eating

Ingestion of food to provide for all organisms their nutritional or medicinal needs

EntityQ213449

Also known as food intake · consuming · consumption · to eat · eat · feeding

Subclass of: ingestion
Part of: activity

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Eating is the ingestion of food for digestion. In biology, this is typically done to provide heterotrophic organisms with the essential nutrients and energy needed for metabolism and physical growth, since they are incapable of acquiring nutrition and energy intrinsically like autotrophs and therefore must ingest external organic matters in order to survive. Animals, in particular, have evolved different forms of eating — carnivores and scavengers eat flesh (meat) from other animals, herbivores and algivores eat plants and algae, omnivores consume a mixture of both plant and animal matters, and detritivores and coprophages eat detritus and feces. Animals and phagotrophs eat and digest food internally, as opposed to decomposers such as fungi and microbes, who secrete enzymes to digest organic matters externally before absorbing the nutrients and thus do not "eat" food.

Overview

All data

83 statements · 14% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Has use: pleasure
homeostasis
nutrition
Uses: digestive system
Opposite of: excretion
drinking
starvation
Location: kitchen
restaurant
dining room
workplace
Different from: grazing
Follows: cooking criterion used: human
hunting criterion used: predator
food and drink preparation criterion used: human
butchering
Has effect: satiety nature of statement: often
Cause: hunger
hunger
Practiced by: eater
Hashtag: eating
Class of object(s) of occurrence: food

On other databases

47 identifiers linking eating across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

14%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 9, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). eating (Q213449). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/eating-Q213449