Staple food

A staple food (or simply staple) is a food that constitutes a dominant portion of an individual's or a population group's diet, supplying a large fraction of energy needs and nutrients. Specific staples vary from place to place, but are typically inexpensive and readily available foods that supply one or more of the macronutrients and micronutrients needed for survival and health: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins.

Early agricultural civilizations valued the crop foods that they established as staples because, in addition to providing necessary nutrition, they are suitable for storage over long periods of time without decay. Such nonperishable foods are the only possible staples during seasons of shortage, such as dry seasons or cold temperate winters, against which times harvests have been stored. During seasons of surplus, wider choices of foods may be available.

Types

Common plant-based staples account for about 90% of the world's food calorie intake and include cereals (rice, wheat, maize, millet, barley, oats, rye, teff, and sorghum), starchy tubers (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, and taro) and root vegetables (cassava, turnips, carrots, and rutabagas), and dried legumes (lentils, chickpeas, and beans). Other less common plant-based staple foods include sago (derived from the pith of various species of cycads known as sago palm), large fleshy fruits (breadfruit, breadnut, coconut, plantains, and gourds), pseudocereals (quinoa and amaranth), and acorns made into wiiwish (a type of porridge) and flatbreads among Native Californians or a savory jelly known as dotori-muk in Korean cuisine.

Animal-based staples include various types of meat, eggs, milk and dairy products, which comprise a larger part of the daily diet in places unsuitable for agriculture such as deserts, steppe, taiga, tundra and mountains. Pastoralism allows animals to consume local inedible plants and convert them into edible meat, offal, fat, eggs and milk. Herding primarily involves sheep in Mongolia, bison among the Sioux and other Native American tribes of the Great Plains, and reindeer among the Sami people of the Arctic. Animal based foods often utilize shelf-stable preparations such as canned meat, pemmican made from dried meat and fat, jerky, century eggs, and cheese.

Demographics

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The dominant staple foods in different parts of the world are a function of weather patterns, local terrain, farming constraints, acquired tastes and ecosystems. For example, the main staples in the average African diet are cereals (46 percent), roots and tubers (20 percent) and animal products (7 percent), whereas the main staples in the average Western European diet are animal products (33 percent), cereals (26 percent) and roots and tubers (4 percent).

Just 15 plant crops provide 90% of the world's food energy intake (exclusive of meat), with rice, maize and wheat comprising two-thirds of human food consumption. Roots and tubers are important staples for over one billion people in the developing world and account for 40% of the food eaten by half of sub-Saharan Africa's population. Roots and tubers are high in carbohydrates, calcium and vitamin C, but low in protein. With economic development and free trade, many countries have shifted away from low-nutrient-density staple foods to higher-nutrient-density staples and greater meat consumption.

Production

Most staple foods are currently produced using modern, conventional farming practices. However, the production of staple food using organic farming methods is growing.

Processing

Rice is most commonly cooked and eaten as separate entire grains, but most other staple cereals are milled into a flour or meal that can be used to make bread, noodles, pasta, porridge and mushes like mealie pap (although both can be eaten either as grains or ground into flour). Root vegetables can be mashed and used to make porridge-like dishes such as poi and fufu. Pulses (such as chickpeas, from which gram flour is made) and starchy root vegetables (such as canna rhizomes) can also be made into flour.^{[citation needed]}

Nutrition

When consumed in isolation, staple foods do not provide the full range of essential nutrients and can cause vitamin deficiencies. Pellagra is caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B₃) and is associated with a diet consisting primarily of non-nixtamalized maize, while the disease beriberi is caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B₁) and is associated with a diet of refined white rice. Scurvy results from a lack of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and can result from consuming too many staple foods without consuming other foods containing vitamin C. One author indicated that the nutritional value of some staple foods are negatively affected by higher levels of carbon dioxide, as occurs in climate change.

Images

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  White rice, cooked
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  Couscous
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  Maize (corn)
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  Sorghum seeds and popped sorghum
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  Millet grains
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  Amaranth (left) and common wheat berries
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  Colored quinoa
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  Kidney beans
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  Lentils
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  Chickpeas
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  Edamame (green soybeans)
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  Cassava roots
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  Chinese yams
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  Sweet potato salad
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  Ulluco tubers
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  Oca tubers
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  Taro roots
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  Potatoes
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  West African yam
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  Ube
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  Elephant foot yam
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  Coast live oak acorns
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  Plantain and banana
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  Breadfruit

See also

• Cash crop
• Subsistence agriculture
• Famine food
• Vavilov center – Area where domestication traits arise

References

External links

• Media related to Staple foods at Wikimedia Commons