NCERT Class 6 science textbook for blind students made Screen Readable by Anubhav Patel, IIIT Delhi, and Professor T K Bansal.

Activity 1

Ask your friends in the school about the items they would be eating during a day. See if you can also get this information from friends staying in different states of India. List all the items in your notebook as given in Table 1.1, for as many friends as possible.

Table 1.1 What do we eat?

There seems to be so much variety in the food that we eat (Fig 1.1). What are these food items made of?

Think about rice cooked at home. We take raw rice and boil it in water. Just two materials or ingredients are needed to prepare a dish of boiled rice. On the other hand, some food items are made with many ingredients. To prepare vegetable curry, we need different kinds of vegetables, salt, spices, oil and so on.

Activity 2

Choose some of the items you listed in Table 1.1 and try to find out what ingredients are used to prepare these, by discussing with your friends and elders at home. List them in Table 1.2. Some examples are given here. Add some more items to this list.

Table 1.2 Food items and their ingredients

What do we find? Do we find some ingredients common for different food items? Discuss in your class. So, where do these ingredients come from?