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/Notes in this color and between two / are from the operator of the German mirror site and translator/.
Img.267 (#B1b):
The Chinese name for tapioca is "mook si," which translates as "wood." Since tapioca grows in the soil like our beets, for the Chinese it symbolizes "buried wood" or someone's "coffin." For this reason, around important holidays, such as Chinese New Year, the Chinese do not like the sight of "tapioca." They treat the sight of it then as a "bad omen" suggesting someone's death. So around Chinese New Year, the Chinese do not sell tapioca at their stalls. In turn, since they are the only ones who sell this plant, while I recently stay in the tropics always just around Chinese New Year, this explains why I am not able to show a photo of it here.
Tapioca is a tropical plant. In Poland, it probably cannot be purchased fresh to take advantage of its excellent diarrhea-quieting properties. Fortunately, dried and powdered tapioca is exported from tropical countries to many countries around the world (e.g. New Zealand). Only that it is known there by a slightly different name. There it is called "tapioca starch" (in English "tapioca starch"). In New Zealand, I managed to buy such a dried and powdered version of tapioca imported from Thailand under the name "Tapioca Starch" - which translates to Polish precisely as "tapioca starch". I did this when, after returning from a vacation in the tropics, during which I managed to protect myself from even the slightest food poisoning, I unexpectedly got poisoning and nasty diarrhea already in New Zealand after eating something in a "Mac Donald" restaurant. So in order to cure this nasty diarrhea after a few days in the toilet just with tapioca already proven to work many times over, I started desperately searching in New Zealand stores for this life-giving plant. I found it in the form of "tapioca starch" (i.e. "tapioca starch"). I immediately boiled a few tablespoons of it dissolved in water obtaining a kind of gelatinous soup, almost identical to this "soup" which is obtained from boiling fresh tapioca root - as I explained in the right column from here on. After drinking about half a liter of this "soup" again the diarrhea disappeared "as if by hand." That is, this "tapioca starch" (i.e. "tapioca starch") turned out to be as effective in treating diarrhea as fresh tapioca. So it is worth knowing about this life-giving attribute of tapioca roots and tapioca starch. For it can save us a lot of suffering and trouble.
