Radical 184 or radical eat (食部) meaning "eat" or "food" is one of the 11 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 9 strokes.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 403 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

食 is also the 185th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China, with the simplified left component form 饣 and its traditional form 飠 listed as its associated indexing components.

• Oracle bone script character
• Bronze script character
• Large seal script character
• Small seal script character

This radical character has different forms in different languages when used as an individual character and as a component.

Traditionally, when used as an individual character, its third stroke is printed as either a horizontal line (食) or a vertical line (食), but more often written as a slanted dot (食); when used as a left component, it is usually printed as 𩙿 and written as 飠 in regular script.

In China, xin zixing adopted the handwritten form 食 and 飠 and applies it also to printing typefaces. This change is applied chiefly to Traditional Chinese publications in mainland China; the left component form 飠 was already replaced by the simplified form 饣 prior to the printing typeface reform. Taiwan's Standard Form of National Characters and Hong Kong's List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters use 食 and 飠 (the third stroke is horizontal) as the standard forms, while other alternative forms (e.g. 食/𩙿, 食/飠) are still rather prevalent in publishing.

In modern Japanese, 食 (third stroke is horizontal) and 𩙿 are seen as the traditional/orthodox forms. The shinjitai reform changed the third stroke in 食 as an individual character or as a non-left component to a short horizontal line (食); changed the left component form 𩙿 to 飠. In principle, these changes apply only to jōyō kanji (more specifically, jōyō kanji before 2010 revision; some characters added in 2010 were not simplified); the traditional form is used for hyōgai kanji.

• Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram : the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-774-1.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Radical 184.

• Unihan Database - U+98DF