Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Corn
In corn as in life, be careful what you wish for. Just try finding an ear that tastes the way
it used to, and you'll see what good intentions can do. For generations, Americans have
worshipped a sweet corn as one of our national culinary treasures. But it was a gem with a
flaw. Cooked immediately after picking, corn was superb; cooked a day later, it was much
less so. Much of its flavor comes from sweetness, and that sugar converts to starch very
quickly - an ear of regular corn loses half of its sweetness within twenty-four hours. So
plant breeders worked to overcome that difficulty, developing new varieties, some that are
much sweeter than the traditional ones, some that go starchy more slowly and some that do
both.
Today these new and improved varieties are almost the only kinds you can find. Al-
though plant breeders have inarguably succeeded in making corn sweeter, it's not altogether
clear that we're better off for it. There's a lot more to corn flavor than sweetness, and in
those respects, these new varieties come up short.
Corn is a grain, but one that we eat in an immature state. If left on the stalk to full matur-
ity, the kernels would become as hard as wheat and almost as full of starch. In fact, this is
the state in which most of the corn grown in America is harvested - but those are different
varieties that are processed for use in a whole range of industrial applications, including
sweeteners, textiles and automobile fuels.
The kinds of corn we eat are picked within a month of pollina tion. In agriculture these
varieties are referred to as "sweet corn." Because of their immaturity when picked, in the
past they have also been called "green corn." (In the Southwest you still find green corn
tamales, which are made with sweet corn rather than purely from masa, or ground dried
corn.)
Almost every ear of sweet corn grown today was developed for a certain set of charac-
teristics. This is not an example of modern-day Frankenfood genetic tinkering; it has been
going on for centuries. (The ur-corn, teosinte, had cobs about two to three inches long that
contained at most a half-dozen kernels.) But lately the march of progress has been espe-
cially swift. Besides traditional corn - which is practically nonexistent today (and would be
so starchy you probably wouldn't like it even if you could find it) - corn breeders recognize
