ZEA MAYS
Corn has come a long way since a Mexican annual grass called teosinte crossed with another wild grain (scientists don’t know which or when, but it was probably sometime well before 6000 bce) and the resulting hybrids began to sport small, 3/4-inch heads studded with seeds. The first evidence of cultivation of this plant by Native Americans was discovered in the Tehuacan Valley of Puebla, Mexico, and dates to 5500 bce.
By the time Columbus arrived 6,992 years later, the plant had changed into its modern form—dependent for its survival on human hands to pull the seeds off the cobs and plant them individually a foot or so apart.
THE ORGANIC FACTOR
As of this writing, about 60 percent of the corn planted in the United States has been genetically modified to be able to grow well in an herbicide-drenched environment or to incorporate a gene from a bacterium that expresses a caterpillar toxin, making the corn generate its own pesticide. So, besides avoiding the pesticides conventional farmers spray for insect pests, organic corn will be free of such unnatural additions to the corn genome.
NUTRITION
Native Americans long ago learned to boil their corn in water into which they threw wood ashes. Today we know that niacin—a necessary vitamin in the human diet—is present but locked up and unavailable in corn. Societies that depend on corn for the bulk of their protein are liable to develop pellagra, a particularly nasty disease caused by niacin deficiency. Adding ash to cooking water, however, alkalizes the water and converts the niacin into a form that can be assimilated by humans—a process scientists call nixtamalization. Today corn is just a part of our diet rather than the central foodstuff, and we get plenty of niacin from other sources.
TYPES
Sweet corn is a natural mutation of Indian or field corn—the starchy corn used mainly for cattle fodder in the United States. A mutant gene slows the conversion of sugar to starch, keeping the corn sweet—but only until the ear is picked. As soon as it is picked, the corn begins turning its sugar into starch. For maximum sweetness, then, you have to get the corn to the pot of boiling water immediately.
In recent decades corn breeders have come up with corn that contains the so-called sugary en-hanced gene (se), which produces added sugar in the kernel. We’re not talking genetic engineering here, but just regular, old-fashioned selection of superior strains.
Eventually breeders found corn with the so-called shrunken gene (sh2), which slowed the conversion of sugar to starch so completely that this corn, known as Xtra Sweet, will stay sweet for two weeks after it’s picked.
I’ll say this for Xtra Sweet corn: it’s really sweet. So sweet that some people find it cloying. I’m on the edge: If it’s fresh-picked, fine. Then it’s crisp, juicy, and sweet. But don’t let it sit for two weeks. It’ll still be sweet, but it will also have lost many of the enzymes that make fresh corn taste so good. Treat it like any other corn: eat it as soon as possible.
There is another kind of corn coming on the market that you may find at farmers’ markets or roadside stands called Triple Sweet or Sweet Breed™. Each ear of this corn contains standard sugary (su), sugary enhanced (se), and Xtra Sweet (sh2) kernels on the same ear. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like an advance over the heavily sweet types. You get sweetness, but also old-fashioned corn flavor from the standard kernels.
BABY CORN
When I was learning to grow vegetables organically, I planted my first corn crop in soil so poor I had to open up a 4-inch-deep channel in the brick-hard earth with a pick. I planted the seeds a foot apart in five rows 3 feet apart, like the seed packet said, and pretty much forgot about the corn. ....read more
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