Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?

Want to join the "I hate kale" contingent. Received a farmers box weekly (for 8 weeks) during BC treatment and we were permitted to swap unwanted vegetables (1:1) for those we preferred. Found you had to get their early or you were stuck with kale which appeared to be swapped out in abundance. When I couldn't swap it out, found my DD rabbit and guinea pig thought it was wonderful, so they benefitted. Love mustard greens but they are hard to find in this area.

“Poke Salad Annie”

Chomp, chomp, chomp chomp chomp

Haha! Love that song, your comments made me thing of it, Spookie!

One of my hobbies is song trivia, so I’ve read about this one before. Written and sung by Tony Joe White, he grew up in Louisiana. Or, Loo’siana as people from those part say. When he heard Bobby Jo Gentry (an incredible songwriter and singer herself) sing ‘bout Billie Joe, he realized she wrote about what she knew, so he sat down and wrote about his southern roots which included poke. I also learned the phrase “truck patch” is slang for garden.

“Her daddy was lazy and no count, claimed he had a bad back
All her brothers were fit for was stealin' watermelons
Out of my truck patch
Polk salad Annie, the gators got your granny
Chomp chomp chomp chomp
Everybody said it was a shame
Cause her momma was a workin' on the chain gang
Sock a little polk salad to me, you know I need me a mess of it.”

Poke salad is new to me, so looked it up and found that Pokeweed is both edible and toxic. After their first harsh winter without much food, many were eager to eat the first fresh greens of spring, which was sometimes the very poisonous jimson weed. Wow, need some courage to eat pokeweed.

I knew it was some sort of leafy-weedy plant. I didn't realize it needed so much prepping to render it edible. In WWII a lot of people in England got poisoned eating the green leaves of their rhubarbs. I don't think there is a way to render it harmless. Doesn't jimson weed make cattle crazy?

I often wonder how people figured out some of the complicated ways highly toxic foods can be cooked to make them edible.

Hakarl - Greenland shark is highly poisonous when fresh. But if you bury it for a few months, then hang it up to dry for a few months more, then scrape off the brown goo that extrudes from the meat (don't eat the goo!), then you can eat it. Though it smells of ammonia, so you might not want to eat it anyway.

Fugu - Most of the fish is edible, but if you get the slightest knick on this one certain organ, it will kill you.

Polar bear liver - It will kill you (vitamin A poisoning), unless you let it rot for a month or so to let the vitamins break down to lower levels.

Mushrooms - They'll kill you, make you stoned, make you sick, or maybe - just maybe - you can eat one and survive. Oops! Not that one!!

And so many plants like tomatoes, potatoes, cherries, elderberries, or apples where you can eat this one specific part of the plant, but everything else will kill you painfully or make you wish you were dead. Humans are amazingly persistent when it comes to foods.

Alice...Great reminder for each of us to be part of the solution.

I am addicted to mushrooms, but I'll only eat the grocery store ones because I'm also a coward.

I wouldn’t eat them from my yard, but have seen squirrels munching on them. I worry about my dogs, and try to clean them out

I thought he might look like Bob Dylan. :-)

My sister sent this -

Love both

magiclight, This redneck country would never elect a non-Christian, so that's never going to be anything but a hypothetical question. It's so sad and stupid, it should never be an issue.

Hey, maybe we'll get a PDFer someday. How to pronounce it, though? Pudeffer?

magiclight: Let us not forget that all the Christmas greenery is Pagan YULE greenery. It is my understanding that the tree part only came from to most of us when Albert married Queen Victoria and brought the tradition from Germany.