Eat Me!

I just finished eating the last gherkin from a jar given to me by Sammi Lee Bass about a year ago. For those of you aren't familiar with them, they are prickly round-ish cucumbers that are pickled with garlic and chili peppers. They are delicious and I've never seen them anywhere but in Texas. Sammi Lee's 'momma and deddy' get them from a local friend who grows them. They normally draw strange looks from people who have never seen them but are almost always revered as 'fantastically yummy' once eaten.

I guess every part of the US has strange food traditions. I can specifially remember growing up with seeing black people dig up hunks of chalk from the clay-soil around my town. They would boil it to clean it, then scrape it off with a knife into a powder and eat it. I've told this to many people who don't believe me, so I've found THIS article to prove it. Turns out this chalky substance is actually called Kaolin and is a form of white clay. I can remember seeing black girls sitting in my classrooms scraping big hunks of this chalk off into their notebook paper then using it as a funnel to pour the power into their mouth. They said it kept their teeth white. According to the articles I've found, all it did was keep them regular. Kayopectate: main ingredient = Kaolin.

I love to learn about local traditions. They see to be a dying art in the information age. Nothing seems 'local' anymore when you can access it from your laptop at home. In case you wanna order some chalk to eat just CLICK HERE.