Whew! After growing and eating true yams (Dioscorea spp.) here for a dozen years, a few times this year I up ones from the center east bed and after the usual methods of cooking they had a horrible "plasticy" taste and a very unpleasant, wet "squeaky" texture. They were so bad I fed them to the chickens. But today I dug up a small chunk of a big one in the SE bed, fried the slices in olive oil with sea salt, covered, and served them with a new batch of fermented hot sauce, with fried eggs and raw Surinam cherries on the side.....EXCELLENT! My only theory is that the bad tasting ones came from a garden that Muscovy ducks lived in for nearly a year.....maybe their poop tainted the soil? So far, no signs of the Air Potato beetle here yet. John