Amorphophallus konjac

Amorphophallus konjac, commonly known as moyu (Chinese: 魔芋; pinyin: móyù, lit. 'demonic taro', 'magical taro'), juruo (Chinese: 蒟蒻; pinyin: jǔruò), konnyaku, or konjac is a species of flowering plant in the family Araceae. In English, it is also referred to as devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam. Native to China and cultivated in East and Southeast Asia, the perennial species forms a corm, the stem of which produces a purplish flower. Food made from the corm is known as móyù (Chinese: 魔芋), a term that also refers to the plant itself, and as konnyaku in Japanese. It can be made into white or black cake, as well as a kind of noodle called shirataki. Moyu was first domesticated in Southwest China about 2000 years ago, where Yi people and other early cultivators developed methods to detoxify the naturally irritating corm through repeated boiling and the use of alkaline ash water. These techniques enabled the plant to transition from a toxic wild tuber to a fiber-rich f......read more on Wikipedia.