No.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk!

"digestible" and "nutritious" aren't social constructs, so no. If your body can transform it chemically in a way that produces energy, it's food. Otherwise it's not. The same things are food regardless of your culture.

This isn't a shower thought, it's embarrassing to even read.

On a scale of 1 to munchies, how high are you right now?

Go ahead, you can eat the mold off your walls, what's the worst that could happen?

Maybe all language, words, and sentences, and the meaning behind everything we share are just social constructs?

No, it’s not a social construct, it’s a description of things that are consumed for nutritional value. Sure, “food” is a social construct in that it’s an English Language word used to describe said items, but every single life form consumes some form of food, regardless of said life form’s society (or more often lack thereof).

Also there are literally objective things innate to certain objects that make them food so you’re entire initial premise is idiotic.

Dude your mom’s a social construct

Food is a non-toxic, organic substance that provides nutrition in the form of carbohydrates, protein, fibre, fats/oils, and/or vitamins and minerals. Sure there are some edge cases which you can argue the point in, such as a lump of rock salt maybe, but for the most part it is something which provides sustenance. Sure you could eat mud or plaster and it won't kill you, but it won't help keep you alive either, so its not food.

Food is a social construct. For a social construct to exist you have to have a social category with shifting goalposts based on different context and cultural factors that are not rigidly defined. Like "Fat" - what is considered fat for a person is based on context. A supermodel is fat for being 5'9 and 145lbs but we would call a constructiom labourer skinny as fuck at those same dimensions. Each culture constructs it's own version of what defines "fat" which is different and distinct from something than the medical guidelines for obesity or an expectation of reasonable health. "Fat" is in the eye of the beholder and represents overlapping cultural circles with varying degrees of consideration of what is excluded from the category.

The scientific concept of nutritional substance is not how we always define "food". Culturally people contest what is considered food vs non food items based on cultural factors. Like eating mice for instance does have nutritional value but there are a lot of people who would contest them as being a valid food item even if they were raised in clean conditions due to cultural adversions. "That isn't food." has been uttered in all sincerity by people encountering strange delicacies that their culture has taboos against eating beliving it dangerous, unpleasant or just categorically not something intended to be eaten. Thus "food" would be in part a sociologically constructed category.

I'd accept the structures within what we define as food being a social construct. Status as fruit or vegetable doesn't qualify it is healthy as we tend to assume. A potato is a plant and it has more in common with a loaf of bread, a yellow banana has less good in it than a Snickers bar.

Food in total though, that's a defined thing. Glass isn't food because we've agreed as a society not to eat it, it's not food because we can't process it in any meaningful way.

Food? No. Cuisine? Perhaps.

Are you saying that because most people wouldn't consider acorns and dandelions edible, or worth processing into food, that the definition of food is meaningless?

Or are you saying that yes you can technically est mud and rocks (what is salt, anyways?) that food is a meaningless concept?

You can drink your coffee from a bowl but that doesn't make it a mug.

Food is a category made up of human edible materials, usually providing nutritional benefits. There is a larger social construct AROUND food. Like a burrito is a construct, it being a product of Mexican culture is a construct, it being transformed into a "Cali Burrito", people who have burrito bumper stickers, the type of place you think of when someone says "a burrito joint". All social constructs. But food itself, I wouldn't consider a social construct, no.

"Food" is a social construct in the same way as every label we put on a thing is a social construct. "Chair" is a social construct. (The universe didn't know what a "chair" was before humans started making and naming chairs.) "Tree" is a social construct. (Any physical thing you pick apart enough is particles (and I'm definitely oversimplifying here) and by giving it a human-made label like "tree", we're imposing something that wouldn't otherwise be there.) "Particles" are a social construct! (They're very much an abstraction of what's actually going on. Even the math we use to understand things like quantum mechanics is just our way of thinking about something that may or may not "exist" but if it does, definitely isn't the same as our "thoughts" about it.)

All words are social constructs, but I think there's at least one more layer at which "everything is a human construct." Even before we give something a name, we've already made the decision to distinguish it from a "background" as a distinct "thing." (A sufficiently alien mind might, if it encountered earth, consider all of earth "atomic" and "indivisible" to the point that the idea of "a human" wouldn't make sense to it. It's not like there's any empty space between our skin and the soup of amosphere we constantly live in, so in what sense am I a separate thing from the rest of earth?)

So, yeah, "food" is a social construct, but humans are very much removed from "reality" by an opaque ocean of social constructs.

All that said, I wouldn't say that "food" is a social construct in any way that, say, a "planet" or a "fork" or a "rock" or a "human" isn't.

Thing you pick up in nature (a fruit, for example, like apple) still called food.

But i like your idea, perhaps we rephrase it. What about call it "dishes" or "cuisines"

=> is "cuisines" a social construct.

Our naming and classification of things is all socially constructed. So yes, our categorization of edible things as food is a social construct, but our physical need to fuel our bodies with something digestible is not. But also, using it that way makes existence a social construct, so it depends on how rigid you want to be.