The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  We finished setting up the booth early, which was unfortunate. We stared at the clever sign, the heaped corn, the green casings, some with escape holes drilled by exiting corn worms. By the time the market manager’s bell pealed to signal the start of the day’s sales, I was already blushing. The flash of heat across my cheeks took me a little by surprise: I hadn’t expected a surge in self-consciousness so far into the season. But there I was, back at the beginning, a suburban slicker with weathered wares and a face that inevitably revealed too much.

  There’s intimacy in tending the plants that provide the food that people will lovingly prepare in some variation on a family ritual. In many places, farm work is purely mechanical, the end results bulk, the products shipped off to be consumed by unknown masses. But here, it’s an art. And it feels like reading a formal poem in front of a classroom of students who have styled themselves after postmodern critics. Or like how I felt at the elementary school spelling bee when the judge asked me to spell the one word—out of all the words in the contest to that point—that I didn’t recognize. I’m the girl who has to know how to spell the unfamiliar word; I’m the girl who has to know how to grow the vegetables. This is what I do, and I’m expected to do it well.

  But I haven’t; we haven’t. Maybe it’s impossible to grow aesthetically perfect corn without unleashing the wrath of the chemist on the corn maze. After all, much of the organic corn I’ve seen sold in the grocery store was shrink-wrapped in plastic, silky tips trimmed off. In other words, it may have been wormy too, but the corn had been shucked, cut, and shrink-wrapped so it could presented in a sterile, worm-free fashion to the customer. Even though the corn looked appealing, all the excessive packaging wasn’t exactly an earth-friendly practice. Regardless, we didn’t have any plastic wrap. Our corn had worms. All we could do was wait to see what people would do about it.

  Moments after the market manager’s bell rang, the results started rolling in. Corn, like the tomato, has a magnetic personality. Despite its sorry asking price, it’s not like the bean—somehow it’s a big-ticket item, a piece of produce people get excited about. Corn brings summer its sweetness: fresh from the farm, tossed in its husk on the barbecue next to sizzling sirloin steaks, it’s an American icon (albeit—like the tomato—one pilfered from vanquished native peoples).

  People caught sight of the ears piled high in the bins, wrapped tight in their green husks. And it was like something had hooked them. Eyes locked on the corn, they made a beeline to our farm stand where, as if hypnotized, they tended to speak in sentences punctuated by exclamation points and question marks.

  “Corn! When was it picked?”

  “This morning,” I answered. My customer’s face lit up: she was practically licking her lips. And then she spotted the sign.

  “Oooh, worm friendly, huh?”

  At this point, her reaction could take one of two turns. The next thing that would happen would either be an understanding chuckle, or a sort of shadow—ranging from uncertainty to outright revulsion—passing across her face. Then I’d know what type of customer I was dealing with.

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  The period deflated me. To avoid annihilation of my ego as a farmer and vendor, I had to take a bit of a moral high ground here. The way I looked at it, if there was one good thing about wormy corn, it was that it formed a test of mettle separating the girls from the women and the boys from the men. Really, if they couldn’t handle a little worm, they didn’t deserve farm-fresh, beyond organic, pesticide-free corn. Let them eat vacuum-packed corn from Mexico, doused in organic OMRI-certified pesticides. Or let them rifle through piles of picture-perfect, genetically modified corn, gene-spliced to resist herbicides and produce their own pesticides.

  Meanwhile, I am proud to say that the corn worms were enhancing my farmer gal cred. Wormy corn was good for me. Far from my former squeamish, worm-hating self, I now flicked the little fuckers off the kernels with abandon. I was handy with the clippers, too, easily slicing through the thick cob to lop off the unsightly worm-eaten tips. Even at home, away from public scrutiny, corn worms now only elicited a reaction if I wasn’t anticipating them. Or if I caught one munching on my ankle. You might not think it, but the little bastards actually bite.

