Staple foods

Staple foods

1. Eaten regularly in such quantities becomes dominant part of diet

   • Easy to access, grown/produced locally

2. Cheap, readily available

3. usually interconnected with climate and land type

4. most staple foods=cereals

5. wheat, barley, rye,oats, maize, rice, or root veg like potatoes, yams, taro, cassava

   • Rice, maize & wheat= 60% world food energy
     • 4 bn rely on them as staple food
   • other staple foods=legumes (soya beans and sago), Fruits (plantains and breadfruit), fish

6. Wheat

   • grown around world
   • second most produced cereal after maize and rice in 2009
   • World trade greater than all other crops combined
   • now 2nd to rice as main food crop and ahead of maize
   • covers more land area than any other commercial crop
   • Most important staple food for humans

7. Maize

   • a.k.a. corn
   • has ability to grow in different environments
   • sweet corn= humans
     • field corn types= animal feed and biofuel
   • most widely grown crop in America
     • 332 million hectares in USA alone

8. Fish

   • staple food= some societies
   • approx 75% fish caught= human consumption
     • rest= made into fishmeal, oil for farmed fish and animal feed
   • People in developing countries (mostly in coastal area) = more dependant on fish as staple food than developed
     • about 1 million depend on fish as primary source of animal protein