Food on line: at Google.com a search under the word "food" delivers more than 33 million hits, more than one million of them in Canada. This has to be a reflection of how important food is to our daily lives. (Food -- Comment).

At The Hunger Site (http://www. thehungersite.com/home) there's a map of the world. A different country flashes black every 3.6 seconds to signify someone has died of hunger; three out of four of them being children. But, at this website you can do something to help. Click on the "Give Free Food" button, and you'll see ads from the site's sponsors. But, each time someone clicks on that button the sponsors donate 1.1 cups of food to the world's hungry. In 2000, daily clicks yielded over $3.4 million for hunger relief organizations to provide food and hope to the hungry around the world. That's more than nine million kilos of food.

The Epicurious website (http://eat.epicurious. com/) offers the chance to browse through more than 13,000 recipes. There are 70 different ways of preparing liver, and 339 recipes that include spinach. Thankfully, there are no instructions for a meal that uses both.

If you're puzzled by some of the instructions at the Epicurious website, the Food Glossary is the place to go (http://www.foodlines.com/glossary. html). This is where you'll learn that quadrettini are small, flat squares of pasta, foriestiere is something served with mushrooms, and Warsaw sauce is made from horseradish and orange juice.

There's a Food Finder website (http://www. olen.com/food/book.html) that delivers some indigestible facts about fast food:

* Eat a quarter-pounder cheeseburger, large fries, and 473 ml pop at McDonald's and you've taken in more than half your daily calorie allowance;

* Four slices of sausage and mushroom pizza from Dominos will give you more than your total daily allowance of sodium (salt); and,

* Even a Taco Salad from Taco Bell will deliver more than the recommended daily allowance of fat.

But, the Food Finder does offer some healthier fast food choices, such as Burger King's Chunky Chicken Salad, McDonald's Vanilla Shake, and Wendy's Chilli.

For those who wonder about connections between science and food there's The Food Biotechnology Communications Network (www. foodbiotech.org/), which promises to search "out credible, current, and evidence-based information about biotechnology and food."

Urban Agriculture Notes (http://www. cityfarmer.org/urbagnotes1.html#notes) is the place to go for information about growing food in city gardens. Based in Vancouver, the website offers a virtual tour of its demonstration food garden in nearby Kitsilano. The non-profit group gives itself a wide remit: "Urban Agriculture is a new and growing field (and fond of puns too it seems, ed.) that is not completely defined yet even by those closest to it. It concerns itself with all manner of subjects from rooftop gardens, to composting toilets, to air pollution, and community development. It encompasses mental and physical health, entertainment, building codes, rats, fruit trees, herbs, recipes, and much more."

There's pretty much anything and everything here for the environmentally concerned from, "Confessions of a Lawn Moron" to "The World's Largest List of Worm Sellers."

"Don't play with your food," we were always told by our parents, but there's a website (http:// www.kidsdomain.com/craft/_xfood.html) that gives instructions on making all sorts of fun things out of food.

Finally, somewhat frighteningly, the word "diet" yields more than 5.7 million hits.