What are some different types of life that we eat and how do they affect our environment? by Grace

There are many different types of life we consume on a daily basis. The most common of these are fungi, plants, and animals. These items make up our diets and provide the majority of our nutrition.

            Fungi are organisms that break down organic materials and recycle them into vital nutrients. The types are mushrooms, molds, mildews, smuts, rusts, and yeasts. Fungi helps make a lot of different foods such as the use of yeasts in bread and alcohol or molds in penicillin and cheese production. Common mushrooms are portabellas, shiitakes, truffles, chanterelles, and morels.

Plants produce a lot of our nutrition and food. Plants can be gymnosperms and angiosperms characterized by seeds and flowers. Most of our food comes from angiosperms which can be monocots or dicots. Monocots have flowers in groups of 3s and have leaf veins that run parallel. Dicots have flowers in multiples of 4s or 5s and have reticulated leaf veins.

We get many foods from plants such as, celery and carrots from the apiaceae family and lettuce and artichokes from the asteraceae family. We get all our fruits and vegetables from plants. 

Animals provide our meat and animal products, such as eggs and milk. There are different ways to get meat, usually by hunting or domestication. Hunting has become more of a sport than a means of survival. Domestication is the transformation of a species into something beneficial for humans, often through selective breeding. This has resulted in the modern societies we have today because we don’t have to travel to get our food. We also receive more animal products instead of just meat.

The different foods we get come from living organisms and are necessary to our lives. We receive all of the nutrition and energy we need because of different types of fungi, plants, and animals.