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Zizania Smut (Jiaobai)
A smut fungus that infects Manchurian wild rice (Zizania latifolia) and makes its stems swell into a crisp, edible gall instead of flowering. The galled stems are a vegetable known as jiaobai in China and makomotake in Japan, grown in paddies for at least 400 years. It is regulated in the United States because it could threaten native North American wild rice.
Edible as the cultivated vegetable: the young, unsporulated swollen stems are eaten raw or cooked, with a taste likened to fresh bamboo shoots, and stay crisp when stir-fried. Spore-filled galls are not used as food; the spores serve as a pigment, and inhaled spore dust has caused hypersensitivity pneumonitis in a lacquer artist.
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