Exactly what I’ve heard. I sliced off a bit of one tuber and tried it. As I said, sorta like a dirty water chestnut, only drier. IIRC, the Extension even handed out recipes, but only one guy I used to know ever tried them. He said he’d boiled some and sliced and fried some others. He didn’t rave. I heard that farmers who tried to feed them to the cows weren’t successful, either. Supposedly, you could grind and dry them and use them as *flour*.
We have lots of commercial potato and other vegetable farms around here. Also a lot of Amish (who buy their seeds locally at the store). I suspect we would have access to their excess if SHTF. We have lots of seed savers, too. I save some, myself, mostly tomato and red pepper.One tomato and one red pepper provide enough seeds of that variety to plant a home garden. Everyone gardens to some extent.
My favorite SHTF gardening meme is a line in “Jericho”. They are trying to keep a school together and one of the teen boys opts out because:”I have to go home and help my mother plant beets in the bath tub.” As a container gardener, it stuck with me.
I know what it else it was about the chokes I didn’t like - a sort of strange astringency.
But I might try those white smooth ones.