Shopping for food used to be a drab, perfunctory exercise. Stroll to shop; request string of sausages; enquire after Bert's lumbago; pay with huge five-pound note, and head home to mangle the spuds. In 2006, though, the process is fraught with tension, particularly on those rare but unavoidable trips to the s ... the sssu ... argh, I can barely say it. The supermarket. Come on, we all have to do it sometimes. Where else can you buy Branston pickle? (And, no, home-preserved chutney from the farmers' market is not the same thing at all. Just ask your cheese sandwich.) Inevitably, occasionally, you're drawn into one of the great temples of food, lured by KitKats and Heinz baked beans, Hula Hoops and Oxo cubes.

Once inside, though, you're trapped in a moral maze. Local, seasonal, organic? Fairtrade, sustainable, ethical? Unprocessed, free-range, farm-assured? And then there's the packaging. If it's dressed like a prom queen, it's out. If you can't tell what it is by looking at it, it's out. If the product weighs less than the carton, it's out. Customers in German supermarkets are unpackaging products at the check-out in protest at the unconscionable waste, a sort of Yoghurt Liberation Front, if you like. Good for them. But why stop there? Why not take Tupperware? We could decant our Branston pickle into reusable tubs, carry Hula Hoops home in trugs or hollow gourds!

Anyhow, the effort appears to be hitting home. Tesco, apparently alarmed by public antipathy towards its general monstrosity and vast profits, is to unveil a 'community plan' and has already installed sun-pipes and a wind turbine at its new store in Diss, Norfolk. Disney, meanwhile, is to end its $1billion Happy Meals tie-in with McDonald's, suddenly rattled to be in such close proximity to all that unhealthy junk food and all those enormous kids.

So, now that even the Tories have gone green, where should the fashion-forward eco-shopper go? Well, if you're ahead of the game, your daily fare ought to be not only PC and packaged in compost, but carbon-neutral. Like the new 'Green Green Tea', available exclusively at Harvey Nicks (where else?). 'We started looking at carbon neutrality a year ago,' says Green Green Tea lady Sharyn Wortman. 'We liked the idea of being accountable, so calculated the emissions from the planting, picking, trucking, wrapping, packing, shipping of our tea - and then invested in wind farms and tree-planting to offset the environmental cost.'

Pockets of carbon-neutral business are beginning to crop up all over the country. My local pub - the wonderful Earth and Stars in Brighton - is not only organic and otherwise switched on, it is also carbon-balanced. The Green Grocers in Norwich is another. 'I was originally concerned that it was a bit flash-in-the-pan,' says owner Ben Binns. 'But it makes sense. To cancel the annual 130 tonnes of emissions that come from the food miles of everything we stock here, we have invested in the Scolel Te Social Forestry Project in Chiapas, Mexico, and Bushenyi District in Uganda. Both projects enable farmers to plant trees, restoring their land to its original forested state.' Binns acknowledges that carbon-offsetting is an inexact and flawed science - given that trees, when they die, give off C02 emissions of their own. 'But it's a start,' he says.

Repaying the environmental cost of doing business is this year's hot potato. And it will soon filter down to a shopping trolley near you. The music industry is ahead of most - 10,000 mango trees were planted in India to make Coldplay's latest album carbon-neutral. Unilever has even developed a solar-powered ice-cream van. It won't make shopping any simpler - those good old string-of-sausages days are long gone. But it might make the world a better place. And, as Green Green Tea's recyclable packet puts it, it's a lot more fun than chaining yourself to a tree.