can you eat rhubarb the first year

Question

first year of harvesting rhubarb is it eatable

Answer 1

It's edible the first year but you'll put too much stress on the poor little plant if you take leaf stems off it so soon.

Answer 2

Sure, but why would you want to?

As a kid, when it was my turn to mop the kitchen floor, I would dump the dirty mop water on the rubarb plant outside the back porch door, in attempt to kill it.    Little did I know or realize that I was preventing the bugs from eating the rubarb leaves therefore making the rubarb a healthy planting.  I wondered why it was thriving.  Bummer.  My sister would sit on the back steps with a salt shaker and munch away on the stems of that nasty plant.  I still, at age 76, don't like rubarb.