Food

Food

Food is any substance or materials eaten or drunk to provide nutritional support contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats,proteins vitamins or minerals. While we are eating, we are giving our body materials which give them energy, which stimulate growth and which maintain human life.

Historically, people obrained food from hunting ans gethering, farming, ranching, and fishing, known as agriculture. Today, most of the food energy consumed by the world population is supplied by the food industry operated by multinational coporations using intensive farming and industrial agriculture methods.

Food safety and food security are monitored by agencies such as the International Association for Food Protection, for exemple.

Animals

Animals are used as food eaither directly or indirectly by the products they produce.

First of all meat is an example of a direct product taken from an animal, which comes from either muscle systems or from organs.

Food products produced by animals include milk, from cow, from goat,  which is drunk or processed into into dairy products such as cheese or butter.

In addition chicken and other animals lay eggs, which are often eaten, and bees produce honey.

Finally, some cultures and people don’t consume meat or animal food products for cultural, dietary, health, ethical or ideological reasons.

Vegeterians, for exemple, are people who don’t consume meat.

Vegans, for exemple, don’t consume any foods that are or contain ingredients from an animal source.

They address issues such as sustainbility, biological diversity, climate change, nutritional economics, population growth, water supply and acces to food.

Fruits

Fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.

The term fruit has different meanings:

- In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means that fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state, such as apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries, berries and bananas.

- Seed associated structures that do not fit these informal criteria are usually called by other names, such as vegetables, pod, nut, ears and cones.

Fruit (in either sense of the word) are the means by which many plants disseminate seeds. Most edible fruits, in particular, were evolved by plants in order to exploit animals and a means for seed dispersal, and many anmals ( including humans) have become dependent on fruits as a source of food. Fruits account for a substantial fraction of word’s agricultural output, and some (such as the apple and the pomegranate) have acquired extensive cultural and symbolic meanings.

Many fruits that, in a botanical sense, are true fruits are actually treated as vegetables in cooking and food preparation, because they are not particularly sweet. These culinary vegetables include cucurbits (e.g., squash, pumpkin, and cucumber), tomatoes, peas, beans, corn, eggplant, and sweet pepper.

In addition, some spices, such as allspice and chilies, are fruits, botanically speaking.

In contrast, occasionally a culinary “fruit” is not a true fruit in the botanical sense. For example, rhubarb is often referred to as a fruit, because it is used to make sweet desserts such as pies, though only the petiole of the rhubarb plant is edible.

In the culinary sense of these words, a fruit is usually any sweet-tasting plant product, especially those associated with seed(s), a vegetable is any savory or less sweet plant product, and a nut is any hard, oily, and shelled plant product.

Technically, a cereal grain is also a kind of fruit, a kind that is termed a caryopsis. However, the fruit wall is very thin, and is fused to the seed coat, so almost all of the edible grain is actually a seed.

Therefore, cereal grains, such as corn, wheat and rice are better considered as edible seeds, although some references do list them as fruits.

Edible gymnosperm seeds are often misleadingly given fruit names, e.g., pine nuts, ginkgo nuts, and juniper berries.

Fresh fruits were traditionally kept for several months in a cellar, a cellar or attic (sometimes on a bed of moss).

Fruits (pitted or not) could also be dried (apricots, plums …), candied fruit into jam, or fruit paste, or preserved in vinegar (olives, pickled pears …), a vegetable oil or brine (olive).

In Western cooking, fruit, broadly defined, is a sweet plant food and is considered essential to food by making certain vitamins and fiber.

There are generally distinguished:

• Citrus: lemon, orange, grapefruit

• Berries: strawberry, gooseberry, grape

• pome fruit: apple, pear

• Stone Fruits: apricot, cherry, peach

• Nuts: hazelnuts, walnut

In Europe or North America, also known as exotic fruits, fruits of certain plants that have been made or naturalized in the wake of the Great Discoveries: pineapple, banana, kiwi, mango, etc…

The culinary concept fruit covers much of the botanical concept, but many botanical fruits are considered as cooking vegetables (eggplant, cucumber, beans, corn, tomato, olive, avocado …), others such as spices (nutmeg, pepper, vanilla, pepper …). With grains of grasses (wheat, rice), which are also a type of special fruit, the caryopsis, they form an essential part of the diet.

