Food

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.

Historically, people secured food through two methods: hunting and gathering and agriculture. Today, the majority of the food energy required by the ever increasing population of the world is supplied by the food industry.

Food safety and food security are monitored by agencies like the International Association for Food Protection, World Resources Institute, World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Food Information Council. They address issues such as sustainability, biological diversity, climate change, nutritional economics, population growth, water supply, and access to food.

The right to food is a human right derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), recognizing the "right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food," as well as the "fundamental right to be free from hunger."

Media

Media may refer to:

Communications

Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater (born 9 April 1958) is an English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was food writer for Marie Claire for five years. He also serves as art director for his books.

Early life

Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.

On 9 April in 1958, Nigel Slater was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, to factory owner Tony Slater and housewife Kathleen as the third and youngest son. His mother died of asthma in 1965 when he was nine. In 1971, his father remarried, to Dorothy Perrens, until his death three years later.

Slater attended Woodfield Avenue School, Penn, West Midlands. He moved to Worcestershire as a teenager and attended Chantry High School where he enjoyed writing essays and was one of only two boys to take cookery as an O-Level subject.

Beacon Food Forest

Beacon Food Forest is a 7-acre food forest in development adjacent to Jefferson Park on Beacon Hill in Seattle, Washington in the vicinity of 15th Ave South and South Dakota. By the design of the project, and as the area is on public land, food in the edible forest section of the project will be available freely to those visiting the park. The project also has more traditional private allotments, similar to those in other local P-Patch gardens.

As the area sits on land owned by Seattle Public Utilities, it is believed to be the largest food forest on public land in the United States.

Goals

Beacon Food Forest has several goals. One goal is to bring the Beacon Hill neighborhood, a richly diverse community, together in fostering a permaculture tree guild approach to urban farming and land stewardship. Another goal is to provide healthy affordable food to the surrounding community.

Background

In 2009, an early version of the project, then known as Jefferson Park Food Forest, was presented at OmCulture in Wallingford, Seattle by a design team of four students as a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) final project. The initiative was led by Jacqueline Cramer, a Seattle landscape designer and activist, and Glenn Herlihy, a member of the Jefferson Park Alliance, who was already involved in the community design and outreach process involved with the $8 million Pro-Parks Levy for the reconstruction of Jefferson Park. That course was primarily taught by Marisha Auerbach, Kelda Miller and Jenny Pell with several prominent guest speakers from the local permaculture and raw vegan community. Classes were held at the Raw Vegan Source/New Earth Permaculture Farm in Redmond, at Seattle Tilth at the Home of the Good Shepherd as well as other workshop locations in 2009. Shortly thereafter, the project gained support by the Jefferson Park Alliance and moved toward its planning and development phase.

Social media

Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. Social media is defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Furthermore, social media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities, and individuals. These changes are the focus of the emerging field of technoself studies. Social media differ from traditional or industrial media in many ways, including quality,reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers). This is in contrast to traditional media that operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers).