One of my son’s first tastes of solid food was dirt licked from a freshly dug parsnip. He didn’t yet have the teeth to chew into the ivory taproot itself, but his attempts to do so sure got it clean.
It was wintertime in New Mexico, and his first winter anywhere. We were visiting a friend at his farm, and I was helping him dig parsnips that had been planted the previous summer and kept in the ground through the winter under a heavy layer of mulch. He’d also planted carrots, a close relative of parsnip, and kept them under mulch as well.
