Corn

When I was growing up in the Midwest, corn (not to mention food in general) was not particularly special. The varieties available in the summer for "corn on the cob" were not that much different from the canned and frozen stuff we got served on ordinary days (except that the rules governing excess butter and salt mysteriously slackened). It was very yellow and a little tough and you could spend a half hour afterwards happily picking your teeth. Most serious vegetable gardeners had a row or two out back, so August and early September evenings generally featured corn. Good tomatoes too, which were so common that reverence had not yet entered the culinary picture, and "heirloom" applied mostly to furniture.

We make quite a fetish of our corn these days. We compare varieties and years as if they were fine wines ("Remember the '07 Sugar Snow?"). One friend of ours rates corn on a scale of 1 to 10; he never awards a 10 and almost shies away from ears of unknown provenance for fear of not even getting to 7. And not only sweet corn is on our minds: field corn seems even more precious, linked as it is to ethanol and our misfiring efforts to declare energy independence.

The stand of corn in the photo below must be sweet corn. I don't think the owner is distilling Freedom Oil in his basement, and there don't seem to be any hogs around. There easily could be though. This scene could be any one of countless fields and gardens in the places of my youth, except for the odd difference in varietal heights, signifying some kind of Eastern liberal tolerance for differences, and the fact that just a hundred yards away, behind the photographer, is the magnificent shoreline of the harbor in Rockport, Maine. There's a culture clash for you.