Erik Marcus, vegan and animal rights activist, has a review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that is appreciative, but critical in key places. Key quote:

Pollan’s book convincingly shows that animal agriculture can, in fact, operate in a way that respects the environment. For a reader who’s acquainted with the staggering wastefulness of animal agriculture, it’s hard not to get caught up in Pollan’s account of the Polyface [Farms] alternative.

What Polyface has accomplished is a genuine achievement. However, Pollan never points out that there’s a reason why Polyface is plunked down in rural Virginia-hardly the heart of cattle country. This model of farming could simply never be transplanted to the arid, near-dessert landscape of America’s western states-the region that produces nearly all American beef. It’s one thing to practice boutique farming and to raise 50 grass-fed cattle a year on lush, rain-soaked land in rural Virginia. It’s quite another to imply that Polyface could be anything like a model for transforming America’s beef industry. You simply can’t scale up what’s happening on a 50-steer farm in Virginia to positively transform the way that more than 20 million cattle are raised in the American West.

I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of animal agriculture to know if this is right or not, but it does support my hunch that a world of humane animal agriculture would necessitate less meat eating, even if it wouldn’t eliminate it.