How to be a fashionable foodie in six easy steps

4. Save the planet. convert to veganism

Meat? Or two veg? If you're remotely interested in saving this timeworn planet, then you probably need to become a vegetable-based life-form, and soon. A recent report in the New Scientist confirmed that meat and dairy production causes environmental degradation on a huge scale, including erosion, water pollution and loss of biodiversity. What's more, the world's one-and-a-half billion head of cattle (and 1.7 billion sheep, plus the odd pig and goat) produce enough methane and nitrous oxide to make up 18 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions. That's a higher share than transport.

A study conducted by the University of Chicago found that the typical US diet (about 28 per cent of which comes from animal sources) generates the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more carbon dioxide per person per year than a vegan diet with the same number of calories. Ah, the burger brigade might retort, but veganism comes with its own gristly issues too. It tends, for instance, to rely on imported crops such as nuts and soya beans so bang goes your food-mile quota. Novice vegans would also need to avoid illegal Amazonian soya, cultivated on land illicitly cleared of rainforest (If you are harbouring any in your fridge, your eco-rating has just plummeted like a dying duck).

Safer by far is to introduce more hemp into your life. According to nutritionists, the hemp seed contains 'the perfectly balanced 3:1 ratio of not just one but both essential fatty acids, Omega 3 and 6'. Win-win-win, and you can even smoke the leftovers.

Heroes: Stella McCartney, daughter of the original veggie sausage broker and all-round icon of the vegetable kingdom. Sadie Frost, strict vegetarian since birth, and Pamela Anderson, an unexpected vegan and the world's only woman known to be made almost entirely from a combination of tofu and silicone.

What to say: 'Curd is the word.'

Risk: as an L-plate veggie, the smell of sizzling bacon could send you to the very precipice of apostasy. But have faith! Hold fast, despite your own increased methane emissions being of grave concern to passers-by.

Benefit: vegetarians live longer. Actually, I made that up. It just feels that way if you have to get by in a sausage-free world.

Other steps from The Observer