Product Code Database
A staple food, food staple, or simply staple, is a Human food that is eaten often and in such quantities that it constitutes a dominant portion of a standard diet for an individual or a population group, supplying a large fraction of food energy and generally forming a significant proportion of the intake of other as well. For , a staple food of a specific society may be eaten as often as every day or every meal, and most people live on a diet based on just a small variety of food staples. Specific staples vary from place to place, but typically are inexpensive or readily available foods that supply one or more of the and needed for survival and health: , , , minerals, and . Typical examples include ( and ), , nuts , and ( and ). Among them, (rice, wheat, oat, maize, etc.), ( and ), and root vegetables (e.g. potato, taro, and yam) account for about 90% of the world's food calorie intake.
Early agricultural valued the crop foods that they established as staples because, in addition to providing necessary nutrition, they are suitable for storage over long periods of time without decay. Such nonperishable foods are the only possible staples during seasons of shortage, such as or cold temperate winters, against which times harvests have been stored. During seasons of surplus, wider choices of foods may be available.
Generally, staple foods are those eaten in bulk that supply energy to humans, predominantly in the form of and , and so are mainly plant-based, as and are predominantly protein and Animal fat, though dairy products provide all these. However, not all places are suitable for agriculture, and so pastoralism can be favoured instead, as it has the advantage that animals can live off of land unsuitable for crop and consume the local plant matter that is otherwise inedible to humans and convert that into—meat, offal, Animal fat, and milk—that humans can eat. Animals can therefore provide staples to human diets in inhospitable such as , steppe, taiga, tundra and mountain. Specific examples include herding in regions such as Mongolia where sheep are herded, the Prairie where the Sioux herded bison, and the Arctic, where the Sami people herd reindeer.
Most of the human population lives on a diet based on one or more of the following staples: cereals (rice, wheat, maize (corn), millet and sorghum), roots and tubers (potatoes, cassava, yams and taro) and animal products such as meat, milk, eggs, cheese and fish. Regional staples include the plants rye, soybeans, barley, oats and teff.
Just 15 plant provide 90 percent of the world's food energy intake (exclusive of meat), with rice, maize and wheat comprising two-thirds of human food consumption. These three are the staples of about 80 percent of the world population, and rice feeds almost half of humanity.
Roots and tubers, meanwhile, are important staples for over one billion people in the developing world, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the food eaten by half the population of sub-Saharan Africa. Roots and tubers are high in carbohydrates, calcium and vitamin C, but low in protein. Cassava root, for example, is a major food staple in the developing world, a basic food source for around 500 million people.
With economic development and free trade, many countries have shifted away from low-Nutrient density staple foods to higher-nutrient-density staples, as well as towards greater meat consumption.
Some foods like quinoa—a Pseudocereal that originally came from the Andes—were also staples centuries ago. Oxalis tuberosa tubers, Ullucus tubers and grain amaranth are other foods that may have been historical Andean staples. Pemmican made from dried meat and fat was a staple of the Plains Indians.
| +Ten staple foods of global importance (ranked by annual production) | ||
| United States | 354 million | United States |
| Egypt | 204 million | China |
| New Zealand | 122 million | China |
| Netherlands | 96 million | China |
| Indonesia | 47 million | Nigeria |
| Egypt | 91 million | United States |
| Senegal | 71 million | China |
| Colombia | 36 million | Nigeria |
| United States | 10 million | United States |
| El Salvador | 9 million | Uganda |
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