What do rice, oats and wheat have in common?

Picture a warm bowl of oatmeal, a fluffy scoop of rice, and a soft slice of wheat bread. Breathe in and imagine that cozy, toasty smell drifting up from the table.

On your plate, these foods look nothing alike. Oatmeal is creamy, rice is fluffy, and bread comes in a soft loaf. So what do rice, oats and wheat have in common?

Here is the first surprise. Rice, oats and wheat all grow on grass plants, just like the grass in a park, only much taller. They share the same long, thin leaves and hollow stems, because they belong to one big grass family.

At the top of each stalk, every one of these grass plants grows a bunch of small seeds. The plant makes these seeds so that new grass plants can grow from them.

These seeds are the part we eat. People call them grain, which means the hard little seeds of a grass plant. Each grain of rice in your bowl and each oat in your oatmeal started as one seed on a grass plant.

Tucked inside every grain is a baby plant, smaller than a crumb. It has no roots or leaves yet, so it cannot make its own food. What do you think the grain keeps packed inside for it?

A lunchbox of food! Most of each grain is filled with starch, which means a white, powdery store of food for the baby plant. When the seed sprouts, the baby plant uses up that starch to grow its first root and leaf.

When you eat rice, oats or wheat bread, you eat that starch too. Your body turns the starch into energy, so you can run, play and think all day.

Rice, oats and wheat are all grass plants, and each one grows grain, small seeds packed with starch to feed the baby plant tucked inside.

Out in the fields, tall grass stalks sway in the wind, their tops heavy with grain. Each little seed holds its lunchbox of starch, waiting quietly inside.