How to Get Food From a Lotus Plant

• 1). Learn how to positively identify a lotus plant. The lotus comes in two categories: one sporting pink flowers and the other boasting yellow flowers--and beautiful flowers they are, with large, luminescent petals, often of multiple layers. Lotus leaves, richly green, can grow to be very large--even 4 or 5 feet in diameter--and float atop the surface of freshwater lakes and ponds, like the leaves of any water lily.
  
  
• 2). Locate a lotus plant. The lotus can be found throughout North America (where the yellow-flowered species is from) and east and south Asia (where the pink-flowered species is from). In truth, the lotus has by now been widely spread across the world.
  
  
• 3). Harvest the lotus leaves. These can be rinsed and eaten raw or boiled in a pot of water and eaten like any other green vegetable.
  
  
• 4). Harvest the lotus flower. Rinse it with water and eat raw.
  
  
• 5). Harvest the stem and roots of the lotus. The latter will have to be dug out of the mud. These parts of the plant are fleshy and starch-filled and can be rinsed and eaten raw, boiled and consumed like a vegetable or even baked and eaten like meat.