A vendor was cutting slices off what looked like the trunk of a tree on his push-cart. This was in Bengaluru, the city in the south Indian state of Karnataka where I live. The core was a creamy white and the skin a brownish-orange. He cut horizontally, in circles, with the precision of a surgeon, so thin that I could see through the pieces. “It’s a root. It can grow five feet deep and 300kg,” he explained, in response to my shock. He sources it, he said, from the neighbouring…
