 We're going to spend one more section using this exact same picture because after being in pharynx land, we move food travels into the esophagus. The esophagus is a muscular tube that travels between the pharynx and the stomach. So it's relatively long. It travels through the entire thoracic cavity. The stomach is not in your thoracic cavity. The esophagus has to travel out of the thoracic cavity and into the abdominal cavity. And it's basically made of muscle. We're going to look at the histology of the esophagus. Because food is basically swallowed through it, there's lots of mucus in the space and it's lined with stratified squamous epithelial tissue, which you can think about the functional significance of having that kind of tissue lining this space. I want to show you where it is. Here, once we're in the laryngeal pharynx, if food is in the laryngeal pharynx, at that point you have two choices. Food and air are present in the laryngeal pharynx. And you can either travel anterior or posterior. This is actually a tube right here. Which one do you think is which? What are these tubes? The posterior tube, the kind of squishy flat tube is the esophagus. The anterior tube that looks like almost like it's lined in bone, you can feel it. It's lined in cartilage. There are cartilage rings in this anterior tube. That's your trachea. We'll talk again about if something is going into the trachea, let's hope it's just air. If your food goes into your trachea, which heads to your lungs, that's a bad situation. That's going to be a sad state of affairs. So you've got structures in place to make sure that your food, your fluid, water, travels down the esophagus and not into the trachea. Stomach, because that's where we will end up at the end of the esophagus.