MSN Food Blogger

I am still getting lots of your pictures of the countryside after a recent feature we ran.

Here's a few more of them.

Halesowen, 9 miles southwest of Birmingham city centre

Glencoe in Scotland

Woldgate, Yorkshire

Keep emailing them in and I will include the best ones in a gallery soon. ukenv@microsoft.com.

Aside from this one of the biggest issue you've been talking about this month is bottled water. Why do we buy it when it costs so much and has such a high environmental impact?

"It's perfectly understandable when you live in an area where your tap water tastes horrible and is basically undrinkable but, when you live in an area where your tap water is fine and you can't complain about it, what's the point?" Says Lucy_12.

Quite right Lucy.

Join the message board debate if you have a view

Some fascinating facts from a UK Cabinet Office report on food, published this week.

• Cereal production needs to increase by 50% and meat production 80% between 2000 and 2030 to meet world food demands. But this will need to be achieved in a changing climate and in a world where natural resources – especially water – are becoming more scarce.

• UK consumers waste £10 billion worth of food each year.

• Half of the food eaten in the UK is home-grown, nearly 70% of the rest comes from elsewhere in the EU. Everything else, from tea to pineapples to prawns is sourced from across the world.

• The food chain creates 18% of UK greenhouse gas emissions.

• A third of the food bought for home consumption is wasted – 6.7 million tonnes. Most of this could have been eaten. Wasting food costs the average UK family £420 a year.

• If UK diets met nutritional guidelines, 70,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year. On average, adults and children eat more salt, fat and added sugar than is good for their health.

It really does make a difference what we choose to eat - to our health, our bills and not to mention the planet.

So from now on that's what this blog is going to be all about.

There are stories about food almost everyday. So much so that it is almost impossible to keep tabs on what we can and can't, should and shouldn't be eating.

This blog is going to pick up and explore or "dig" into these issues and more.

So look out for the first post coming soon...

Yours,

Food Digger

A great plan for dealing with an inevitable problem? Or just a nice idea?

Architect Vincent Callebaut claims the self-sufficient amphibious cities are a "tenable solution" to the problem of rising water.

He reckons the floating cities, inspired by the Amazonian lilypads, could accommodate up to 50,000 what he calls "climatic refugees".

You can read more about his plan here or check out more of the pictures here.

It sounds ridiculous at first glance because we are so far away from that at the moment.

It's going to cost us £100 billion as a nation and upwards of £4,000 per household to reach the EU's target of generating 20 per cent of our power from renewable sources by 2020.

As of today we are generating, wait for it, a tiny 2% of our power needs from renewable sources. Oh dear. The other 98% is largely made up of coal, gas and nuclear.

But, we do have the potential to meet that 20% and much more and the reason why is wind and water.

As a windswept island we are surrounded by a pool of energy far greater in potential than North Sea oil. According to Greenpeace, the UK has enough wind, wave and tidal power to meet our entire energy needs.

If you are interested, we've analysed the issue in greater depth on MSN Environment.