Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we're traveling through a place in our yearly orbit (a placed called April 9th) that I'd love to declare as National Eat-the-Sun Day. This is because on April 9, 2009 First Lady Michelle Obama dug into the White House lawn, with the assistance of a team of fifth graders, and planted a fruit and vegetable garden. Now, if you're wondering what this has to do with eating the sun, let me explain:

The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen in our lungs (all of the elements in our bodies except hydrogen) were created in the heavenly furnaces that we call stars. The forging of these elements exploded them into space and onto planets. Somehow, our planet grew green. Her greenery inhaled carbon dioxide and exhaled oxygen. In time the greenery grew so plentiful - and it exhaled so much oxygen that it was too much. All this oxygen had become pollution. Then, just in the nick of time, a new kind of creature appeared on our Earth - and breathed in the oxygen. Even today, we still breathe in oxygen and we still owe the breath of our life to our planet's greenery.

These "green guys" reach down with their roots and pull up water and minerals from the soil. They also reach up toward our local star and capture its energy in their chlorophyll. Combining this solar fuel with what they bring up from the soil and capture from the air, they manufacture their bodies. Of course, their bodies become our food - directly through vegetables, fruits, and starches and indirectly by feeding any animals we eat.

Plant chlorophyll holds onto solar energy longer than any other substance on Earth. If you or I tried to hold onto this radiation for this long, we'd burn. Yet the green guys hold onto solar energy with unflinching dedication - until they've stepped it down into vegetable matter. The nourishment they provide us makes us matter and keeps us mattering. Thanks to the green guys, light becomes life.

Everything we eat is actually sunlight packaged into food for us by our green guys. This means that the only thing we ever really consume is the radiance of the star we're orbiting. When we combine this miracle-fact with the wisdom of our health-care professionals ("You are what you eat"), we nourish more than our bodies. Yes, every morsel of food we eat is a sacred communion with the living planet that we inhabit and the star she's orbiting.

I'm grateful to First Lady Michelle Obama for what she did on April 9th, 2009. And I hope that every time we orbit through April 9th we remember that, thanks to plants, we are eating the light of the star we're orbiting. So, I'd love to see April 9th celebrated as National Eat-the-Sun Day. Just imagine the festivities and the recipes we could generate!

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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