> To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient

Life is not an optimization problem.

However, had we not tried optimising, Malthus would be right and we'd all be dead.

So let's hear it for optimisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...

No, but staying alive is, and food is for staying alive.

Not really. Only if you discount all external effects on the environment. There are more productive agriculture systems with more yield per sq* but more manual input, but less side effects. E.g. permaculture.