There's nothing worse than no way of telling the artist what you think - the art is there, in the public domain - 'site-specific', we call it - and we're wondering what on earth is that, who on earth made the decision to put that there and how much did that cost... a fine example in the newly-rebuilt Victoria how-many-lanes that have unravelled from the roadworks. Here we are: www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/8943172.__50_000_sculpture_for_Vic_Circus_is_revealed. 58 comments later, there are some sated critics lighting cigars. Public consultation is always a tricky business, and maybe that was sidestepped with Councillors looking for Value for Money. Blimey.

Here on my home ranch, considerably less storm-in-a-teacup - but some lovely comments, and some not so lovely, you'd wonder who would be so unsavvy to air quips that possibly belong elsewhere. Anyway, the 'veggie option' got me thinking about the ethical aspects of what I'm doing - I had thought about them anyway. My mother is an excellent housekeeper - nothing left to waste, food seasonal and freshly cooked or spiced and preserved (she still uses a recipe that includes gunpowder for her Spiced Beef at Christmas), and the old dictum 'waste not want not'. Quite a puritanical upbringing but having been a child during WW2, running a tight ship was part and parcel of doing one's duty. I consider it a challenge to produce what I'm doing with efficiency, conscientiousness, clarity and purpose.

To produce an artwork made from food that lives for only one day seems, on the face of it, to be hedonistic, wasteful, and trite, but for me - the outcome - the end product - is the stimulation in others to comment, the communication, shared or different beliefs.  I can see some of that happening in these comments, and with the dialogue that I have with customers to the Cafe Society, as I set up each morning. I value, just as much, the photographs that come from the artwork, and these will stick around far longer than what's in the back of my fridge.