Introduction

Anything that an animal, plant, or human eat to nourish their body for proper growth and maintenance is called food. To cook food we need different kinds of ingredients.

For example: to cook boiled rice, you need only two ingredient water and rice. On the other hand, to prepare vegetable curry, you need a vegetable, spices, salt, oil, and other ingredients. Ingredients are components used to prepare food.

cooked food

Ingredients of food 

Food materials and sources

The food that we consume is obtained from mainly two sources: plants and animals. Food obtained from plants: Fruits, vegetables, grains, pulses, cereals. Food obtained from animals: Egg, meat, milk, beef, fish, chicken, pork, prawns.

Plant parts as food

We eat many leafy vegetables. We eat fruits, stem, roots, and flowers of some plants. Some plants have two or more edible (eatable) parts. For example seeds of mustard, plants give us oil and the leaves are used as a vegetable. Not all the plants are edible, some may be poisonous too. For example Oleander, Castor bean, Datura stramonium, Dieffenbachia Sprouts of moong dal and chana is eaten as a healthy snack. Note: Sprouts are the white root-like structure coming out of seeds when soaked in water overnight. Carrot, Ginger, Radish, Onion, Beetroot, etc. are the example of the edible root of plants. Cinnamon is an example in which bark of the tree is used as a spice.