The Fun With Food Programme

Contributors: Arlene McCurtin, Damhnait Ni Mhurchu, Petro van deventer, Marie Kennedy, Ger McGuirk, Trish Morrison, Jeni Malone

Vital stories for hungry minds. In the first official book from BBC Radio 4's hit series The Food Programme, award-winning writer Alex Renton tells the stories of 13 key staples such as spice, oil, cocoa, bread and tomatoes, exploring their history, evolution and how our ever-growing hunger for them continues to alter our world. Look at food in a new light - as a weapon, an art form, a tool of revolution, but also a bringer of pure happiness. Discover a kaleidoscope of fascinating facts and curiosities, including the forgotten joys of lard, the secret to perfect chips and how our love of pepper led to piracy.

There are certain catchwords that are more fascinating than the rest. Gamification is one such catchword. This is not shocking as the roots are traced back to the world of games. It is quite amusing that the term is vague for both beginners and intellects. While beginners misinterpret gamification as playing games, intellects brush it off as yet another deviation of a loyalty or rewards program. But what is it, actually? Those in the community of gaming theory and practice have categorized gamification as a term. It is usually considered that it means employing gaming principles to non-gaming situations. It is a design process that reframes goals to be more attractive and attainable using the principles of game design. The gamified solutions targets our usual instincts to seek competition and accomplishment using conventional gamification methods such as point gathering, virtual currencies, accomplishment budgets or levels with growing difficulty are used within game community. This book does not suggest recipes for gamification since the best practices are still evolving. Instead, it provides a list of compelling gamification success stories implemented in organizations from various industries. Enterprise gamification is still in its beginning stage. There is much more to pursue and learn. The overall objectives of this book are (1) to present the current state of games and use of gamification in various sectors and (2) to explore future opportunities and limitations of using gamification.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." —Molly Young, The New York Times Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: The source of much of the world’s food—seeds—is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health—and to the planet. In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t even know existed. Take honey—not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees’ nests. Or consider murnong—once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee. From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

What do the Fab Five from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the Supernanny and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver all have in common? Lifestyle gurus are increasingly intruding on everyday life, directing ordinary people to see themselves as «projects» that can be «made over» through embracing an ethos of relentless self-improvement. Smart Living argues that they represent a new form of popular expertise sweeping the world. Written in a lively and accessible manner, the book examines this cult of expertise across a range of media and cultural sites and offers the reader a range of critical tools for understanding the recent emergence of this popular international phenomenon. Smart Living is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between popular media culture and contemporary social life.

Drawing on Judy Hutchings many years of work with parents and children, The Positive Parenting Handbook is a concise, straightforward guide that offers simple solutions to daily dilemmas. The clear and easy advice provides parents with skills and tools that support positive parent/child relationships for happy and confident children. It explains common behaviour problems in young children and offers expert advice on: -How to build strong bonds and let children know they are important to you -How to encourage behaviour we want to see through praise and small rewards -Giving instructions that children are more likely to follow -How ignoring some unwanted behaviours can be helpful -Strategies for managing difficult behaviour -Teaching new behaviour to our children -Developing children’s language. It includes six case studies of how these strategies have helped real families with everyday problems at bedtime and mealtimes, during toilet training, out shopping and when children experience anxiety. Together with suggestions of other useful books and information sources, The Positive Parenting Handbook is ideal for all parents, including those of children with diagnosed developmental difficulties, and the range of professionals who work with them.

'This is a great kids cookery book. Emily is a star' - Simon Rimmer 'The book I'd like to force into any mother's kitchen' - Prue Leith "A fab book with a plan." - Jane Devonshire, 2016 Masterchef UK winner 'Emily has managed to combine her mummy knowledge and passion for food to make a truly helpful and brilliant cookbook' - Priya Tew, RD, BSc (Hons), Msc Get Your Kids to Eat Anything is an achievable 'how to' for parents in the battle to overcome picky eating and 'make new the norm'. Emily Leary's unique 5-phase programme looks at the issue of 'fussy eating' in a holistic way that links imagination with food, and which situates parents alongside - not in opposition to - their children. You'll embark on a food discovery which will change the way you look at food and bring healthy variety into every meal for years to come. You will ease away from the same four-to-six staple meals most families fall back on, towards truly varied meal plans from day to day, week to week, to the point where introducing your whole family to new flavours, colours and textures is a breeze because new is the norm. Each phase includes a clear explanation of what you're going to learn and achieve, clear advice/commentary, two weeks of delicious tried and tested recipes, and hands-on activities to try out with your family, all of which will help bring that phase to life and help you and your family to progress forward. The 5-phase approach: Phase 1: Unfamiliar into the familiar. Introducing unfamiliar colour, flavour or texture into familiar favourites. Phase 2: Educate. Experimenting with food, and understanding where it comes from and why it's important. Phase 3: Fun. Putting the fun back into food and building enthusiasm for food variety. Phase 4: Into the unknown. Discovering new ingredients and flavour combinations. Phase 5: Cementing variety. Learning techniques to keep your family meals varied long-term.