Corn Wars

I grew up intimate with vegetables. It was no one season fling, no April to August affair, but a succession of seasons blending into seasons. My parents, Clint and Mary Searl, kept a large garden on their acre of land, in, what was in the 1950s, rural Northern Delaware. In spring we planted. In summer we harvested. In autumn and winter we lived off a cache of canned and frozen produce.

My mother's parents, German-speaking, Austro Hungarian immigrants, had a truck farm in South Jersey. My mother, along with eight brothers and one sister, had worked the Walter family truck farm. When the siblings married, most of them stayed in South Jersey. Of course, they all kept their own gardens, competing among themselves for the earliest, the biggest, and the tastiest.

On most Sunday afternoons, the Walter clan spontaneously gathered around the faded-oilcloth covered, oversized kitchen table. Whenever I grew tired of playing with my cousins, I drifted into the kitchen, where I perched on a cast iron radiator beneath the window. I listened to boisterous talk and glanced through copies of the Farm Journal that set on the windowsill. Thinking about the Walter clan now, I'm reminded of a flock grackles worrying a little plot of ground – bobbing about and fighting with each other over little tidbits, real or imagined.

My father enjoyed antagonizing my mother's brothers. Most of them worked in a Mobil Oil refinery on the Delaware River. He called them thickheaded Dutchmen, a corruption of Deutsche, meaning German. They were Democrats, union men, and fiercely loyal to Walter clan's prejudices.

To a brother and brother-in-law, except for my father, they were passionate growers of white corn. The Walter boys and my always animated aunt Eva spent hours extolling the virtues of their favorite variety – Stowell's Evergreen. Yield was important and so was resistance to disease, but sweetness and tenderness were the ultimate criteria. For them, it was literally dessert after the day's big meal. And my grandmother usually had a big pot of boiled ears set on the stove for snacking during corn season. Often, to accent a point, one of my ham-handed uncles would wave a half gnawed ear at whomever he was arguing with.

Maybe just to be contrary, my father grew yellow corn – Golden Cross and Iowa Chief. Not only did he live on the other side of the Delaware River, he was a Republican and nonunion worker, too. He certainly egged on the Walter clan, taking every opportunity to assert to one or all of my gathered uncles that yellow corn was infinitely superior to all varieties of white corn – but especially to Stowell's Evergreen. The ensuing discussion would grow noisier and noisier until everyone was shouting across the table. And my mother would enter the spirit of her clan by getting angry at my father for antagonizing her easily excitable brothers.

In my memory, I can hear her voice beginning to admonish, "Oh, Clint…” (She was in her heart of hearts a white corn person; but for my father's sake her garden grew only yellow corn.) The Walter boys would finally shout, in a chorus of frustration and derision, that yellow corn was really only fancy field corn, fit for horses and not for human beings, as though that settled the argument.

Because my father was a yellow corn man, I bent that way, too.

I rarely see white corn. A compromise version of yellow and white dominates the marketplace. When I do come across a white ear of corn, I remember those long-ago arguments around my grandparents’ oilcloth covered kitchen table.

I called home for the names of the white and yellow varieties they argued about years ago. On the phone, Dad said it took him 50 years to convince Mom that yellow corn was indeed superior to white corn – especially Stowells’s Evergreen. Remembering the Walter clan deep prejudices and unending loyalties, I asked incredulously, "Is that right, Mom?"

"That's right, son," she admitted with such an incredible sweetness in her voice that I was reminded of the taste of the yellow corn of my boyhood.