Every time you eat bread, rice, or popcorn, you're eating endosperm cells. They are the packed lunch inside a seed!
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Inside many seeds is a food store called the endosperm. It grows from the central cell after a sperm cell joins it.
Endosperm cells are packed with starch, and also some protein and sometimes oil. Grains like corn, wheat, and rice are mostly endosperm. In a coconut, the white meat and the coconut water are endosperm too.
Look at a piece of popped popcorn. The white fluffy part is endosperm that puffed up when it got hot!
When a seed starts to sprout, the baby plant (embryo) uses the food in the endosperm to grow. It lives on this food until its leaves can make food from sunlight.
People eat endosperm too. White flour is mostly ground-up wheat endosperm, and white rice is mostly endosperm.
In beans and peas, the baby plant uses up most of the endosperm while the seed forms. It stores the food in its thick seed leaves instead.
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Endosperm feeds a lot of the world. Rice, wheat, and corn are some of the most-eaten foods on Earth!
By SciShow Kids. A fun video for kids.
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