The colocasia runner, known in Bengali as kochur loti and in Assamese as kosu loti, is the tender flowering stalk of the taro plant — the long, slender, pale-green stem that shoots up bearing the plant's inflorescence, cut young before it toughens. A prized monsoon-season delicacy of Bengal, Assam and Odisha, it cooks to a soft, mucilaginous, faintly sweet vegetable with a clean earthy taste, always eaten cooked because the raw stalk stings the mouth with needle-like calcium-oxalate crystals.