About the Food Domain: What is Food

Food is one of the three essential ingredients of human life. Together with water and oxygen, food provides the human body with the nutrients it needs to survive. Lack of food leads to hunger, decreased body function and nutritional diseases like rickets, pellagra or scurvy. Only in extreme cases will total lack of food result in death. A human body can survive about a month without food, but only a few days without water, and a few minutes without air (Jelen, P. (1985). Introduction to Food Processing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, Inc.).