It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't.
Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.
Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost.
I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortunate how much of the meaning was lost with the Chinese simplification. I can mostly make out Taiwanese/Republic of China newspapers, but can see nothing in the simplified characters.
Edit:
Yay, I'm wrong, see below. Thank you internet.
Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).
On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).
The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.
The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.
Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.
(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it.
Example: 金 gold is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)
Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.
Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.
To add some anecdata from native speakers (not me), I've noticed many simplifications like 机車 in "Traditional" Taiwanese handwriting, but I've never seen 机车.
Characters are mostly displayed on screen nowadays, and most fonts are indeed symmetrical. I don't find Simplified Chinese handwriting ugly at all, but it looks odd on-screen.
喰 is not a Chinese character, Japanese created this character...吃 is not a modern simplification for 喰, it has appeared in ancient written Chinese but has a different meaning. Now in modern Chinese 吃 has the same meaning as ancient 喫(eat). 食 has always been in Chinese characters, composed of 人良, which means "things that hold one's life". 食 serves both as a noun and a verb.
Japanese kanji come from Chinese characters, but has become very different too. As a native Chinese, I think there is a clear link between modern simplified Chinese and 'near ancient' Chinese character. Here 'near ancient' means characters used up to 汉(漢, Han) Dynasty. Before Han, Chinese was very different too. There has always been a simplification process and a link.
You can't simply take a characater apart and glue meanings of the parts together - it's more complicated. Having "乞" part doesn't necessarily mean it has the meaning of begging - it's a "sound", rather than meaning, element, which "provides" the sound of "吃".
And although I don't know the "喰" character, I can tell it didn't become Chinese 吃 and Japanese 食. 食 is more "ancient", where "吃" seems only used so widely in modern time.
Simplification of Chinese characters indeed started many arguments, but the "tranditional" Chinese used in Taiwan has also developed some "simplified" characters.
Yeah the Japanese version of hànzì is much more ancient (Song or Tang dynasties, I think) and have changed comparatively little since then. Also, they simplified some characters in a very different way than how the Chinese did.
(I'm probably wrong but: if I remember correctly, Japanese has changed a lot, but the writing system hasn't so the sounds like part of the character isn't always correct or even close. It's a lot like Irish or English in that the language has changed much but the writing hasn't.)
I have lived in Japan since I was a teenager and I had a much better time reading in China (was there for a few weeks as a tourist) than speaking.
It was quite funny because staff at restaurants thought I was some kind of weirdo who could point at exactly what he wanted on the menu but couldn't answer basic questions.
They appear to have simplified them predictably in a way that is not impossible to understand if you have a senior HS-level of kanji knowledge.
When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV.
I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual elites wrote (文言文) so I'm not surprised that this mentality has continued on
EDIT:
I'd also like to add that 食物 is food, which translates literally to "eat" and "thing". Put together it means "edible thing", i.e. food. The original meaning of 食 still means, "eat", not "food". It's a modern contraction that "食" means food
I had to look a bit to figure out how you got "qi" from a word pronounced "chi". 契, the right part of the character is pronounced qi4, as is the character 氣, which does have spiritual meanings. 契, however, has no such meaning (according to wiktionary), so I assume this is another one of those Chinese superstitious puns.
Is a preference for 食 a Taiwanese thing? All the mainland Chinese people I've ever heard say 吃.
There was a linguistic shift to prefer 吃. I would say it probably happened in the Cultural Revolution. In Cantonese 食 is pronounced "sek", and is regularly used - "sek fan" as in "eat rice".
Since HK was quite insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and evidence from older texts that use 食 all the time (喫 was not really used IINM), it would not be amiss to say that the development to prefer 吃 is quite new. Hence in my other post I mentioned that it was political agenda that drove selection of preferred words to use.
addendum: I think there is also a nice narrative in the shift to use 吃 - it was more a "commoner" word, and communism was then about replacing the elite sounding words with simpler words that is common to everyone.
乞 is most commonly used with 乞丐 (begger), but the etymology of the word comes from qi (气) according to zhongwen.com
I'm just suggesting from modern Chinese's perspective, because, after all, we are modern people. 文言文 (uh I don't know its English translation) is fun to read and learn, but it's like Latin since basically nobody writes it anymore.
Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.