Food and Nutrition ESSAYS

By now you have studied the various kinds of foods and their use in our daily diet. You have also learnt how these foods can be made into many different preparations. But, do you think you would enjoy cereal, pulse, vegetable, meat and egg preparations if salt and spices were not added to them? Surely, you would not. If the food is not tasty, it is not liked and not accepted even though it may be very nutritious and well cooked. Spices and condiments are substances which give taste, flavour and colour to the food, thus making it attractive and acceptable. Spices are also important to promote appetite as they stimulate the secretion of digestive juices in our body. Some of them are rich in minerals, especially iron, and some are a good source of B-complex vitamins. But their nutritional contribution in the diet is not of importance because they are consumed in small quantities. We should not consume spices in excessive amounts as this can cause irritation and lead to problems like acidi...

 You would have enjoyed eating sweet preparations like burfi, gulabjamuns, rasgullas, ice-creams. These sweets and desserts form an important part of any feast or social functions like birthdays or marriages. All these preparations have sugar as an ingredient. Your tea, coffee, soft drinks and other beverages, also contain sugar. The main sweetening agent all over the world is sugar. This is made from sugarcane or sugarbeets. In our country sugarcane is used for making sugar, while in European countries, especially West Germany, sugar beets are used. Which ever source is used for the production of sugar, the product obtained is the same. Our country is one of the largest producers of sugar. Sugar is produced from sugarcane in the factories. In brief the process of making sugar is: the sugarcane is crushed. The juice so obtained has some impurities. It is then refined and concentrated to form sugar crystals. In our villages even now a large quantity of sugarcane is used to produce j...