Food, Plants and You

Healthy Food Choices.

       Endless cement streets, skyscrapers, streetcars, buses, screeching brakes, car horns; these are the city. Thousands upon thousands of people keep the city going - doctors, bus drivers, teachers, elevator operators, and countless others. This is a world of power, of turning wheels, and of machinery in motion. To produce this power, furnaces and machines must have fuel. Their-fuel is usually coal.

       Man, too, needs fuel. His fuel is food. In the city he gets his fuel at the corner grocery. In cans or boxes, frozen or fresh, it all has come from the farms of the nation. Man with all his science and inventions still cannot make his own food. He is completely dependent on nature to do it for him. Every bit of man's food comes from plant life.

       Now maybe you are thinking that we don't have to eat plant food but instead could live on milk, eggs, fish, and meat. If you were thinking that, now ask yourself this question: Where did that meat come from? Yes, it was an animal. But what did that animal eat? It probably depended almost entirely on plant food. However, even if it also ate meat, that meat was once an animal that had eaten plants. If you search back far enough, you will always find that somewhere plant life was the food. So, you see, even meat eaters are really dependent on plants.

       Plants are living things, and they too need food. What is their food? They make their own. It is made from air, water, minerals dissolved in the water, and sunlight. Plants and only plants have this amazing ability to make their own food. They alone can transform air, water, certain elements, and the energy of the sun into life. They alone have a substance that makes possible this life-giving process. That wonderful material is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the green substance in the leaves and stems of plants.

       A plant's green leaf is a factory that takes the raw materials, air, water, and certain elements, and, in the presence of sunlight, manufactures them into food. This food is a kind of sugar, and it is soon deposited throughout the plant. In many plants the sugar is changed to starch. Some of these plant sugars are changed into fats and oils and, with certain additions, into proteins. These plant sugars, starches, oils, fats, and proteins are the food of man and animals.

       Civilization and agriculture have developed together. Earliest man hunted animals to supply the main part of his diet. Whatever plant life he ate was that which grew wild. Later he learned to store plant foods to tide him over bad weather and seasons of poor hunting. His discovery of how to grow food plants from seeds was the beginning of agriculture. Now he no longer had to follow the roaming game. He could stay in one place, and this, then, was the beginning of civilization.

       Pioneers in any land must either live off the new land or bring their own foods and seeds with them. The pioneers in New England found foods very different from those they had always used. They knew nothing about corn, which was the staple food of the Indians. Except for the Native Americans, instructions on how to raise this strange product those pioneers might never have survived their first year in America. As America grew, its new settlers brought along their favorite foods. Many of the foods now grown on our farms have originated in other parts of the world. Our civilization may become more and more complicated but it is still completely dependent on the silent, secret processes that go on in plants. Winona Cosner

 More About Our Food:

1. Sugars of Many Kinds
2. Chocolate Or CaCao (Spanish)
3. Fruits and Vegetables
4. Starches That We Eat
5. Cereals Not Just For Breakfast
6. "Meat" From Plants?
7. Food Oils From Plants
   

About Food for Kids:

• You Are What You Eat!
• Doll Groceries for Craft and Play
• How to Cook for A Doll