If new food became availible, could the organisims digest it chemically?
In order to digest food, organisms need enzymes which can break the food down. There are tons of enzymes in our saliva, our stomachs, and our cells, for example, which break down sugars, proteins, and fats to get energy and other useful materials out of them. In order to do this our enzymes must be able to break the bonds between molecules in the food substances. There are many types of materials which we cannot digest because we don’t have the proper enzymes to do so. An excellent example is the example of potatoes versus wood. The two are actually both made up of very similar materials; both the starch in potatoes and the cellulose in wood are made of lots of glucose sugar molecules stuck together. The difference is, the molecules are connected in a different way in wood than they are in potatoes; we do not have enzymes that can break the chemical bonds between glucose molecules in wood, so we cannot digest wood. We can, however, digest potatoes, because they have a type of bonds our
