Smoking is the process of flavoring, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood. Meats and fish are the most common smoked foods, though cheeses, vegetables, and ingredients used to make beverages such as beer,smoked beer, and lapsang souchong tea are also smoked.

In Europe, alder is the traditional smoking wood, but oak is more often used now, and beech to a lesser extent. In North America, hickory, mesquite, oak, pecan, alder, maple, and fruit-tree woods, such as apple, cherry, and plum, are commonly used for smoking. Other fuels besides wood can also be employed, sometimes with the addition of flavoring ingredients. Chinese tea-smoking uses a mixture of uncooked rice, sugar, and tea, heated at the base of a wok. Some North American ham and bacon makers smoke their products over burning corncobs. Peat is burned to dry and smoke the barley malt used to make whisky and some beers. In New Zealand, sawdust from the native manuka (tea tree) is commonly used for hot smoking fish. In Iceland, dried sheep dung is used to cold-smoke fish, lamb, mutton, and whale.

Smoking is a practice in which a substance is burned and the resulting smoke breathed in to be tasted and absorbed into the bloodstream. Most commonly the substance is the dried leaves of the tobacco plant which have been rolled into a small square of rice paper to create a small, round cylinder called a "cigarette". Smoking is primarily practiced as a route of administration for recreational drug use because the combustion of the dried plant leaves vaporizes and delivers active substances into the lungs where they are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream and reach bodily tissue. In the case of cigarette smoking these substances are contained in a mixture of aerosol particles and gasses and include the pharmacologically active alkaloid nicotine; the vaporization creates heated aerosol and gas to form that allows inhalation and deep penetration into the lungs where absorption into the bloodstream of the active substances occurs. In some cultures, smoking is also carried out as a part of various rituals, where participants use it to help induce trance-like states that, they believe, can lead them to "spiritual enlightenment".

Smoking is an activity that involves the intentional burning and inhaling of a substance, most often tobacco.

It may take the form of:

The practice of smoking specific substances include:

It may also refer to:

See also

Smoking is a brand of rolling papers, manufactured by Miquel y Costas in Barcelona, Spain. According to their website, they were one of the earliest factories to produce rolling papers. Smoking offers different color packages to differentiate the weights or materials of the paper inside.

History

1725 is the earliest documented reference of this company. At that time the Miquel family made paper by hand in mills driven by the Anoja River. It was not until almost 100 years later that the Miquel family started specializing in cigarette paper. In 1879, the company moved production to La Pobla de Claramunt and founded the company Miquel y Costas Hermanos.

In 1929, the company was incorporated and took its present name, Miquel y Costas & Miquel S.A. Cigarette paper booklets first appeared in the 19th century and their international brand, Smoking, was introduced in 1924. Miguel Y Costas is now one of the largest cigarette paper manufacturers in the world. They manufacture Smoking, Pure Hemp, Guarani, Bugler, Hempire, SMK, Mantra and Bambu brand papers. They also produce many private label brands for other companies.