chewing cane

During the 1960s, come fall in south Louisiana, on two-lane country roads, you might come upon open trucks filled with sweet potatoes or filled with sugar cane rattling to processing plants. Sometimes, near our house, a stick of sugar cane could be found at the edge of the road. At the local A&P grocery store, they sold sticks of cane, perhaps 8 inches long. We would take a stick of cane, and our mother or father would peel off some of the hard exterior. We then could chew on the moist tough sweet interior, and spit out the fiber when finished.