Very early on in my life I knew I thought about food differently to other people my age. One instance that still sticks in my mind is when I went over my grandmother's house during the summer holidays. There were kids in her street I'd play with and I'd often like to busy myself by drawing or rooting around her garden looking at the different insects. I remember her saying that pretty much anything could be turned into food if you knew how, and she was always telling me about the natural world. There is a certain weed that grows with tiny long leaves with a white/purple ombre to them, that she once told me you could turn into jam. Whether it was true or not I went about the garden stuffing them into jars.
When I made friends with a girl who had a tortoise, we'd go picking dandelions to feed it with. When I mentioned that my grandmother said we could eat them too, she didn't believe me. I relayed the same information to my housemates in university as I'd noticed a patch of dandelions whilst we were sunbathing on the patio. They didn't believe me either, nobody did until the celebrity chefs started mentioning them and it became fashionable. Still, this isn't an 'I told you so' tale, more of a warning that if you tell someone dandelion leaves are edible and you grab one to munch to prove your point, then make sure you THOROUGHLY rinse it unless you want to digest a cat's territorial markings. It may be bad for you eating bagged salads washed in chlorine, but there can be far worse things to have on your salad.
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