  And I wasn’t the only one putting on a tough face at the farmers’ market. In Healdsburg, courageous men and women—diehard customers of the local food system—scoffed at corn worms. The fact that our corn had worms made it more real, and these customers liked real food. “That’s how I know it’s not GMO!” they’d say, or “If it doesn’t have worms, it isn’t organic, is it?”

  But there were also those customers who desperately wanted to support local farmers but would prefer to do it without acknowledging that organic farming involved lots of insects inhabiting the food they were about to ingest. These were the people who came up to the stand and waited awkwardly until it was their turn to confess: “I found a bug in your spring mix the other week.”

  Duh.

  “I’m sorry, you know we do try our best to keep them out, but every once in a while one slips through.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d let you know. You know.”

  I know. Duh.

  “Thanks! Well, I hope the salad was tasty, anyway.”

  “Oh, it was. We gave it a very thorough washing, and then it was delicious.”

  These people often requested that we remove the wormy bits before they’d purchase the corn. Obligingly, we did, although from an economic standpoint it clearly made no sense to spend several minutes husking and trimming items that we were offering for fifty cents apiece. But we did it, partly because we still felt a little depraved about selling wormy corn, and partly because I understood on a personal level how difficult it is to overcome worm phobias. I felt that it was my duty to extend a helping hand to those worm phobes with weaker constitutions than mine.

  A particularly intriguing subset of the no-bug demographic was comprised of customers who didn’t really believe in bugs in their salad or worms in their corn, but didn’t really believe in killing them, either. This got complicated, especially when I pulled out the pruning shears to lop off the offending worm-eaten tip along with the offending worm.

  “You’re not going to kill it, are you?” one of our regular customers asked apprehensively.

  “No, I’m just putting it in the bushes.” Where, lacking its moist food source and protective husk, it would dehydrate and die, if it wasn’t picked off by a bird or engulfed by ants before then.

  “Oh good, I wouldn’t want to hurt it.”

  This is the point where I was no longer on the same page as the customer—in fact, I was in an entirely different book, in a library on the other side of the world. I did want to hurt the worm. In fact, I wanted to hurt as many worms as possible. And I’d been a vegetarian for six years, so it wasn’t like I didn’t understand empathizing with animals. I wanted to ask, do you eat meat? If not, do you wash your hands, killing millions of innocent bacteria who are just trying to eke out a living and provide for the next generation? What would you do if five thousand ants invaded your refrigerator—let them eat cake? Really, we had to draw the line somewhere, and I can assure you there were thousands more of these worms in my field ready to replace the fallen hero.

  Another regular customer walked up, a big grin plastered across his face at the sight of our corn. Later, I’d learn that he once worked on a farm in Haiti; he knows how these things go. “Worm friendly?” he mused. “I’ll take eight!”

  I’d throw in two extra, I told him—worm insurance. And with that, I’d set the hook. Even if a couple of the ears are worm cities, our worm insurance would ensure he’d be back at our farm stand looking for more next week.

  On the human menu for the evening: leftover sweet corn from the morning’s market, paired with roasted new potatoes—dug that morning to check on the plants’ progress—and roasted beets. On the avian menu for the evening: corn worms.

  Now, the chic
kens weren’t terribly adventurous yet. They were in the awkward teenage phase, which was every bit as bad in Gallus gallus domesticus as it is in Homo sapiens. They were leggy, scrawny, and covered in their adult feathers—but a few down feathers from chick-hood remained, reminding them that they weren’t really adults just yet. Rather than pimples, sheathed feathers jutted up awkwardly from their skin. (I would imagine it would feel about as bad as a big zit, too; think about trying to push a feather tightly wrapped in fingernail out of one of your pores.) They spent a lot of their time preening themselves, trying to break through the keratin sheath to free the feather underneath. Their efforts rendered their rooms perpetually dirty, coating everything in the vicinity with a fine golden feather-dust. Their wattles and combs were, embarrassingly, just starting to swell and redden—the cockerels’ more so than the pullets’. And, of course, they were starting to squabble and assert themselves, pushing their boundaries, discovering their personalities, and establishing social norms.

