Recently I froze 10 pints of corn for the winter. I love
fresh sweet corn. If it is a hot day,
the corn can almost be eaten raw. All and all, picking, shucking, scrubbing,
blanching, cutting, and storing the corn took about 3-1/2hrs. I was also
watching my two young nephews at the time, so it isn’t such a labor intensive
or time consuming project. I think it is important that adults model to
children how to grow vegetables and take care of animals. Growing and storing
food is becoming a lost skill, and we as a people are becoming too distant from
what we are putting into our bodies.
There are several challenges with growing corn. The weather
can be problematic because corn needs quite a bit of water. It is also
susceptible to hail damage and high winds. If corn plants are not planted at a
proper distance from each other, pollination will be splotchy. Usually the corn
always has some earworms, but this year I didn’t see any of the caterpillars.
Finding an earworm in an ear of corn is not a big deal because they usually eat
just a few kernels. I remember my dad used to say, “If the bugs don’t even want
to eat a plant, do you really want to eat it?” This was his argument against
using pesticides on vegetables. There were a couple corn plants that had corn
smut, which is a type of fungus. Corn smut is routinely used in authentic
Mexican dishes and is called huitacoche. It grows best when the weather is
abnormally dry. The fungus infects the corn by entering the ovaries and
replaces the kernels with large tumors that resemble small greyish black
mushrooms. It is said to taste sweet and is used in quesadilla fillings
and soups.
Corn is one of the most filling foods I grow, but it isn’t
particularly nutritious. In the area where I live, a popular way to eat corn is
something called hominy and is usually eaten as whole kernels. I’m not sure of
the whole process to making hominy, but I know the kernels are soaked in lye,
which breaks down the outer part of the kernel. Adding an alkali solution to
corn is called nixatamalization. By treating the corn with a lye solution, it
makes the niacin available for us to use in our bodies. There is a risk of
developing a disease called pellagra if niacin is deficient from the diet. The
symptoms are classified by the “four D’s”: diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and
death. During the early 20th century, the disease was common among poor
southerners, and it was thought that it was caused by a toxin in the corn
because of the correlation between high corn consumption and a high prevalence
of pellagra. The reason for the correlation was the corn was generally eaten in
the form of grits or corn meal and not as hominy. Now our corn products are
fortified with niacin, so pellagra is virtually non-existent in most developed
countries.
