Against the Grain

credit: Illustration by Barry Blitt

I was born in October. Arose, that is, in the fall. “Welcome to the world,” said the doctor as he held me up by the feet and gave me a whack. “Too bad you weren’t here for the green leaves and sun—and the corn! The sweet corn this year!” He got a dreamy look on his face and forgot about me.

Now I, too, in my autumnal years, can look back on corn fondly. Alas. Corn, as an object of innocent delight, is over. When this past summer’s floods in the Midwest devastated the corn crop, it almost seemed like Judgment. Even the Mississippi had scorned corn.

From way back when I was myself a wee nubbin, up till it seems like only recently, corn was a Great American Thing. No juice so uncloyingly sweet, no crunch so tender, no dish more convenient (not that you even need a dish, much less utensils) than recently picked sweet corn on the cob. And nothing was as altogether gritty and savory as real corn bread (as opposed to the fluffy sweet perversion).

Corn is the American grain. Native Americans depended on it. Some pre-Revolutionary American—according to lore, a Baptist preacher—invented bourbon, whose mash is on average 70 percent corn. “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone,” Mark Twain quoted a natural philosopher as saying, “en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.” It was from a TV cornfield that corny Americans rose up, on Hee Haw, to deliver dialogue such as the following:

Junior Samples or somebody: “How’s that new baby y’all got over at your house?”

Archie Campbell or somebody: “Oh, fine. But I can think of some things we could use a lot more.”

By-products of corn include a musico-beautiful morning: “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” A standard for being in love: “as corny as Kansas in August.”

Without corn chips, what would we eat guacamole with? A spoon? Yuck.

Corn provides a symbol for roughness (“as a cob”) and for smoothness (“corn-silk hair”). Did you know that each strand of corn silk leads to a particular kernel? Corn silk is sort of like Rapunzel’s hair, in that it receives the pollen shed by male tassels and channels it, one grain per strand of silk, to the female flower within. Oddly enough, the botanical word for this fine fetching strand is stigma. Until recently we might have wondered, how on earth could any stigma be attached to…corn?

And yet this summer an unignorable consensus arose around me to the effect that corn is a threat to our way of life, or vice versa.

Corn stands accused of being the reason the love handles of people next to us on airplanes overflow onto our armrests. The most fattening, least health-giving, and most carbon-consuming foods are sweetened with corn syrup, fattened with corn-fed beef, bulked up with cornstarch, or fried in corn oil.

Ethanol, a fuel whose mash is equal parts corn and tax dollars, offers only false hope as an alternative to gasoline, because growing corn ties up more real estate than anyplace but Kansas can spare, and anyway producing ethanol consumes about as much energy as it yields.

Then there’s genetic modification. I don’t know that I am purist enough to oppose breeding bugs out of corn. But if after eating a rat that ate corn that was genetically modified, your cat has six-legged kittens, don’t blame environmental activists.

I’m not saying corn hath lost its savor. ‘Butter and Sugar’ or ‘Silver Queen’ from a farm stand still makes my mouth water. I have not lost my taste for the corn cakes at Jimmy Kelly’s in Nashville—in fact, I had fourteen of them just the other night, or maybe eighteen.

As a commodity, however, corn has been pushed too far. Yet another golden oldie bites the dust. Remember when sunshine was good for us?