Where's the Food?

I didn't get to post yesterday, mainly because our house is a shambles due to the ripping up of carpet and flooring in the kitchen and dining room. The process of putting the new stuff down has, for some reason, not happened as quickly as it came up. Why do you think that is?

We also watched a doco which deserves a mention, but I'll come back to that or I'll be here all night.

On the writing front, things are looking good. For a start, waiter has elucidated to me why it's so hard to write both a blog and a book at the same time. Here it is in a nutshell, for anyone who is trying to do just that and can't figure out why the two don't seem to go together:

Quite simply, blogging didn’t prepare me for the emotional ferocity of writing a book. It didn’t prepare me for the claustrophobia and fear, the exhausting concentration coupled with tedium, and the isolation compounded by occasionally crying like a little girl. (How embarrassing!) Psychologically speaking, writing a book is like getting into a knife fight with yourself in a phone booth.

As for my own projects, yesterday I officially passed the 3/4 mark in revising my novel. I'm presently up to the start of Chapter 35, on page 926 of 1229. I didn't even see the critical page 908 go by. But I'm seeing lots of scrawled pencil marks on the coming pages, so I might have a bit of slog ahead.

After 9 years of inception (detailed here), the first four proof copies of Urban Driftwood have been printed and shipped by Lulu.com. Very excited about that.

In other news, Freshly Ground has made an appearance on the Cooking Gadgets website, mainly by dint of me pushing them into it. Yip, those are really my hands.

Over at Culinate, it would seem I'm not the only one encouraging folk to really get the most out of a chicken.

On the Zero Waste topic, Barbara at winosandfoodies has some tips on not letting food go to waste, while Treehugger reports that a staggering 50% of all food produced worldwide is wasted, and that the same goes for water. Aside from water lost in irrigation systems and through leaking taps:

To produce the $48 billion in food that is wasted each year in the United States took ten trillion gallons of water.

That's a lot of water. It's hard to fathom how there can be a global food shortage if there's so much food and water being wasted across the planet. I've made this point before, and it's something we all need to take a bit more seriously.

And it seems that there are a lot of people out there taking this very seriously. As well as reducing, reusing and recycling, there is a growing trend (particularly in the States but I'd love to hear about any local efforts) towards the Urban Homstead. It seems that no matter how small a bit of land you have, be it rural or suburban or even urban, you can grow! The Dervaes in California are a shining example of just how successful growing in limited spaces can be.

The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden.

That's impressive.

So I really have no excuse not to have stuff on the grow out the back and down the front. Which brings me back to my original question: Where's the food?
Righto. It's Spring, its getting warmer, and this weekend, these bad boys (being sprouting potatoes) will be nestling down in a lovely pile of compost somewhere in the vicinity of the pumpkin seeds that I rather eagerly but probably quite prematurely planted way back in May. I still have faith that they'll sprout. Pumpkins seem to crop up everywhere I use compost whether I want them or not!