Why Our Summer Corn Is Ever Sweeter

Few summer treats feel quite as timeless as a whole, sweet corn on the cob. It seems to belong to an older, simpler way of eating, in which no cutlery is required (unless you insist on using those tiny cute corn holders). You slowly rotate the cob in your hands and use your teeth to extract every sweet yellow morsel. Maize eating in Mexico goes back more than 7,000 years. In America, the first English settlers began using field corn to make flour, but records suggest that they didn’t start eating sweet corn until 1779, when colonial soldiers on campaign discovered it and brought it home to their farms.

It is an illusion, however, to imagine that corn on the cob is something eternal and unchanging. Farmers market corn may look remarkably similar to the corn of the Aztecs (minus the amazing range of colors), but more than 90% of the fresh corn for sale in the U.S. now consists of modern hybrids that are far sweeter than corn ever used to be. In 1950, Dr. J.R. Laugham at the University of Illinois discovered a distinct and very sweet strain of corn with a gene known as “shrunken two” because the kernels shriveled up when they dried. Laugham’s discovery transformed the sweet corn industry, making way for new varieties of corn that were “supersweet,” “ultrasweet” and “extrasweet.” Anyone born later than the 1980s may not even remember the taste of old corn, which could be gloriously milky in texture but deeply unreliable in its sweetness.