The Wisdom of the Radish (20 page)

Red had a split second to herself. She tilted back her head and gulped down the worm.

“Did you see that?” I asked Emmett. My heart was pounding at this little life-and-death game; the end was sudden, brutal. Somehow I'd imagined that the chickens would jointly peck the worm to death, each bird receiving a bit of a protein boost. I'd forgotten that chickens are not nearly that egalitarian—though they may not always be bloodthirsty cannibals, they are always bloodthirsty carnivores.

There was another reason my heart was pounding: when I was a kid, I had a friend who had a lizard. The lizard ate meal worms, until one day the meal worms ate the lizard. From the
inside out. At least, that's what my friend told me. Now all I could think was: what if I just killed my chicken? The corn worms bite. What if I peered in the coop tomorrow to find a Rhode Island Red in her death throes, an evil fattened corn worm protruding from her neck? Shit, all the Rhode Island Reds looked the same; I couldn't even pick out the chicken who might be dead tomorrow.

As though I hadn't killed enough chickens already. Damn corn.

 

 

 

Another characteristic corn shares with the tomato: corn is a touchy-feely food. People like to pick it up, squeeze it, pull the husk back. If we were charging full market price for corn, I'd feel less resentment at turning the other cheek—but we were already discounting
and
throwing in worm insurance for anyone who bought more than a couple of ears.

And still the customers heavy-handedly unsheathed our ears, showering all produce in the vicinity with corn silk (and, let's face it, corn worm poop), rejecting those they deemed unworthy. We quickly learned to place the corn bins on the ground, at the end of the stand, so that they didn't defile the rest of our display.

But shifting the mess to the parking lot asphalt solved only half the problem. Not only were we deworming ears, discounting our product, and giving some ears away—we were also ending up with half a bin full of the crummiest, wormiest corn at the end of the day.

Once again I found myself shaking my head at a bizarre societal norm. Why are we encouraged—with artfully placed trash cans—to shuck corn at the grocery store to see if it's up
to snuff, but forbidden to bite into an unpaid-for apple to find out if it's mushy or crisp? Why do customers feel it's okay to nab a few cherry tomatoes from the baskets that I sell, but not okay to take one stamp from the packs for sale at the post office to see if they like the way it sticks?

We planted corn in blocks to maximize wind pollination.

Oh well. At the very least, Emmett agreed, the wormtropolis leftovers could be used for chicken food. The trouble was, our chickens were only teenagers—and while they happily scarfed down several ears at a time, they couldn't handle thirty ears per day. Besides, sweet corn is mostly sugar. Chickens don't have any teeth to rot, but if we overloaded the teenagers with simple carbohydrates we'd have to increase their protein intake in some way. They were growing birds, and for optimum health they needed a diet that was about 20 percent protein; their bodies required more than corn carbs to build bones and muscle. Red junglefowl, the progenitor of the domesticated chicken, to this day thrives on a foraged diet in Southeast
Asia: bugs, grubs, seeds, and invertebrates. Although chickens' nutritional needs have, like the bird itself, evolved over time—more calories and calcium are needed to keep up with larger bodies and larger, more frequent eggs—we couldn't stray too far from the ancestral diet without fundamentally sacrificing the health of the birds (not to mention that of the eggs they produced). In other words: a bird cannot live on corn alone. And I'd rather not push the boundaries, either.

We'd been canning tomatoes, dilly beans, and cucumber pickles. Surely there had to be a way of preserving this corn for the long winter ahead. I thought about popcorn on the cob, multicolored ornamental corn, and the hard yellow ears sold in the local feed store to entertain and treat pet rodents. But in all my years of shopping at the grocery store, I'd never seen a corn pickle. I surmised that when it came to large-scale corn preservation, drying must be the tried-and-true route.

Unfortunately, there's not too much information about corn preservation online. Really, what American in her right mind would grow corn at all, let alone grow it and eschew the joy of eating it fresh, and instead turn it into an unappetizing shriveled cob of chicken food? But absurdity and lack of knowledge had never fazed us. How hard could it be to dry a few ears of corn?

 

 

 

As it turns out, once it's pulled from the plant—a corncob left on the stalk, given warm and dry weather, will desiccate neatly inside the husk—the task of drying corn is very difficult indeed. We shucked hundreds of ears, a process that, I promise, is far more time consuming than you'd ever think possible. We placed them on newspapers in the backyard, and left the sun to do the work.

Within a week, the first batch sprouted fuzzy blue-gray mold. We realized that we couldn't leave the corn out overnight, because the Healdsburgian fog comes in on little cat feet and pees on our cobs, wetting them just enough to provide a nice damp environment for mildew.

So we altered our plan: ferry the corn out to the backyard in the morning and back into the house at night. The second batch fared better. For a while, it seemed like our corn was not grown in vain. Dubbing the cobs a success, we placed them in plastic bags and put them in the garage.

Where they promptly molded.

Well, you know what they say about the third time. Corn out during the day, in at night. We let this one dry even more thoroughly—the last batch we had left ever so slightly soft—and figured we could rehydrate it for the chickens later. And, we decided to forego plastic bags and instead use paper bags so that the dried corn could breathe.

Did I say paper bags? I should have used the singular: the leftover efforts of hundreds of corn plants could fit easily into one paper bag. Untold hours of effort yielded what felt like just a few ounces of dried corn, fit only for chickens.

 

 

 

Corn is a grass. Ten thousand years ago, it was utterly unrecognizable from the huge cobs festooned with sweet, plump kernels we enjoy today. Corn comes from the wild, weedy Mexican grass called teosinte. Teosinte has an edible, nutritive seedpod that measures approximately four centimeters and possesses maybe six kernels, all in a single row. Picture an overgrown, unmowed lawn that has gone to seed and started taking steroids, and you have an approximate depiction of
teosinte, with approximately the same stem-to-seed ratio. Lots of plant: little itty-bitty seeds.

