[The Guardian - opinion]

Meat-eating apologists fail to address the effects of intensive animal agriculture
...
I was sorry to see that George Monbiot was taken in by the latest attempt to justify meat-eating (I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly, 7 September). Despite the misleading title of Simon Fairlie's book which formed Monbiot's view – Meat: A Benign Extravagance – meat is anything but benign. In fact, much of it could more accurately be described as carcinogenic and toxic.

Monbiot speculates about forms of food production, citing Fairlie's argument that "we could afford to use a small amount of grain for feeding livestock, allowing animals to mop up grain surpluses in good years and slaughtering them in lean ones", and conjecturing that if we were to adopt a system that "differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world", then "we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience".

--
full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/14/vegan-diet-health-planet