Under the “part of organism” facet (class), FoodOn provides selected terms from anatomical ontologies for biological anatomical parts, as well as plant and animal part references that don’t fit into an anatomy, such as cuts of meat, or portions of a fruit like a hulled seed.

• Part of animal: body part and body product (like milk) terms mostly from the Uberon ontology, but also including some more arbitrary parts, such as butchery cuts of meat.
• Plant structure: terms mainly from the Plant Ontology, but also terms like “fruit, peel removed” which LanguaL provides and which have no pre-composed anatomical equivalent.
• Fungal structure: terms from the Fungal Gross Anatomy ontology (FAO); so far only “fruitbody” is used, the reproductive part, which is usually the above-ground portion of a fungus or mushroom which is harvested.

Within the part of organism facet there are a number of terms originating in LanguaL which don’t correspond to anatomical biological parts, Note that plant structure includes the subclass “whole plant”, a PO term, which is actually also a subclass of the “food product organismal source” class situated under “organism”.

In ontology speak, if a basic unprocessed raw food item isn’t a whole organism, it is certainly a part of one, and so can likely be represented primarily as an instance of one of the above classes in a graph database.  

An organism part, along with a reference to the organism it came from, is the usual building block on which all other foods are based. The growing  FoodOn Organismal Materials spreadsheet’s tabs hold these entities.