How Plants Eat Sunlight

Plants make their own food, and sunlight is the ingredient that powers the whole kitchen. Inside every green leaf are tiny structures called chloroplasts, filled with a green pigment called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is what catches the light.

Here is the recipe: the plant takes in water through its roots and carbon dioxide from the air through tiny holes in its leaves. Using the energy from sunlight, it rearranges those ingredients into sugar - plant food - and releases oxygen as a leftover. That leftover oxygen is the air you are breathing right now.

This process is called photosynthesis, from words meaning "putting together with light." Almost every food chain on Earth starts here: plants catch sunlight, animals eat plants, and bigger animals eat those animals. The energy in your lunch was sunlight not long ago.