The ethics of the carnivorous life

The Ethicist, a NYT column devoted to the ethics of diverse human endeavors recently sponsored an essay contest on the ethics of eating meat.  The winner was a former vegan who decided the meat raised ecologically in a pasture based system is probably ethically superior to tofu processed from soybeans raised in a monoculture, fossil fuel based farming system.  He goes further in exploring the ethics of taking the life of a sentient creature, and decides, much as the protagonist of Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land, that all of us on the plantet are just temporarily stored solar energy and we will all die sooner or later, so we might as well take nourishment from animals as well as vegetables.  ( Of course he doesn't carry it to Heinlein's logical conclusion that we might as well eat our friends when they die of natural causes).  The argument is persusasive, until you realize that the vast majority of meat eaters are trapped in the factory farm paradigm which treats animals as cogs in a machine to be fed and slaughtered in the most appalling conditions so as to maximize profit.  And of course, the health benefits of a vegan or vegetarian diet have nothing to do with ethics so that aspect of the debate was not covered.  Short of a complete rethinking of our industrial agricultural system, it would seem to me that by eating meat, we are probably encouraging a process which involves extreme cruelty to many animals and lasting damage to our ecology.