The redneck strike again.

[The Grand Nudger]

Animals have the advantage of condensing some of the more important nutrients from the earth into meat, and meat has the additional advantage of being relatively easy to store and transport without spoiling. The cost of this, as I see it, is a loss of caloric efficiency.

They can turn things we can't eat, into things that we can,and in the process generate the inputs required to grow yet more food. Hard to imagine what could be more efficient than that, from a caloric standpoint. Even in the absence of agriculture this is what happens. The green portion of a forest devoid of animal life is less bountiful, and less efficient (calorically speaking) than that same forest would be if it were filled with crickets...or squirrels....or snakes. I could go on and on, but the point is probably clear.

as a vegetarian, I hope to minimize the impact of my uselessness.

Your vegetarianism doesn't accomplish that. The issues that seem to bother you aren't caused by what we eat, or even how much we eat, but the manner in which we produce what we eat.

The numbers of efficiency with regards to farmers and the general public are less forgiving btw. Less than 1% of us feed the rest of us. This could be the case anywhere, and we could be even more efficient if we chose to be. In fact, you'll never find a number of people in which that ratio would change. If we reduced our population to 10% of current levels, less than 1% of that 10% could feed the lot. You'll always be useless, by your own metrics - as will the same portion of human beings no matter how small the number becomes. If there were 100 of us, 99 would be useless. If there were ten, 9 would be useless (since a fraction of a person can't farm, of course). In fact...the only number that makes sense with this sort of justification is 1. It seems pretty damned absurd to me that we consider this as any sort of option when we always have the option of feeding more people, better food, in greater quantities than are currently available to them - while reducing the footprint of the system, and minimizing or eliminating the suffering of animals involved in that system. Do you want to accomplish those goals -or is the goal, more accurately put- to get rid of people?

We could end all suffering and eliminate any footprint whatsoever if we just burnt this entire rock to cinder with all hands on deck. Hell, it'd probably be easier and cheaper than growing food too. No, no, wait, how about we eliminate 90% of non-human life? Wouldn't that fall within the confines of your justifications just as easily as eliminating the excess human animals might? After all, we're all on equal footing, eh? Or, still just spitballing, we could set up a lottery with every living thing represented as a number - then we could eliminate whatever the ping pong ball tells us too until only 10% of what we began with remains, human, non-human..the whole lot.