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I have received the following enquiry regarding tuber consumption in Russia. I guess from the description (triangular stems) that we are dealing with Cyperaceae, not Juncaceae, and from the location the species must be temperate, not one of the sub-tropical Cyperus species. Any thoughts? By the way, sorry to miss everyone in Girona, sounds to have been a good meeting. Mark <SNIP>I am a Russian specialist and I am doing some research on a Russian writer called Boris Andreevich Mozhaev (1923-1996), who writes a great deal about the Russian countryside. He was a very close friend of the famous writer Solzhenitsyn, and he has a wonderful knowledge of plants and shrubs which grow around the area of Riazan' (sometimes spelt Ryazan), which is about 100 miles SE of Moscow. He also writes a great deal about the Meshchera national park area, on which there are many references on the internet. He wrote a work which I am translating at the moment entitled 'Lively' (named after the nickname of the main character). In it he makes reference to an acquatic plant which is growing in a local lake (in the Ryazan area), which grows tall, like a reed, but he specifically says it is neither a reed nor a grass, but that is not to say that technically it might be either. It has a triangular cross- section and he describes it as 'black and hairy'. The reason he mentions it is because there was a terrible famine in Russia in 1932-33 as a result of the government policy to destroy all independent farms and push them into collective farms, a process called collectivization, which cost the lives of about 6 million people, because the peasants destroyed their own cattle and crops rather than let the state have them. The peasants turned to eating anything that grew locally, and they even ate tree bark. Horrifically, there were even reports of cannibalism. The point Mozhaev is making in the story is that the locals actually ate this acquatic plant, by pulling on the stems and washing the root/tubers, which they then dried and used as flour to bake something resembling bread. He also describes the stem as being very sharp, capable of cutting anyone brushing against it, and locally it is known as a 'bollock cutter' or 'balls cutter', because fishermen were frequently cut by it when fishing using a drag net. In Russian the common name is 'mudorez', the word 'mude' being slang for 'testicles'<SNIP> ********************************* Dr Mark Nesbitt Centre for Economic Botany Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Richmond Surrey TW9 3AE UK Tel (direct): +44 (0)20 8332 5719 Tel (central):+44 (0)20 8332 5197 Fax: +44 (0)20 8332 5768 www: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/scihort/ecbot.html Culture Online www: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/scihort/culture.html Economic Botany Links: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/scihort/eblinks/