Nutritional resources
As a species we are omnivorous mammals. As mammals, women produce the exclusive food for their children during the first stages of life, and as rural workers, they produce, transform and distribute the family food. Thus, they cover teir children’s nutritional needs with lactation during the first months and years of life and, later, with a combination of plant and animal resources obtained by hunting, fishing, gathering and agriculture.
Cereals, roots and tubers amount to 80% of all the food we consume. Cereals grow in large masses, have seeds which are rich in essential nutrients and yearly life cycles which helped to domesticate, select and harvest them. Tubers are the underground parts of plants which abound in the tropics –both in the jungle and in arid zones- where they are essential foodstuffs. The fruits obtained from trees are part of human nutrition, but the banana tree (origin in Southeast Asia) is the only tree whose fruit is a basic foodstuff, grown and eaten in tropical areas all over the world.
The main nutritional resources from animals involve a few species of domestic mammals and birds, and occasionally some wild species caught by hunting and fishing. They all provide proteins and lipids to our diet, as well as many raw materials for everyday use (skins, horns, teeth, fertiliser, etc.).