LonelyContext

It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting meat farm subsidies and introducing a meat tax alone already puts you way ahead of decades of scientific funding at perfecting multilayer amorphous silicon to where it’s less than $1000/cm^2.

Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.

Yes, it does. Assuming you have all the requisite stuff enabled.