Conversely, some fruits are botanically culinary sense of faux fruit, resulting from the evolution of the ovary but not other organs, including the floral receptacle: strawberry, pineapple, apple, etc…

Plants

If we take a look to our nutrition, we can realise that many plants and plant parts are eaten as food. Many plants have several distinct cultivars. There are around 2.000 different plant species which are cultivated for food.

First, seeds of plants are used for animal and also for human nutrition. They contain nutrients necessary for the plant’s initial growth, including healthy fath as Omega fats.

The majority of food consumed by human being are seed-based foods.

As edible seeds we have :

- cereals (maize, wheat and rice…) ;

- legums (beans, peas and lentils…)

- nuts.

We also have oilseeds, wich are often pressed to produce wich oils, as sunflowe, flaxseed and sesame.

Seeds contain a lot of unsaturated fats and, in modération, are considered a healthy food, although not all seeds are edible.

We have to pay attention by consuming lemon, apples and cherries, for exemple, because a large seeds from a lemon pose a choking hazard, and seeds from apples and cherries contain poison cynadie.

Second, fruits are also making significant part of our nutrition. Fruits are the ripened ovaries of plants, including the seeds within.

A lot of fruits are used for a diet of most cultures. Some botanical fruits, as tomatoes, pumpkins and eggplants are eaten as vegetables.

Third, vegetables are a second type of plant matter that is commonly eaten as food.

We have distinct cultivars as vegetables :

- root vegetables (potatoes and carrots) ;

- leaf vegetables (spinach and lettuce) ;

- stem vegetables (bamboo shoots and asparagus) ;

- inflorescence vegetables (globe artichokes and brocoli).

Finally, many herbs and spices are highly flavorsome vegetables.

Vegetables

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant.

However, the word is not scientific, and its meaning is largely based on culinary and cultural tradition. Therefore, the application of the word is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. For example, some people consider mushrooms to be vegetables, while others consider them a separate food category.

Some vegetables can be consumed raw, some may be eaten raw or cooked, and some must be cooked in order to be edible. Vegetables are most often cooked in savory or salty dishes. However, a few vegetables are often used in desserts and other sweet dishes, such as rhubarb pie and carrot cake.

The list of food items called “vegetable” is quite long, and includes many different parts of plants:

• Flower bud: broccoli, cauliflower, globe artichokes;

• Seeds: Sweetcorn (maize), peas, beans, popcorn, corn;

• Leaves: kale, collard greens, spinach, beet greens, bok choi, choi sum, turnip greens, endive, lettuce, water crest, garlic chives, gai lan;

• Leaf sheaths: leeks;

• Buds: Brussels sprouts, capers;

• Stem: Kohlrabi;

• Stems of leaves: celery, rhubarb, cardoon, Chinese celery, lemon grass;

• Stem shoots: asparagus, bamboo shoots, and ginger;

• Tubers: potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes, taro, and yams;

• Whole-plant sprouts: soybean (moyashi), mung beans, urad, and alfalfa;

• Roots: carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, rutabagas, turnips, and burdocks;

• Bulbs: onions, shallots, garlic;

• Fruits in the botanical sense, but used as vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchinis, pumpkins, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, christophene, okra, breadfruit and avocado;

• Legumes: green beans, snap peas, soybean.

Vegetables are eaten in a variety of ways, as part of main meals and as snacks. The nutritional content of vegetables varies considerably, though generally they contain little protein or fat, and varying proportions of vitamins, provitamins, dietary minerals, fiber and carbohydrates. Vegetables contain a great variety of other phytochemicals, some of which have been claimed to have antioxidant, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and anticarcinogenic properties.

However, vegetables often also contain toxins and antinutrients such as α-solanine, α-chaconine, enzyme inhibitors (of cholinesterase, protease, amylase, etc.), cyanide and cyanide precursors, oxalic acid, and more. Depending on the concentration, such compounds may reduce the edibility, nutritional value, and health benefits of dietary vegetables. Cooking and/or other processing may be necessary to eliminate or reduce them.

Production

Traditionally, food was obtained through agriculture. With increasing concern in agribusiness over multinational corporations owning the world food supply though patents on genetically modified food, there has been a growing trend toward sustainable agricultural practices. This approach, partly fueled by consumer demand, encourage biodiversity, local self-reliance and organic farming methods.

In popular culture, the production of mass food production, specifically meats such as chicken and beef, has come under fire from various documentaires documenting the mass slaughter and pooor treatment of animals, most recently Food, Inc, often for easier revenues from large corporations.