FOOD: THE MEANING

We all eat to live as the old adage goes. However how many times have we wondered what this thing food is? In simple terms food can be described as any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb, in order to maintain life and growth. According to Wikipedia, 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.

The most interesting thing is that the origin of food emanates from the food chain/food web theory. All food originate from plants mainly as even animal food sources deriving their food from plants first.

Food can be classified as animal or plant. Plant food sources can be further classified into seeds such as legumes and cereals like beans, vegetables which can be leafy like kales, stem vegetables like asparagus, root vegetables like turnips and flowery/inlforescence like cabbages. on the other hand animal sources range from beef products, pork, veal, mutton, offals like matumbo [not to mention utamu wa atta na matumbo,lol], poultry like  chicken, dairy products like milk among others.

In order to understand food we also need to have a brief understanding of the taste perception of food. It should be noted that the taste perception of food goes beyond flavor and may involve a combination of aroma and color. As human beings we have five types of taste mainly sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Generally regarded as the most pleasant taste, sweetness is almost always caused by a type of simple sugar such as glucose or fructose, or disaccharides such as sucrose, a molecule combining glucose and fructose.Sourness is caused by the taste of acids, such as vinegar in alcoholic beverages. Sour foods include citrus, specifically lemons, limes, and to a lesser degree oranges. Sour is evolutionary significant as it is a sign for a food that may have gone rancid due to bacteria.Saltiness is the taste of alkali metal ions such as sodium and potassium. It is found in almost every food in low to moderate proportions to enhance flavor, although to eat pure salt is regarded as highly unpleasant. There are many different types of salt, with each having a different degree of saltiness, including sea salt, fleur de sel, kosher salt, mined salt, and grey salt. Bitterness is a sensation often considered unpleasant characterized by having a sharp, pungent taste. Dark, unsweetened chocolate, caffeine, lemon rind, and some types of fruit are known to be bitter. Umami is the savoury kind of taste.

Having exhausted the introductory part of this piece next we are going to look into depth the impact of food on our health and how much of each food group we need.

Keep on enjoying the reading