Burn some Doritos and consider what "food" actually is, what happens to it when it's burned, what we use food for, and where all of the stuff that was in the food goes next.

Share what you understand about two major things life can do with food, or other creatures flesh, burn it for energy or use it as building blocks from which an earthling body can grow.

Build flesh molecules and model what happens when the energy inside of them is released through cellular respiration. Consider what can happen to these molecules next.

Consider other kinds of reactions that happen outside of human bodies that are similar to cellular respiration and the effects these reactions have on earth as a system.

Food is the story of flesh and energy passed across vast distances of space and time. A sunflower soaks up sunlight, its leaves turning air into flesh, light into life. A Dorito—born from corn grown under the sun, fed by water drawn from deep in the earth, rooted in soil alive with unseen worlds—carries that same fire. When you eat it, your body breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces, breathing in to release the power stored within. For a time, that power becomes part of you.

But as the fire burns, you breathe it out again, returning what was borrowed so it may take form elsewhere. This flesh, carrying the heat of a distant sun, is the foundation of life on Earth. We have learned to dig it from the ground—coal, oil, and gas—ancient stores of sunlight turned to stone and tar, torn loose by vast machines. We burn them not to live, but to drive our cities, our ships, our endless motion.

We are woven into this chain—sunflower to seed, seed to flesh, flesh to flame—each of us both borrower and giver, each breath a passing of the torch. Food is not only fuel. It is a link, binding you to the sun, the soil, the wind, and the long memory of our planet.