Staple food

), legumes (lentils and beans) and tubers (e.g. potato, taro and yam) account for about 90% of the world's food calorie intake.

[1] Early agricultural civilizations valued the crop foods that they established as staples because, in addition to providing necessary nutrition, they generally are suitable for storage over long periods of time without decay.

Common plant-based staples include cereals (e.g. rice, wheat, maize, millet, barley, oats, rye, spelt, emmer, triticale and sorghum), starchy tubers (e.g. potato, sweet potato, yam and taro) or root vegetables (e.g. cassava, turnip, carrot, rutabagas), and dried legumes (lentils and beans).

[3] Animal-based staples include various types of meat (typically livestock and poultry), fish, eggs, milk and dairy products (e.g.

Animals can therefore provide staples to human diets in inhospitable ecosystems such as deserts, steppe, taiga, tundra, and mountainous terrains.

[8][9][10] The dominant staple foods in different parts of the world are a function of weather patterns, local terrain, farming constraints, acquired tastes and ecosystems.

Most of the human population lives on a diet based on one or more of the following staples: cereals (rice, wheat, maize (corn), millet, and sorghum), roots and tubers (potatoes, cassava, yams and taro), and animal products such as meat, milk, eggs, cheese and fish.

Roots and tubers, meanwhile, are important staples for over one billion people in the developing world, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the food eaten by half the population of sub-Saharan Africa.

One author indicated that the nutritional value of some staple foods are negatively affected by higher levels of carbon dioxide, as occurs in climate change.