if you’re going to consume us either way - our caloric and nutritional values are abysmal (compared to our alternatives).

Well you can still make leather from human hide and other human-based products. That’s what the nazi’s did with their prisoners. The whole work camps where basically human agriculture where they were maximising the profit the could gain by minimizing the cost of sustaining the labor-power. They were calculating how much calories people need in order to do exactly the work required and nothing else so they could save penny’s on food. That’s why they started experimenting with human leather, in order to recoup some of the costs by creating commodities from the corpse a laborer left behind etc. It’s really was the same mentality that goes into dairy farming or chicken or really any animal agricutlure ever.