Human Food and Food Additives

Abstract

Food plants may be defined as those plants or plant organs that are used for human consumption. Although the angiosperms are the major source, the gymnosperms, ferns, lichens, fungi and algae are also represented. Human food differs from animal food in the sense that it usually undergoes some form of preparation prior to eating. This may include washing to remove dirt, leaching to remove toxic substances, grinding to reduce excessive mastication and to improve digestibility, and even fermentation to produce a more palatable food or intoxicating beverage. Some foods, such as nuts, fruit and salad vegetables may be eaten raw, more often food is cooked. Food may also be preserved by drying, freezing, canning, pickling, fermentation, etc. and stored for future use. Also, depending on the culture, it may be presented in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing. The use of plant food sources ranges from total dependence on wild plants by some aboriginal peoples to almost total reliance on cultivated plants by people of developed countries. Ogle and Grivetti (1985), for example, have shown that more than 220 species of wild plants are commonly consumed by the people of Swaziland and that for 39% of the people the wild foods provided a greater share of the annual diet than the cultivated crops. In the Garfagnana region of Tuscany the local inhabitants still use 133 species of wild plants (including 19 species of fungi) for food, with 20 to 45 species included in the traditional soup known as minestrella (Pieroni, 1999). In many regions, especially in the drier areas, wild food sources provide food security during times of dearth arising from drought, famines and wars, as well as regularly providing an important contribution during pre-harvest food shortages. The nutritional value of these wild food sources has been sadly neglected. This is particularly distressing since, from the little work that has been done by, for example Brand and Cherikoff (1985) and Arnold et at., (1985), many have been found to be nutritionally superior to cultivated crops.