the only thing animals do is save time, when we were naked and running the meadows, other animals collected nutrients for us, stored them in the bodies and saved us extreme amounts of time.
currently, most of the animals we eat are just inefficient in converting edible to edible, soybean to meat. we're filtering food that we grow for them just so that we can eat food.
Matter of perspective. Compared to carnivores, all herbivores are "inefficient". A wolf (even humans) can gulp down some 1-2 pounds of fatty raw meat in 10-15 minutes and be done with eating for the day. Doesn't even need any manner of dentition if pieces are pre-cut to fit the tube into the stomach.
Put on another lens though and ruminants can be seen as profoundly "efficient" when look at the actual nutrient density of grasses and seeds.. with their micro-organism colonies they also synthesize various vitamins/vitamers that mammals need but grasses/seeds/soil doesn't provide.
But yeah grazing and ruminating all-waking-time isn't terribly "efficient" from the viewpoint of us goal-oriented or creative mammals.
> the only thing animals do is save time, when we were naked and running the meadows, other animals collected nutrients for us, stored them in the bodies and saved us extreme amounts of time.
Again, they can also break down cellulose which homo sapiens never could do, so it's not just "saved time". Thus herbivores can liberate (the majority of) micronutrients from vegetation that we cannot even access (except perhaps a few in a stew for the non-heat-sensitive vitamins, and a few in the juice run-off from certain fruits or leaves when mashed, bitten or squeezed or such). Finally they synthesize vitamins we cannot synthesize no matter what gut bacteria we host. Again, capabilities that go beyond "saving time".
> currently, most of the animals we eat are just inefficient in converting edible to edible, soybean to meat
What animals are fed soy beans, hopefully only pigs and not ruminants (grasses/seeds eaters)?
You're not converting "edible to edible", you're converting "barely palatable (save for hours of pre-processing and time-consuming cuisine theatre) to eminently, utterly enjoyable and fully nourishing + highly energizing, even raw" --- the animal takes a lot of time but the human is free to pursue other undertakings. There's no serious need to "speed up food animals" as long as plenty of them are kept.
> What animals are fed soy beans, hopefully only pigs and not ruminants (grasses/seeds eaters)?
50% of worlds meat is raised using intensive animal agriculture. liquified soy for the chickens, fishmeal and soymeal for growth and finishing of livestock.
brazilian beef which is practically their biggest export, along with soy, eats it in ridiculous amounts, so long amazon rainforest.
given the amount of energy that is put in the process for producing meat and dairy, it's ridiculously huge compared to what can be done with the land in other way. most efficient production is of chicken flesh and that's already being done on ridiculous scale (about 50 billion of chickens every year in USA - other issues appear then).
IMO raising 60 billion land animals for food, given our current technological, moral and materialistic status is highly irrational, irresponsible, inefficient and ridiculous.
That's the case for all industrial-age agriculture at today's 7-billion-people scale anyway.
With average mixed diet, it costs 10kcal (whether fossil fuels or renewables) energy expenditure for every 1kcal of food energy.
Isolated (or ancestral) immediate-return hunter-gatherers (roaming anywhere prey game abounds) average 10kcals of food energy gained for 1kcal energy expenditure invested.
So that lifestyle gives 100x better ROI. But it's not for this today's world, because at the top of the food chain "we"'d rather soon feed most/all humans food barely fit for animal feed (grains and soymeal etc) than "guide our reproduction more wisely".