Plant foods include more than vegetables. Grains, fruits, spices, nuts are also products of vegetation. These enhance the beauty of Nature as well as aid in sustaining physical life. Many of them carry their charm into food and as food do more than nourish by supplying beauty too. They support life by furthering the processes that make food of possible use to the body. The wonder of the working together of living things is nowhere more real than in the food realm. Food sustains life. What it is thus passes into what food does for the body. This in turn makes possible the work the person does. Plants bear fruit that bears further fruit through its value in human life.

Grains have played a race-long part in the food of humankind. Around them clings much of the mystery of the harvest, celebrated wherever the fertility of Nature stirs the emotions of humankind. The compactness and richness of grains has made them symbolic of productiveness. Yet to humankind to-day grains as grains seem less human foods than many substances that appear in the form in which they grow, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts. Grains lose their identity in usually being ground into flours.

With the coming of peoples from other lands have come too their foods for them and to us. Thus have come forms of grain foods new here and of value. Not a few of these are preparations that serve as vegetable foods, as does macaroni. See Foreign Foods, p. 214.

Cereals have of late assumed greater importance as breakfast foods and for children. Though this is not denied them by science, science emphasizes it less than does commerce. Some cereals serve as vegetables; hominy does. Rice (unpolished and uncoated) like potato serves as a palatable starchy vegetable.