Yeah, perhaps the most fitting example here is non-vegetarian diets: Feed plants to livestock. Livestock uses up some energy for its own existence. Then feed livestock to humans.
There is a slight difference in that livestock can ingest leaves, which we cannot, but in industrialized farms, they typically get fed produce anyways, to make them grow more quickly.
At $DAYJOB, we've been working on a service which uses Raspberry Pis as edge devices. And our product manager – bless him – has made sure we'd have enough hardware budget and wanted to buy only Raspberry Pi 5, so we'd have really good performance.
And I think, we really befuddled him with our reaction, because you know, normally devs won't say no to good hardware, but because our software happens to be efficient and Linux is efficient, we've just been like, eh, a Pi 3B+ is already a lot beefier than we need it.
We had to explain that to him like five times before he actually started to believe it. 🙃