Results of an unreplicated sweet corn experiment

(The scientific method can be applied to some things that are practical in everyday life.)

The other day I reported ("Corn and crust") that I bought six ears of sweet corn at Iron Kettle Farm, and we ate four of them.   They were great, and I can only assume that the two ears we did not eat would have been just as good.  A couple of days after that, I bought a dozen ears at the same farm, and fixed them for students that very night.  They were not nearly as good as the six I had purchased earlier. Tonight, five days after buying the first batch of great corn, I ate it for dinner.  The two ears I ate tonight were not as good as their siblings of five days ago, but they were definitely better than the second batch that was eaten the day I bought it.  Are you following this?  I just gave you the Introduction, Methods and Materials, and Results section of this scientific paper all in a few sentences.  Try to keep up, especially if you received a C in my Field Biology course years ago.

Conclusion and Discussion: that while eating corn as soon after picking is important to its taste, that is not as important as the exact stage the corn was in when it was picked.  Picking at the height of its sweetness is the main factor in quality.  I have no idea how to determine this perfect time for harvesting; perhaps, corn farmers can explain.  An alternative explanation is that the second batch of corn was NOT picked the day I bought it, although the sign at Iron Kettle said it was "picked this morning".  So there you go.  Use of the scientific method applied to something very practical.  Who said my education was esoteric, irrelevant, and nerdish? Oh, that would be my niece, Andrea.

Literature Cited:  none.

Birding "au naturelle"

(A Sean John underwear model.  Now, this man is dressed appropriately to go birding in DrTom's woodlot.)

I like to sit on my deck in the nude on a warm, sunny day.  Nothing wrong with this.  It feels great and no one can see me except the Management and Zeus, although low-flying aircraft that circle overhead make me wonder sometimes.  I hate having a "farmer's tan", so either get a complete tan or don't get one at all.  On occasion, I will even venture out into the yard to check the garden donning nothing except a pair of Crocs.  Pretty bold for an old guy, but I've earned the right.  After all, it is not like I am strutting around naked in a national park or anything.  This is MY property, and no one can see me from the road.  But there is a potential glitch in the security of this activity.

A few times, I have even gone further from the house than my psychological tether normally allows.  Once I crossed over the driveway and a little wooden bridge over a drainage ditch, and entered the forest 150 yards from the house, walking along a path I keep mowed there.  On this particular occasion, I had taken the hand-set phone with me, thinking I would call one of my sons and brag how I am bird-watching in my birthday suit.  They think I am half crazed anyway, so why not really give them something to talk about.  It is always enjoyable to me when I can shock the younger generation, who thinks that senior citizens sit around and listen to polka music all day.  But at that moment, I heard a very disturbing sound--a car was coming up the driveway, which is located between the house and me.  The path to my pants was disrupted big time, but the flow of adrenaline was not.

The car drove up to the house, and three people got out.  I saw clearly through my binoculars that it was some former students of mine, two females and a male.  Ouch!  What to do?  Think MacGyver, think.  The problem was that Robin did not know I had taken this little safari nude, so when she saw the students, I was sure she would just tell them I was in the woods and to go find me.  I had only seconds to figure this out.  I got it.  I used the intercom feature on the phone (please do not be talking to your sister in Ohio), called my wife, and told her to take a pair of my pants and a shirt and to throw them down the basement stairs.  I would explain later.  Then, take the students onto the deck at the back of the house and keep them there until you see me.

I waited a couple of minutes for my wife to complete her assignment.  As long as my wife did not do something dyslexic, like throw my clothes on the deck and take the students into the basement, I should be ok. I sneaked through the woods to the side of the house opposite the deck, avoiding thorny raspberry bushes at all costs, zipped into the basement, got dressed, and came upstairs as if I had been organizing my tools down there.   Fortunately, Management had executed her instructions properly, and we lived happily ever after, although the students wondered why I appeared from the basement with a phone in one hand and binoculars around my neck.  Since then, I don't take excursions around the property without, at least, wearing a pair of my Sean Johns.

The big sting

(My friend Ida Lydiya, a Latvian immigrant who allows me to cut firewood on her property.)

For nearly 30 years I taught a course titled Introductory Field Biology at Cornell.  The course had many field trips to local natural areas where we could find amphibians, bog plants, and other features or organisms of natural history interest.  Near the end of the semester, I would bring the class to my property for our afternoon 3-hour lab.  I would talk about the birds' nests I had found the previous summer, woodlot management, forest ecology, control of invasive woody plants, etc.  But I always told the students when we arrived at the site that the property belonged to a widow who lived there named Ida Lydiya, who, I told them, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s to escape the Latvian revolution. 

I explained to the students that Mrs. Lydiya and I had an agreement.  I could cut firewood on her property, but I would give her 1/3 of what I cut for her to use in her wood stove in the winter.  This is a common agreement here in upstate NY, and is referred to as cutting firewood for "shares".  When we visited my property, it was always in October, the time of year when I had numerous piles of cut firewood scattered around my woodlot, often 100-200 yards from the house.  And October is the month I move firewood to the back of the house in preparation for use in November.  So the wood needed to be moved, and it is a huge job for one person, and I was getting older, and my children had left home, and my wife was not interested in this activity, and the wood was not going to move itself.  So I told the students that it would be a nice gesture to Mrs. Lydiya to move her share of the wood behind the house, in payment for letting us visit her property for this field trip.  Every year, the students would dutifully drop their notebooks and backpacks, pick up an armful of wood, and march to the house with their booty.  The class usually had about 40 students, so 3-4 trips per student resulted in a significant amount of work accomplished.  Isn't this the way the Pyramids at Giza were constructed?