It took thousands of years of artificial selection to turn that piddling 6-kernel cob into the 1,200-kernel monster corn is today. Along the way,
Zea mays
has been cultivated into specialized varieties: flour corn, sweet corn, popcorn, dent corn (primarily used for animal feed), ornamental corn, corncob corn (raised for the cobs, which transform into a solvent for extracting crude petroleum), high-lysine corn, and high-oil corn. Flavors of the eating ears range from sweet to starchy—but up until the 1950s, even the sweetest eating corn would start to lose its flavor shortly after harvest because the plant immediately began to convert the sugar into starch. For a long time, this is what kept people growing their own corn—and why local farmers bothered to grow it, too. Corn couldn't be kept longer than a day or two without losing its sweetness, and it couldn't be canned without adding loads of sugar and salt.

In the 1950s, the fate of the world's crops was still largely in the hands of farmers and agriculture universities. John Laughnan, a professor at the University of Illinois, published a paper in 1953 that he thought could be of use to the commercial corn industry: he'd devised a corn hybrid that contained four to ten times more sugar than the traditional sweet corn and, even more important, didn't convert that sugar into starch. He called it “supersweet.”
⁴¹

If there's one thing that college taught me, it's that scientists generally suck at communicating with the general public. Laughnan's supersweet corn—which had the potential to revolutionize the corn industry—flopped. It wasn't until the 1980s that seed companies got serious about developing commercially viable forms of this hybrid, and the agriculture world caught on to the potential brilliance of this concept. Now,
corn can stay sweet for a week—plenty of time to get it from a field in Iowa to a grocery store in California and onto your plate. Americans produce 2.8 billion pounds of supersweet corn per year.
⁴²
Yet that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the stuff we're growing for animals. Field corn—or corn destined to be processed and fed to cattle, hogs, or chickens—makes up the majority of the corn market. (My chickens are eating some of this corn in their grain ration.) In 2009, while all the country's farmers planted around 656,000 acres of sweet corn,
⁴³
Mississippi alone planted 730,000 acres of field corn. And Mississippi isn't even among the top fifteen field corn–producing states. Feed grade corn covers eighty-five million acres nationwide; for every one acre of human corn, there are more than one hundred acres of livestock corn.

Ironically, American corn-fed cows would probably be better off if they were turned loose in a corn field to feast on the corn leaves and stalks. It is, after all, a grass. Instead, giant machines flatten the cellulose-rich corn stalks into the ground, strip them of their paltry two-per-stalk cobs, and feed
that
to the cattle that live thousands of miles away.

 

 

 

Emmett's parents used to own livestock, but now they borrow them. In early summer—when the grasses on the property are as high as an elephant's knee, if not its eye—a motley herd arrived on the ranch. A friendly Brahman with huge wattles and a fleshy backpack, a couple of mean-looking bulls with their famously large heads, and a host of nervous new mamas and leggy calves ranged the property. They'd trim the grasses down to nubs, reducing the fire danger and fertilizing the ground for the following year's growth.

When our first planting of corn was harvested, Emmett's dad suggested that we feed the still-green corn stalks to the cows. We piled them up in a pickup truck and, feeling a bit like we were in a car commercial, drove it out on the range.

You know how cows have a tendency to look dumb and bored? So dumb you almost don't feel guilty when you start a car guessing game of how many hamburgers would that black and white one make?

Well, the free-range cows on the property did not look stupid. They looked rabid.

As soon as they spotted the heap of corn stalks spilling over our tailgate, they barreled down the hill toward the truck, lowing urgently. Emmett quickly climbed into the truck bed and I remained in the driver's seat; he tossed corn stalks out the back while I kept the truck moving so we wouldn't be entirely surrounded by several tons of overly enthusiastic ruminants. Still, a couple of the cows had clearly decided that the stalks in the truck were always better than the stalks on the ground. While the rest of the herd was content to munch on the stalks we'd tossed them, five cows doggedly pursued the pickup, easily extending their heads over the truck's side to munch on the stalk pile.

After a while, Emmett and I traded places so I could experience the adrenaline rush of jumping into the middle of a cow feeding frenzy. Perched on top of a pile of corn stalks, wobbling as the truck lumbered over bumps, I was knocked over by the huge head of an animal trying to wrest food from me before I even had the chance to toss it overboard. I'd always wanted to go on safari: maybe this was it.
Over to our left, a black-backed jackal feasts on a dik-dik gazelle. Look! A giraffe and her calf lumbering up to our truck. Now, watch out for the rhinos ...
they know we have food in the truck, and they can be quite aggressive when they're hungry....

And then the thought occurred to me: at our farm, corn wasn't a subsistence crop, or even a cash crop. It would never be perfect, and we needn't expect it to be: let the corn worms eat a little cake, and the ants eat a little corn worm. From now on I'd measure the worth of corn not by the number of ears it produced or the dollars it brought in, but by the excitement of those it fed. I thought back to the faces that lit up at the farmers' market, drawn in to our stand to make other purchases; the chickens that played tag with the corn worms for hours; the cows that raced for a taste of green grass in the middle of the brown California summer and, in their eagerness, bowled over their hapless feeder.

Maybe corn wasn't so useless after all—assuming that you used the entire plant and that you were able to find at least a few worm friendlies in your community. And somehow corn seemed more elegant when approached holistically: kernels for humans, who bred them over the years to satisfy our need for quick calories; stalks for cattle, who had been eating similar grasses for most of history; and worms for the chickens, whose close cousins still subsist almost solely on bugs and grubs.