Video narration
If a plant doesn't eat like you do, where does its food come from? Think about making a meal: ingredients become food, and energy helps you do it. A plant is a maker, too. Sunlight supplies the energy; it isn't an ingredient or the food itself. It powers the change, but it doesn't become part of the sugar. Roots absorb water from the soil and carry it up through the plant. Carbon dioxide is a gas in the air; leaves take it in. Neither is the plant's food yet. Inside the leaves, sunlight's energy helps turn both materials into sugar. That sugar is the plant's food. Oxygen is released into the air, too. That food-making process is photosynthesis. So where does its food come from? Leaves use sunlight's energy to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar, releasing oxygen.