Spring Wind

latimes:

Customers stalk Fresno State’s sweet corn: Carefully nurtured produce is a cash crop for the university and a sensation on Central Valley tables, with annual sales estimated at 1 million ears.

The first day the corn was picked, people lined up at 6 a.m. outside the university’s farm store, the same as they have for five years. This season, however, a line stretching all the way to the parking lot was there at dawn the next day. And the day after that.

… The ears are big, with kernels that are plumper than spheres on Bubble Wrap. It is sweet as honey and creamy as butter. You can smell the grassy-corn scent the second you pull back the husk.

The university president, who is from the Midwest, claims that Fresno’s corn is even butter. Err, better! We meant “better.”

Is it lunchtime yet? Fresno’s only 200 miles away.

Photo: Ganesan Srinivasan, director of Cal State Fresno’s agricultural lab, samples an ear of corn grown by his students. “If you’re a corn man like me, the corn plant can speak to you. If you ignore corn, don’t pay enough attention, it gets depressed. But if you give care, the corn gives back.” Credit: Tracie Cone / Associated Press

(Source: Los Angeles Times, via food-forthought)