While eating, have you ever thought about where food comes from?

You buy it from the market or your mom cooks it for you. Yet, where do shopkeepers get food from?
The sources of every ingredient in these foods are different too.
Remember what you had for dinner yesterday and try to list the ingredients.
Some ingredients come from a plant source. People grow fruits such as apples and grapes, vegetables such as tomato and onion, and grains such as rice and wheat.
Do you grow any plant at home?

Not every part of a plant is edible. For example, some plants have edible leaves, while others have edible stems.
If you put some moong seeds in water for one day and wrap them in a wet cloth for another day, you see a small white structure grow. The seeds have now converted into sprouts and are very nutritious.
Some plants have more than one edible part, whereas some have multiple edible parts. For example, pumpkin fruit, seeds, flowers, and stem are all edible. Try to think of more examples of plants with 2 or more edible parts.
Ingredients like milk, eggs, and meat come from an animal source from the farm animals that people grow.

What about honey? Do you know that bees collect sweet juice or nectar from flowers all year long? They store it as food in their home, the beehive, and we collect it as honey.
Have you ever seen plants eating food?
Plants are a special kind of living beings, called Autotrophs. This word is made of two words, “auto” meaning self, and “troph” meaning nutrition. Plants make their food using sunlight, water and salt.

Animals depend on other living things for food. They are therefore called Heterotrophs. “Hetero” means others and “troph” means nutrition. There are many types of heterotrophs:
The animals which eat only plants are herbivores such as cows, goats, horses, elephants, etc.
Carnivores are animals that only eat other living organisms. Some examples include lion, tiger, jackal, etc.
Other animals eat both plants and animals. These are called omnivores. Humans, dogs, bears, etc. are a few examples.
Some animals and insects eat only dead beings and plants. These are scavengers because they collect their food from the dead bodies of other animals. Some examples of scavengers are raccoons, hyenas, foxes, etc
The insects and plants that break down dead animals and plants are called decomposers. Some decomposers are earthworms, beetles, fungi, etc.
By reading about food sources, you have just finished online revisions of the chapter- Food: Where Does it Come From? from your Class 6 NCERT Science textbook. Wasn’t it exciting? At SeekoG, there is a lot more exciting stuff to learn from. You can also take the online MCQ tests which would help you prepare for school exams as well as other competitive exams and Olympiads.