So - Where does the Energy in Food Come From?

So - Where does the Energy in Food Come From?

In a word – the sun.  That’s right, you are running on solar energy at this moment.  Every blink of the eye, heart beat, synapse connection, breath you take – from the sun.  

Lying out in the sun to rejuvenate yourself, however, will likely produce nothing more than a good sunburn.  You are simply incapable of accessing this marvelous energy source for your own biological purposes.  Good thing, too.  Otherwise sunshine could make us fat and who wants that.

You are absolutely reliant on intermediaries to collect that sunlight and convert it to a form that your body can access.  

Enter – plants.  This might be an appropriate time for you to take a step outside and hug a tree or kiss a bush.  These are your friends.  Even those dandelions you pulled out of your lawn last week – biological associates.  

Plants have the ability to trap the energy of sunshine into chemical structures that we can then eat and utilize.  This is no small thing. No plants, no you.  

Wait, say you, I eat cows for food, none of that wimpy plant stuff.   Well, not that I necessarily endorse this particularly culinary plan, you are still running off of solar energy.  The cow got its energy from grass or grain.  You might eat meat from a lion that ate a hyena, which ate a gazelle.  The gazelle ate plants.  It will always come back to somebody that can gather up radiant energy and turn it into chemical energy for the rest of us.  Hence, the lowly plant is at the bottom of the food chain, because of its incredible energy mining capabilities.

Now, I will be using the word "plants" fairly consistently.  What I mean, for those who are fussy about such things, is "photo synthesizers", a term that includes all living things  that can gather and store energy from the sun.  That would include plankton, in the oceans, little tiny microscope beings, certain bacteria, etc.  These guys do make up a large and important group of organisms that are busy collecting sunlight and providing food energy for other creatures.  But, in an effort to keep things relatively simple, we will usually refer to "photo synthesizers" by the somewhat inaccurate term of "plants".

Up next - how do they do it?