I simply believe food is too good to throw away - and Christmas leftovers can be a gastronomic opportunity for the well-skilled kitchen forager. With a little imagination, there are a million ways to use up leftovers rather than bin them.

The manufacture and running of all the world's computers, the toxicity of the hardware mountains that we currently dump on other countries; all this can be totted up on the environmental account of web-users and its authors.

In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the government in a matter of years has put a lot of energy behind recycling food waste as livestock feed. It's environmentally friendly, it provides cheap livestock feed for the farmers in those parts of the world, and it avoids sending the food waste to landfill.

It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool.

Vegetarians have been around for a very long time - Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago - but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument.

Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees.

Viewed from a holistic ecological perspective, some meat - such as conscientiously hunted animals - involves less suffering and environmental damage than arable agriculture, while both of these are significantly less harmful than indiscriminately purchasing meat on the market.

The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.