  Up to this point, their diet had been limited to chick starter and a chard leaf or two. But today, they forayed into a new world: their first taste of flesh.

  The original surviving seven chickens had already passed the ungainly phase. Now, just entering their prime, they inhabited the retrofitted chicken coop that had been safely floored with plywood to keep out predators. We’d also created a chicken yard by installing a chicken-wire fence. During the day, the gate would remain open, enabling the chickens to roam where they would. But at night, I’d shut the gate so the foxes wouldn’t be able to get anywhere close to the coop: double security.

  We hadn’t yet introduced the awkward teenagers to the original chickens, and the reality of predation altered our coop plan. Originally we thought we’d have a dirt run “porch” attached to the chicken coop, to provide them with more space overnight. Now we realized that was just asking for trouble. So Emmett and I were working on a second, larger coop—but until it was done, our teenagers were spending their nights in the garage and their days in makeshift enclosures in the backyard (cardboard boxes artfully arranged to form an outer boundary, and old window screens placed on top so they didn’t fly out and get eaten by the neighbor’s dog).

  Our dinner was almost ready, the roots browning in the oven, the water hot and the corn husked and trimmed, ready to go. We headed out into the yard with a handful of corn worms, slipped back the old window screen, and dropped in a fat green worm, which wriggled as it hit the ground.

  The worm instantly became the focus of the flock’s attention. The chickens stood around it awkwardly, sticking their necks out, turning their heads sideways and tilting them so that one eye squarely faced the ground. They studied the worm intently, yellow eyes blinking. For a half-minute they were practically frozen in place: a game of ring around the worm combined with freeze tag.

  Suddenly a Rhode Island Red reacted. She took two steps up to the contorting worm, darted her head down quickly, and grasped it in her beak. And now, suddenly, everyone realized that worms were food—and not just any old food, but the best food they’d never tasted. As Red looked around nervously for an exit, the entire flock began to chase her. She darted back and forth, trying valiantly to keep her head away from the birds who were snapping at her beak, trying to deprive her of her prize. Her sisters were in hot pursuit until an evasive maneuver—running through them, rather than away—confused them momentarily.

  Red had a split second to herself. She tilted back her head and gulped down the worm.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Emmett. My heart was pounding at this little life-and-death game; the end was sudden, brutal. Somehow I’d imagined that the chickens would jointly peck the worm to death, each bird receiving a bit of a protein boost. I’d forgotten that chickens are not nearly that egalitarian—though they may not always be bloodthirsty cannibals, they are always bloodthirsty carnivores.

  There was another reason my heart was pounding: when I was a kid, I had a friend who had a lizard. The lizard ate meal worms, until one day the meal worms ate the lizard. From the inside out. At least, that’s what my friend told me. Now all I could think was: what if I just killed my chicken? The corn worms bite. What if I peered in the coop tomorrow to find a Rhode Island Red in her death throes, an evil fattened corn worm protruding from her neck? Shit, all the Rhode Island Reds looked the same; I couldn’t even pick out the chicken who might be dead tomorrow.

  As though I hadn’t killed enough chickens already. Damn corn.

  Another characteristic corn shares with the tomato: corn is a touchy-feely food. People like to pick it up, squeeze it, pull the husk back. If we were charging full market price for corn, I’d feel less resentment at turning the other cheek—but we were already discounting and throwing in worm insurance for anyone who bought more than a couple of ears.

  And still the customers heavy-handedly unsheathed our ears, showering all produce in the vicinity with corn silk (and, let’s face it, corn worm poop), rejecting those they deemed unworthy. We quickly learned to place the corn bins on the ground, at the end of the stand, so that they didn’t defile the rest of our display.

  But shifting the mess to the parking lot asphalt solved only half the problem. Not only were we deworming ears, discounting our product, and giving some ears away—we were also ending up with half a bin full of the crummiest, wormiest corn at the end of the day.

