Teenagers’ Knowledge and Perception about The Staple Food Diversity to Describe Daily Eating Habit

Daily eating habit of teenagers is usually described by knowledge and perception based on their family culture/heritage or education experience or social life. This research studies about how the knowledge and perception of teenagers describe their daily eating habit. Staple food is a group of food to reach the balance nutrition which is consumed regularly in certain portion to obtain the carbohydrate as the source of energy (Suhardjo and Kusharto, 1992). Indonesia has 77 kinds of staple food as the potential sources of carbohydrate such as cereal plants (paddy, sorghum), roots (garut – Maranta arundinacea, ganyong – Canna discolor, gembili – Dioscorea esculenta), and fruits (sukun/bread fruit, banana) (Gahar and Dadang, 2014). This research uses the quantitative approach to analyze the data. Data is randomly gathered from students of High School YADIKA 11, West Java. The results of this research consist of students’ knowledge and perception of staple food. The students’ knowledge about staple food is 67% for items, 55% for kinds, 65% for provenance, 73% for definition, and 88% for benefits. But, the knowledge about Indonesian endemic staple food is only 32%. The students’ perception of staple food by giving the score based on the choice (5 for rice and 3 for corn, cassava, potato, sweet potato and banana), taste (5 for rice and 3 for corn, cassava, potato, and sweet potato) and appearance (5 for rice and 3 for corn, cassava, potato, sweet and potato). The students have low level of knowledge about Indonesian endemic staple food. This means that teenagers’ daily eating habit is only described by 6 kinds of staple food