Searching food, man's first occupation.

The eating habits of people

As a living creature, man can not live without food. In fact, no living things-animals or plants can survive without food. The search for food was man’s first occupation. He made his first weapons to hunt animals for food. Gradually he learnt how to grow food plants. Thus he invented agriculture and settled in communities beside his cornfields.

People do not eat the same food all over the world. It varies from place to place. The eating habits of the people of a country depend largely on its geographical position, climate and soil. That is to say, the kinds of food that people eat depend on what they can grow or afford to buy from other countries. For instance, people in the tropical countries eat a lot of fruits and vegetables which grow abundantly in these regions. The chef foods of the people of Hawaii Polynesia and the Pacific are taro roots, bread, fruit and seafood. They also eat a lot of limes, coconuts, bananas and pineapples which grow in plenty in these islands around them. The Eskimos live almost entirely on meat and fish because vegetables do not grow in the ice-covered regions they live in. It is interesting to note that the word “Eskimo” itself means the ‘eater of fish’. In fact, a lot of fish is eaten raw by the Eskimos.

Meat is eaten in the countries that have large pastures for grazing livestock. Large meat eating countries are Australia, Argentina, Canada and the USA. It is quite natural that fish should be an important food in the countries with large sea-coasts. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Japan are examples of such countries. Much of the food of Japan which is a country of island comes from the sea. They eat a lot of seafood such as shrimps, oysters, as well as mineral rich sea-weed. Thus we see that the kinds of food that people eat vary throughout the world.