On Vegetarian/Veganism

I have been recently reading The Omnivore's Dilemma and just last night was reading through Pollan's thoughts on vegetarian/veganism.

"But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature?
...
To contemplate such questions from the vantage of the farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any thread to us (a fairly recent development), and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged.
...
The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn't at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops.
...
The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places.
...
To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent that it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility-in the form of manures-would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature-rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls-the eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.
...
...the essential concession: What's wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle.
...
The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature."

Basically, predation is a part of the natural order, and it has it's purpose too, to keep a rather precarious balance so that Animals (on the whole, not individuals) can continue to survive. What's wrong with meat eating in our world right now, and especially in the westernized nations, is that the CAFO's (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) cut costs at the expense of the animals they raise, and in so doing, they deprive those animals of their natural inclinations and way of life.

However, a "good farm," a sustainable farm (example: http://polyfacefarms.com/) does not deny animals that way of life. In fact it encourages it and uses the animals natural instincts to make the farm run more efficiently and more sustainably. For example, on Poly Face farms when the cows leave their pasture (daily) they let chickens loose in that pasture to scratch around in the manure. This does two things, it spreads the manure around so that it becomes fertilizer instead of breeding bacteria and killing the ground it sits on, and the chickens find grubs that they love to eat and which makes their bodies create the fat that makes them taste good later. This is just one example, there are many. The end result of this is that the animals quality of life is excellent, and (I think sometimes veg's forget this) their deaths are better than what they could probably expect in the wild.

I agree with the veg's that the CAFO system of farming is completely fucked up, abusive towards animals, and wrong. But that doesn't make meat eating wrong, it makes the CAFO system wrong, and that needs to change. As Pollan says "the essential concession: What's wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle." But, I personally don't think opting out of the meat eating system all together will effect that change. To my mind that's sort of like asking for feminist change while at the same time refusing to identify with feminism as a movement. If you want to effect change in this area, what to do is to seek out these sustainable farms (not necessarily organic but that is for another day) and if you don't have any, then find the best you can. Support them, give them your money, buy locally so that you can drive by and see how your animals live, and don't buy into the CAFO system. If enough of us do that, they will have to change.