Even Today,

there are some plants that will not give up their secrets to modern science,

like this one above, photograph Kailash Mohankar/Wikimedia Commons, Ram KandMool is a drum-shaped tuber that has been sold as a hearty snack on Indian street corners for at least several decades, it remains a mystery to scientists, as no one can figure out what plant produces it, the  giant reddish tubers are sold by street vendors, none of who will disclose where the tuber or root comes from, Ram kand mool is often advertised as the only food source of Lord Ram when he was exiled to forests along with his wife Sita and brother Lakshman, and vendors claim it can cool you down during the summer, quench both hunger and thirst, and provide all sorts of medicinal relief. It is served with all sorts of seasonings, from chili and salt, to lime and sugar. It’s cut and served as very thin slices out of tubers that can reportedly weigh up to 300 kilograms, a real breakthrough in the botanists’ quest to solve the mystery of ram kand mool came in 2010, when a team of scientists conducted DNA tests on a slice of tuber, which revealed that it matched the DNA of agave by 89 percent. Whatever evidence had been gathered until then pointed at agave, and the more scientists thought about it, the more sense it made. Agave contains lots of alkaloids, so it’s poisonous in large quantities, and that may be why vendors only sell it in thin slices, in 2011 a study narrowed down the source of ram kand mool to Agave Sisalana, one of several species of agave, by chopping off the leaves to reveal a large, white tuber-like stem similar to that sold by street vendors. A paper on this significant finding was published in the Current Science journal that same year but, and a big but, 

because there are several species of agave, some very similar to each other, scientists can’t figure out exactly what the source of the popular street snack is, it could be Sislana or Americana, or some other foreign species, “We can’t conclude until the vendors show the plant to us. They keep this as a business secret to create curiosity around it,” Dr. Vinod B. Shimpale, co-author of the aforementioned 2011 study, admits, Wikipedia describes the root of the shrub Maerua oblongifolia as the source of the ram kand mool snack, but acknowledges that “the root is brought to the shops in a very secretive manner, in that where it is either collected or obtained is kept secret,” and that “there are doubts amongst botanists as to whether the described plant is Maerua oblongifolia”. so in effect no one actually knows, a final word from one of the sellers, “Ask anything but this, please. Nobody will tell you anything. This is how this business is,” one vendor said when asked him to reveal the source of ram kand mool.