From farm to fork: The journey of your food!

After a day full of work when we sit at the dining table and look at that plate of food, it brings a smile on our face. We all are working hard day and night just for living and food is a necessity for survival. But have you ever wondered how this food comes from the farm to fork?

Whatever human being consumes is somehow generated in fields like spinach is a direct product but the bread is indirect as it is made from the flour which comes from the grain. There is a particular journey that our food made before coming in front of us from the farm to our home. Knowing it better is as important as knowing your food.

There are five main centres in this whole journey Let's just get through them one-by-one:

● Farm:

This being pretty obvious comes first. To do the journey food must be produced first. At the farm, our hardworking farmers work the whole year to produce quality food for us. Farmers ready the field with the help of tractors and equipment to sow the seed then watering them and saving them from disease and insects till they can be harvested, all of these are done by farmers. Then the yield is harvested.

● Collection Centre:

All the yields are collected from farms by paying farmers the appropriate amount. Some farmers prefer directly selling their produce in the market instead of going this way. At the collection centre, the food is stored until it gets a good market price. Various preservation methods are used to keep the food healthy and safe for a long time. Cold Storage and Warehouse are generally used as collection centres.

● Distributor Centre:

The purchased food comes to the distributor centre from the collection centre through various means of transport. And then the food is distributed all over the region from the distributor centre by loading it from one place to another. From here, the food enters the retail market.

● Retail Store:

A retail store can be a mall, mart or Kirana store. Here we get a variety of items to purchase. Most of our food items are purchased from here.

● House:

This is the last stop for our food. After travelling for so long the food reaches to us through many hands. Now we just clean it and cook it according to our taste. And then the food is all yours.

One point should be noted that this whole journey gets little changed for different foods as all the food which we eat is not raw, some require to be processed so then just an additional step is added in the link. Let's understand this with two examples.

We purchase onions from the market and we eat them just by cooking them. Hence they travel through the above-mentioned centres. But the journey for potato chips is a little different. From the collection centre, the potatoes go to factories where they turn into chips and then they go to distributor centres. So, here is an additional step i.e.factory.In the same way, the journey will be similar but not identical for all food items.

After seeing the journey we understand that there are lots of efforts and hard work behind a single plate of food. Hence we must avoid wastage of food because we are very grateful as we can enjoy a meal which isn't possible for many.