Blue Hill at Stone Barns’ chef Dan Barber on the “phenomenon of the self-righteous vegetarian“:
I’m not here to say I don’t eat vegetables—I do, a lot of them—but, from a soil perspective, they’re actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass. Vegetables deplete soil. They’re extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals. So without animal manure, where are you going to get your soil fertility for all those vegetables in an organic system? You are, by some measures, forcing crops into a kind of imbalance.
Butchering and eating animals may not be called kindness, but eating soy burgers that rely on pesticides and fertilizers precipitates destruction too. You don’t have to eat meat, but you should have the good judgment to relinquish the high horse. There is no such thing as guilt-free eating.
Lots more good stuff re flavor, nutrients, and sustainable food over at the WSJ.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health & food policy. And cats! 
I disagree about there being no such thing as guilt-free eating, I have been doing it my entire life.
Not to nit pick, but the minerals in soil come from the parent material, aka rocks. The biomass comes from mostly plant material, which can be broken down by bacteria, fungi, insects, or vertebrates. So his arguments are impressing me much.