NCERT Class 6 Science Food Where Does It Come From

Food:Where Does It Come From?

What did you eat at home today? Find out what your friend ate today. Did you eat the same kind of food yesterday and today? We all eat different kinds of food at different times, isn’t it?

1.1 FOOD VARIETY

Activity 1

Ask your friends in the school about the items they would be eating during a day. See if you can also get this information from friends staying in different states of India. List all the items in your notebook as given in Table 1.1, for as many friends as possible. Table 1.1 What do we eat? Name of the student/friend Food items eaten in a day There seems to be so much variety in the food that we eat. What are these food items made of? Think about rice cooked at home. We take raw rice and boil it in water. Just two materials or ingredients are needed to prepare a dish of boiled rice. On the other hand, some food items are made with many ingredients. To prepare vegetable curry, we need different kinds of vegetables, salt, spices, oil and so on.

Activity 2

Choose some of the items you listed in Table 1.1 and try to find out what ingredients are used to prepare these, by discussing with your friends and elders at home. List them in Table 1.2. Some examples are given here. Add some more items to this list.

1.2 FOOD MATERIALS AND SOURCES

It may be easy for us to guess the sources of some of the ingredients that we listed in Table 1.2. Fruits and vegetables, for instance. Where do they come from? Plants, of course! What are the sources of rice or wheat? You may have seen paddy or wheat fields with rows and rows of plants, which give us these grains. And then, there are food items like milk, eggs, meat, chicken, fish, prawns, beef, pork and such others, which come from animals.

Activity 3

Let us take the food items listed earlier and try to find out where they come from — the ingredients and their sources. Some examples are shown in Table 1.3. Fill in the blanks in Table 1.3 and add more examples to this list.

1.3 PLANT PARTS AND ANIMAL PRODUCTS AS FOOD

Plants are one source of our food. Which parts of a plant are these? We eat many leafy vegetables. We eat fruits of some plants. Sometimes roots, sometimes stems and even flowers. Have you ever eaten pumpkin flowers dipped in rice paste and fried? Try it! Some plants have two or more edible (eatable parts. Seeds of mustard plants give us oil and the leaves are used as a vegetable. Can you think of the different parts of a banana plant that are used as food? Think of more examples where many parts of a single plant are used as food.

Exercises

1. Do you find that all living beings need the same kind of food?

2. Name five plants and their parts that we eat.

3. Match the items given in Column A with that in Column B

4. Fill up the blanks with the words given: herbivore, plant, milk, sugarcane, carnivore

(a) Tiger is a ____________________ because it eats only meat.

(b) Deer eats only plant products and so, is called ______________.

(c) Parrot eats only _________________ products.

(d) The ________________ that we drink, which comes from cows, buffaloes and goats is an animal product.

(e) We get sugar from ___________________.

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 6 Science Food Where Does It Come From