food
noun
Food — the substance an animal consumes to sustain its own life
Definition
Any substance that can be metabolized by an animal to give energy and build tissue
In depth
Food is any substance an animal can metabolize for energy and the building of tissue, the basic material exchange by which one form of life sustains itself by consuming another, or by consuming what another has produced. The word names both biological necessity and, almost everywhere in human culture, an enormous reservoir of ritual, pleasure, and meaning.
Origin
The word descends from Old English foda, related to fedan, to feed, part of an old Germanic word family concerned with nourishment and sustenance. Its remarkable semantic stability across more than a millennium of English — almost unchanged in form and meaning — reflects just how fundamental the concept has always been to human language.
Usage examples
"The expedition rationed its remaining food with growing anxiety as the storm dragged on."
"She had always understood love, in her family, as a language spoken primarily through food."
"Even in famine, the body's demand for food does not pause to consider circumstance."
How to use it
Food is plain, universal vocabulary, equally at home in scientific writing about metabolism and in deeply personal prose about culture, memory, and family. Its emotional resonance in literature often exceeds its biological definition by a wide margin.
Related concepts
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