🌾 Where food comes from

An apple feels smooth and a little cool, and it is hard until you bite into it.

Almost everything you eat starts out growing somewhere, on a plant in a field, on a tree in an orchard, or from an animal on a farm. Farmers plant seeds, tend animals, and wait for months before fruits, vegetables, milk or eggs are ready to gather. By the time food reaches your plate, it has often travelled through many hands, from a farm to a truck to a shop near your home.

Yes, fruit can be round like an apple, long like a banana, or small like a grape.

Bread starts as wheat, a tall grass with seeds at the top. Farmers grind the wheat into flour once it is ripe and harvested. Flour gets mixed with water, a pinch of salt, and often yeast. Yeast is a tiny living thing that eats sugar in the dough and puffs it full of air bubbles. When that soft dough goes into a hot oven, the heat sets those bubbles in place, and the outside turns crisp and golden.

A ripe banana is yellow on the outside and soft and white inside.

Milk comes from mother animals, most often cows, but also goats and sheep, who make it naturally to feed their babies. On a dairy farm, cows eat grass and grain every day. Farmers gently milk them, usually twice a day, using machines that do the job quickly and comfortably. That milk gets cooled right away and checked for cleanliness. Then trucks carry it to a place where it gets bottled for shops.

Yes, many fruits like apples, pears and oranges grow on trees before they end up in a bowl.

Eggs come from hens, female chickens, who lay one nearly every day whether or not there is a rooster around. Inside a hen, a tiny yolk grows first. Then a white wraps around the yolk. After that, a hard shell forms around it all, before the egg is ever laid. On a farm, workers collect eggs from nests every day, then clean and check them before packing them into cartons for the shop.