When it was nearly time to board the bus for the return to campus, I would stop the wood-moving.  At that point, I explained that the name Ida Lydiya could be pronounced "I'd a lied to ya".  To watch the expressions on their faces at that point was worth every minute I had spent teaching these sophomores and juniors the previous two months.  There was always the danger that they could have become an angry mob at that point and turn on the old man, but they laughed and admitted it was a pretty good joke.  In addition, I opened the garage door at that instant, revealing a table full of donuts and apple cider.  Nothing calms down a 20-year old like the prospect of receiving a slug of sugar.  But the amazing thing was that one class apparently never revealed the secret to students who would take the course the following year.  They were naive about this subterfuge every single year for over a decade.

Quality counts with sweet corn and pie crust

(Sweet corn is in season.  And there is good sweet corn and not-so-good sweet corn.)

Last night Robin and I had what may have been the best sweet corn of our lives. I bought it yesterday at the Iron Kettle Farm near Candor. Realize that we both grew up in Ohio, where it is an annual tradition to eat all the sweet corn you can possibly eat during August. But there is sweet corn and there is sweet corn.

I don't think I have ever had really good corn from a grocery store. To be at its best, sweet corn needs to be picked at the exact right time in its maturation, the so-called "milk stage", early in the morning when it is cool, and then those ears should be eaten within hours of being picked. With every passing hour after picking, the sugars in the corn are being converted to starch, so the ears become less sweet and more chewy as the clock ticks away. With really good corn, I simply grill it over charcoal while basting it with olive oil and it is fantastic--no butter, no salt, no pepper. And the corn we had last night was superb. I could have eaten a dozen ears.

But for the past couple of years, whenever I have corn on the cob at my daughter's home, her husband always asks me how it is. It is never very good for the reasons I provided above, and so I give him my agronomist's appraisal. "Just a little past", I'll say. Or, "Probably should have been picked 2-3 days ago".  And, "Should have been eaten yesterday". I try to be tactful and to hide my Buckeye State cockiness about this, but he is the one who asked. Mitch always thinks I am joking.  He responds, "There is nothing wrong with this corn. It has tasted like this all my life".  Now, Mitch is from Staten Island, so you can see how difficult it might be to explain agricultural factoids to him. The first time he visited our home when he and Amy were dating, he saw a hummingbird at our feeder on the deck and he thought it was a giant insect. See how challenging this is?  (On the other hand, Mitch knows a lot about the stock market, because he works on Wall Street.  He warned me about the low quality of Over the Counter stocks years ago, compared to more "blue chip" type equities, but I insisted on losing money.  So the keeper of the quality standard resides in different people for different things.)

With my daughter, the situation is almost as bad.  We have a recipe for pie crust in our family that came from my grandmother.  It is fantastic crust and, if made correctly, is every bit as enjoyable to eat as the fruit filling used in the pie.  But my daughter fails to appreciate this and thinks that a frozen pie crust bought at the local store is just as good.  Every Thanksgiving we go through the same routine when I ask, "Is this Grandma Mary's pie crust?", although I know for sure after tasting it that it is not.  She always says no, and who cares, and who can tell the difference, and that old crust contains Crisco, and it's fattening.

Am I being a turd about all this?  I don't think so, and here is why.  I believe there really are absolutes when it comes to "quality".  Most of us would have no argument about this if we were comparing a Mercedes to a Ford Pinto, an Armani to a Sears suit, or a Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon to a Mogen David bottle of wine.  Corn and pie crust are not quite as obvious, and one could argue that accepting a slightly lower quality in one of these is not as important as the choice of a car or a house.  The irony in the corn and crust examples is that what I believe to be the higher quality choice may even be less expensive than the alternative; you are almost certainly paying a premium for the convenience of a ready-made crust, or for getting corn from the grocery rather than locating and stopping at a roadside vegetable stand.  So the issue is not about cost in these examples, it is mostly about a loss of collective memory. 

What bothers me about all this is that there seems to be a degradation of so many aspects of modern life, and it is almost always driven by what is convenient.  After a while, we accept the new lowered bar as normal.  Each generation of humans experiences a "ratcheting down" in their acceptance of the new normal, so that what was once good quality becomes just so-so, and almost no one remembers how it used to be.  The tough part is figuring out whether elderly people (the keepers of the past) really remember that an item was of higher quality in the old days, or whether it is just their failing or romantic memories of their youth .  And, of course, many aspects of life, like medical care, have gotten much better over time. 

This topic is actually a huge one, and can apply to many areas: the importance of high quality habitat in nature and the integrity of natural ecosystems, the quality of the food we eat daily, and the quality of the water we drink and the air we breathe.  For now, I've said enough and I need to keep my mouth shut.  In fact, last week we had dinner at my daughter's after she had just returned from the local grocery.  Half way through, Mitch said, "Aren't those tomatoes great?"  I bit my tongue, looked at my son-in-law with a big smile, and said, "I love ya man!"