[Retric]

Farmed plants use the vast majority of captured sunlight, but we don't ignore the food cost of cows and only look at meat when doing energy costs.

However, even if you use 2% that's still easily 20x the energy from Oil. Also of note, we eat fish grown that eat fish... that eat plankton so we do capture energy from the oceans just really inefficiently.

Yes, this may seem pedantic but recreating a western style lifestyle is hard in very large part due to indirect energy costs for meat. Buildings, transportation, or manufacturing can be 10x efficient corn and thus cows not so much. Yes, ethanol takes 40% of corn but cows take 36% and some leftovers from ethanol.