How Plants Make Food

Plants cannot go to the store or cook dinner, so they make their own food. Their kitchen is the leaf, and the recipe needs only four ingredients: sunlight, water, air, and a green substance inside the leaf called chlorophyll. The process has a big name - photosynthesis - which simply means putting together with light.

Here is how the kitchen runs. Roots drink water from the soil and send it up to the leaves. Tiny openings in the leaves take in a gas from the air called carbon dioxide - the same gas you breathe out. Chlorophyll catches sunlight, and the sun energy powers a reaction that turns water and carbon dioxide into sugar, the food the plant lives on. As a bonus, the plant releases oxygen, which is the gas we breathe in.

This one recipe feeds nearly everything on Earth. You eat plants, or you eat animals that ate plants, so the energy in your breakfast started as sunlight. Plants also refill the air with oxygen. Take care of plants and you are taking care of the kitchen that feeds the world.