A Tale of Two Corns

Today, I saw something that made my blood run a little cold: coming down Rt 6 from Watertown towards Bethlehem, passing a farm I pass almost every day, I noticed a field of corn bordered by a row of white and red signs. I recognized the signs from a distance, and my jaw clenched a bit. I'd seen plenty of the signs, or those like them, before, during the brief time I lived in Iowa. Out there, in the green desert, many fields sprout such warning signs, as unsettling as those demarcating a land-mine zone. As I drove closer, the signs revealed themselves, plastic placards on stakes, red and white, simple. Each one bore the name ConAgra. Hybrid, GMO, copyrighted corn had come to my little corner of Connecticut.

ConAgra, like its bigger brother Monsanto, is one of the chief faces of evil in the realm of industrial agriculture. As well as dabbling in confinement livestock factory farming, ConAgra makes its name building frankenfoods. Now, for what it's worth, I'm not as opposed to genetically modified crops as you might think (I'll devote time soon as to just why), and unsettling as the whole idea may be, what truly upsets me is the industry's tendency to treat their corn as intellectual property.

Farmers planting ConAgra hybrids must register with the corporation, risking legal action if they should try to plant a second year's crop with their own seed corn instead of re-upping from the parent company itself. Worse, should TM corn be found growing in a neighboring farmer's field, even if it hybridizes accidentally or is spread by mistake, that farmer can be sued for illegally possessing the equivalent of stolen corn. In return for high yields and straight rows, farmers forsake their freedom, and the industry reaps the profits.

I always considered Iowa a lost cause; the farmers there seemed just too far indebted to the system, and too weak-willed, to ever get out from under the corporate thumb. But to see the mark of ConAgra greed and a grower's ignorance so close to home was unsettling. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

There was, however, a nice counterpoint to that ConAgra corn field, just a little further down the road. Another sign, though this one a little more welcoming: a giant plywood ear of corn, green and yellow, advertising native sweet corn at Logue's Farm (credit where credit's due, Logue's has the best butter and sugar corn this season, beating Towne's farm hands down). Sweet corn season is one of the most pleasant in northwest CT, late summer when the weather swelters and then cools, and the green of the landscape seems to deepen in its final moments. And the sweet corn itself embodies what's best in local, seasonal eating. As delicious as it is, it comes and goes in a matter of months; you eat all you can and then hope the taste lingers till the following year.

Within half a mile, I saw two very different ends of the agricultural spectrum. One corn crop was good for nothing but high-fructose syrup or cattle feed, an industrial engineered shackle around a farmer's leg. The other, sweet, crisp, fleeting, stood in my mind for a lot of what is right with the local food movement. I know which end of the spectrum I prefer. I drove home, with the giant wooden ear receding in my rear-view mirror. It looked good enough to eat.

Sweet...

It's the morning of January third, a new year, and I'm hereby christening this latest foray into public egotism.  Blog.  Ugly word, isn't it? Thick, viscous, redolent of the verbal upchuck that it is.  If nothing else, I see this little venture as an effort to stretch the ol' mental hams, a way to shake off the dust thats settled in my skull after a holiday season typified by twenty-four straight hours of A Christmas Story and enough Harpoon Winter Warmer to drown six out of eight reindeer.  I'm trying to blog myself awake again, as it were (though usually after I blog myself I get sleepy).  Still, a quasi-anonymous, unread post on the internet is at least a start, right? Baby steps...

And as for baby steps, here's a mildly curious one I've taken for 2009: to get off the white death.  You might know it by one of it's street names: horse, smack, monkeydust, Haitian ass-sweat.  I call the harsh white bitch Domino superfine. Sugar.  Sweet, magical, diabetes-tastic refined cane sugar, shipped from Florida, Hawaii, or the DR to make me fat and rot my teeth.  Awesome.  Really, at this point, I'm just trying to ween myself off the few teaspoons I have in my morning coffee.  I like my coffee black in the afternoon, but in the wee hours I need that little kick of sucrose, and though one or two teaspoons a cup doesn't seem earth-shaking, when your morning habit is up to a full French press's worth, things have gotten out of hand.  So, as a small step towards putting my resolutions in order, I'm switching from white sugar to local honey in my coffee.  I did say it was a small step...

Now, theoretically, a teaspoon of golden, syrupy, blog-ish honey is no better than a teaspoon of sugar, at least health-wise, but hey, do I really need both these legs?  No, the real motivation for the switch wasn't health, but rather providence.  Santa, in his wisdom, left my sister one sweet Xmas gift in the form of two hundred gallons of pure honey.  Or, if not two hundred gallons, then at least half a gallon, which is still a ridiculous, ridiculous amount of honey.  It's five pounds worth, in fact, which is almost the weight of an adult human head. 

Yeah.  That's the real Eiffel goddamn Tower, just to give you a sense of scale.  It's a seemingly unfinishable amount.  Fortunately, honey is the one food that never, ever goes bad, but merely crystalizes.  Ten thousand years from now, after the inevitable nuclear holocaust, after the melting of the glaciers and their subsequent re-freezing, after the scourge of the hyper-intelligent cockroach overlords, the mewling, cancerous, devolved ape-spawn that call themselves our descendants will find this jar in the ruins of Bethlehem, Connecticut, and have spoons of leftover honey to sweeten their bitter lives.

Mock though I may the the gargantuan nature of the honey jar, I am actually quite pleased by it.  The honey, you see, is pure Woodbury honey, Woodbury being the next town over.  Not only is the honey delicious, organic, and curative (honey being a natural antiseptic), but most importantly, it's local.  Though the body-esque lump upon which my head resides may not be able to tell apart the complex polymerize strands of saccharine carbohydrates, the economy and even the environment can: the sugar was farmed as a monoculture and shipped long-distance to me via fossil fuels, while the honey was made by multi-tasking little pollinators a scant few miles away.  In broad, eco-social terms, one helps, one hurts.  I feel good about that, though it may not seem like much.  It is a small step, after all.  But it's a sweet one.