Most notable members of this family found in Alabama are exotic and/or usually considered to be weeds. The exceptions are cock's comb, Celosia L., which is planted for flowers, and pigweed, Amaranthus L., which has some species that are planted for grain.
The Jackson County Fair even has a couple of Cock's comb categories each for combed and plumed varieties where the flowers can be exhibited. I have seen entries lose because the exhibitor insisted on putting their entry in the wrong category.
The grain amaranth can be found at health food stores, but gardeners around here mostly consider pigweed to be a weed, especially spiny pigweed; the leaves are also reported to be eatable although that may have to wait until some very hard times assuming you could even grow a garden of weeds without it being raided. I've considered getting seed at a health food store to see if it they would grow, and if so to find out if it is even worth growing around here, besides such seed are probably of an improved variety. I once saw someone comment of a dense stand of amaranth, excited to think that somebody was growing it only to find out that the garden plot had never even been weeded. This sort of makes me wonder if there is a seed bank in the soil from where amaranth was being grown by Native Americans up until about the time DeSoto came through bringing the diseases that decimated the civilization. The descriptions this area at the time of settlement indicate that old-growth pine forest were mostly in the areas that are now under cultivation compared to hardwoods that were mostly just in the hollows support the hypothesis that the pine forest could have been the abandoned fields of that culture, even the estimated age of those pine trees based on the described size matches with the date of DeSoto's expedition. Although this area has been settled for long enough that the amaranth seed bank could also be of recent origin since the abundance of spiny pigweed and other amaranth weeds seems to be increased by the application of chicken litter, but this can be expected since many seed germinate only after passing through an animals intestinal tract thus the application of chicken litter may just be enough to overcome the remaining impediment to such delayed germination.