  Once again I found myself shaking my head at a bizarre societal norm. Why are we encouraged—with artfully placed trash cans—to shuck corn at the grocery store to see if it’s up to snuff, but forbidden to bite into an unpaid-for apple to find out if it’s mushy or crisp? Why do customers feel it’s okay to nab a few cherry tomatoes from the baskets that I sell, but not okay to take one stamp from the packs for sale at the post office to see if they like the way it sticks?

  We planted corn in blocks to maximize wind pollination.

  Oh well. At the very least, Emmett agreed, the wormtropolis leftovers could be used for chicken food. The trouble was, our chickens were only teenagers—and while they happily scarfed down several ears at a time, they couldn’t handle thirty ears per day. Besides, sweet corn is mostly sugar. Chickens don’t have any teeth to rot, but if we overloaded the teenagers with simple carbohydrates we’d have to increase their protein intake in some way. They were growing birds, and for optimum health they needed a diet that was about 20 percent protein; their bodies required more than corn carbs to build bones and muscle. Red junglefowl, the progenitor of the domesticated chicken, to this day thrives on a foraged diet in Southeast Asia: bugs, grubs, seeds, and invertebrates. Although chickens’ nutritional needs have, like the bird itself, evolved over time—more calories and calcium are needed to keep up with larger bodies and larger, more frequent eggs—we couldn’t stray too far from the ancestral diet without fundamentally sacrificing the health of the birds (not to mention that of the eggs they produced). In other words: a bird cannot live on corn alone. And I’d rather not push the boundaries, either.

  We’d been canning tomatoes, dilly beans, and cucumber pickles. Surely there had to be a way of preserving this corn for the long winter ahead. I thought about popcorn on the cob, multicolored ornamental corn, and the hard yellow ears sold in the local feed store to entertain and treat pet rodents. But in all my years of shopping at the grocery store, I’d never seen a corn pickle. I surmised that when it came to large-scale corn preservation, drying must be the tried-and-true route.

  Unfortunately, there’s not too much information about corn preservation online. Really, what American in her right mind would grow corn at all, let alone grow it and eschew the joy of eating it fresh, and instead turn it into an unappetizing shriveled cob of chicken food? But absurdity and lack of knowledge had never fazed us. How hard could it be to dry a few ears of corn?

  As it turns out, once it’s pulled from the plant—a corncob left on the stalk, given warm and dry weather, will desiccate neatly inside the husk—the task of drying corn is very difficult indeed. W
e shucked hundreds of ears, a process that, I promise, is far more time consuming than you’d ever think possible. We placed them on newspapers in the backyard, and left the sun to do the work.

  Within a week, the first batch sprouted fuzzy blue-gray mold. We realized that we couldn’t leave the corn out overnight, because the Healdsburgian fog comes in on little cat feet and pees on our cobs, wetting them just enough to provide a nice damp environment for mildew.

  So we altered our plan: ferry the corn out to the backyard in the morning and back into the house at night. The second batch fared better. For a while, it seemed like our corn was not grown in vain. Dubbing the cobs a success, we placed them in plastic bags and put them in the garage.

  Where they promptly molded.

  Well, you know what they say about the third time. Corn out during the day, in at night. We let this one dry even more thoroughly—the last batch we had left ever so slightly soft—and figured we could rehydrate it for the chickens later. And, we decided to forego plastic bags and instead use paper bags so that the dried corn could breathe.

  Did I say paper bags? I should have used the singular: the leftover efforts of hundreds of corn plants could fit easily into one paper bag. Untold hours of effort yielded what felt like just a few ounces of dried corn, fit only for chickens.

  Corn is a grass. Ten thousand years ago, it was utterly unrecognizable from the huge cobs festooned with sweet, plump kernels we enjoy today. Corn comes from the wild, weedy Mexican grass called teosinte. Teosinte has an edible, nutritive seedpod that measures approximately four centimeters and possesses maybe six kernels, all in a single row. Picture an overgrown, unmowed lawn that has gone to seed and started taking steroids, and you have an approximate depiction of teosinte, with approximately the same stem-to-seed ratio. Lots of plant: little itty-bitty seeds.