Eat St.

Eat St. is a Canadian reality television series produced by Paperny Entertainment that airs on Food Network Canada and Cooking Channel. Hosted by Canadian comedian James Cunningham, the show tours North America in search of the most inventive meals served from food trucks. To accompany the series, an Eat St. app was developed that uses GPS to track street fare near the user. The series, which premiered April 6, 2011, has filmed in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, as well as a number of cities in the United States. The show will be airing its fourth season in 2013.

Phone App

An Eat St. app for iPhone was released in 2011. It allows users to discover the food trucks in their area, as well as share tips and photos with others on their favourite street food destinations. The Eat St. app has been relaunched from its original version in a new and improved version 2.0. The app has been used by over 300,000 food lovers across North America, allowing them to weigh in on their favourite street eats. It also includes video clips and recipes from vendors that have appeared on the show. Using this app, users can learn about the vendors in their area, and share their experiences with their community as well as tourists. The app is very interactive as vendors can update their location using GPS if available on their smart phones, so their biggest fans can know when they are in the area. The Eat St. app brings food truck fanatics together, and allows them to interact through a shared love. The app is also a prime example of how successful the food truck industry has become, as well as how successful the TV show has been.

Eating

Eating (also known as consuming) is the ingestion of food, typically to provide a heterotrophic organism with energy and to allow for growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive — carnivores eat other animals, herbivores eat plants, omnivores consume a mixture of both plant and animal matter, and detritivores eat detritus. Fungi digest organic matter outside of their bodies as opposed to animals that digest their food inside their bodies. For humans, eating is an activity of daily living. Some individuals may limit their amount of nutritional intake. This may be a result of a lifestyle choice, due to hunger or famine, as part of a diet or as religious fasting.

Eating practices among humans

Many homes have a large eating room or outside (in the tropics) kitchen area devoted to preparation of meals and food, and may have a dining room, dining hall, or another designated area for eating. Some trains have a dining car. Dishware, silverware, drinkware, and cookware come in a wide array of forms and sizes. Most societies also have restaurants, food courts, and/or food vendors, so that people may eat when away from home, when lacking time to prepare food, or as a social occasion (dining club). At their highest level of sophistication, these places become "theatrical spectacles of global cosmopolitanism and myth." At picnics, potlucks, and food festivals, eating is in fact the primary purpose of a social gathering. At many social events, food and beverages are made available to attendees.

Nicollet Avenue

Nicollet Avenue is a major street in Minneapolis, Minnesota and three of its suburbs. It passes through a number of locally well-known neighborhoods and districts, notably Eat Street in south Minneapolis and the traffic-restricted Nicollet Mall in the city's downtown.

It began as a military road between St. Anthony Falls and Fort Snelling. Nicollet Avenue was named for early 19th-century French explorer and mapmaker Joseph Nicollet, who led three expeditions in what is now Minnesota. Nicollet Mall occupies the oldest section of the avenue. Before the mall was constructed in 1968, Nicollet Avenue stretched from the Mississippi River to the Minnesota River.

Technically, the avenue begins at Grant Street in Loring Park and continues south to West 29th Street/Cecil B. Newman Lane, where it is interrupted by a K-Mart store, and begins again at Lake Street, continuing through Richfield and Bloomington to 107th Street just north of the Minnesota River. Across the river in Burnsville, Nicollet begins again at Cliff Road West and ends at County Road 42. Nicollet is a city street in Minneapolis and Burnsville, while it is designated as Hennepin County Road 52 between 98th Street in Bloomington and Crosstown Highway 62 in Richfield. This designation resumes on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, though the county highway is not contiguous.

Food Network (Canada)

Food Network is a Canadian English language Category A specialty channel with programming related to food, cooking, cuisine, and the food industry. Food Network is a joint venture between Shaw Media and Scripps Networks Interactive.

History

Before the launch of Food Network Canada, the American service, Food Network was available in Canada since 1997. Food Network became one of the more popular foreign cable channels available in Canada, which prompted the creation of a Canadian version of the American service, which would then be able to access ad revenue through commercials under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulations.

The licence for Food Network Canada was approved by the CRTC in early 2000. The channel was launched in October of that year; on the day of the launch, the American service was removed from the list of foreign channels eligible to be broadcast in Canada.

On January 18, 2008, a joint venture between Canwest and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners known as CW Media bought Alliance Atlantis and gained AAC's interest in Food Network.

Street food

Street food is ready-to-eat food or drink sold by a hawker, or vendor, in a street or other public place, such as at a market or fair. It is often sold from a portable food booth,food cart, or food truck and meant for immediate consumption. Some street foods are regional, but many have spread beyond their region of origin. Most street foods are classed as both finger food and fast food, and are cheaper on average than restaurant meals. According to a 2007 study from the Food and Agriculture Organization, 2.5 billion people eat street food every day.

Today, people may purchase street food for a number of reasons, such as to get flavorful food for a reasonable price in a sociable setting, to experience ethnic cuisines, or for nostalgia.

History

Small fried fish were a street food in ancient Greece, however, Theophrastus held the custom of street food in low regard. Evidence of a large number of street food vendors were discovered during the excavation of Pompeii. Street food was widely consumed by poor urban residents of ancient Rome whose tenement homes did not have ovens or hearths. Here, chickpea soup with bread and grain paste were common meals. In ancient China, street food generally catered to the poor, however, wealthy residents would send servants to buy street food and bring it back for them to eat in their homes.