I love eating corn on the cob. I loved it even when I had braces and had to shave the kernels off after their butter/salt/pepper bath. My corn-eating experience was enhanced at the age of 29 when I watched my Hoosier husband butter a slice of bread, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, and then use the bread like a glove to rub his ear of corn. It was like watching someone invent fire.

The down side is that I hate cleaning it. I can pull off the husks with no problem, but if you leave me to it I’ll still be sitting there picking silk out of crevices when everyone else has eaten dinner and dessert and shuffled off to bed.

Living in Illinois and having a mom with a farm that she pays variable attention to means I see a lot of corn—but only know a fraction of what I should. (I really ought to sign up for an ag extension class one of these days before my mom croaks and leaves me to figure things out. But that’s not why we are here today.) 

Here are two easy things to share: First, “knee-high by the Fourth of July” is a crock where we live. It might have been true once, or maybe it’s true farther north, but corn here is knee-high by mid-June, even if you’re not short like I am. And second, not all corn is the same. Field corn might keep you alive, but you do not want to eat it as a rule (unlike livestock). If you are paying super close attention and watching development every day, there’s a window of maybe five days where you can bust off a few ears and eat them at dinner. But that stuff loses its sugar and gets tough and tasteless pretty fast. You don’t want that on your dinner table any more than you want a big platter of Indian corn—also called flint corn, because it will break your teeth (not really).

So what kind of corn are you eating? Well, the overall category is sweet corn, but beyond that, I don’t actually know. The majority of my corn knowledge came from my grandmother when we talked about it in the late 1970s as I was tasked with stripping husks and picking off every last strand of silk for what was going on the dinner table. And even then there were probably things she hadn’t kept up with.

I know mine was a Silver Queen family from its time of development in the 1960s—none of that yellow stuff for us, unless it was coming out of our own field in that narrow window. Silver Queen doesn’t last long—like most vegetables, it loses quality starting the second you pick it, which is why this is such a seasonal thing. My mom and grandma grew Silver Queen in their vegetable gardens for years. I know you can eat it raw and fresh picked standing there in the garden, but none of us ever did that. We weren’t savages, after all.

Nowadays, you are more likely to find other varieties on store shelves, but most of the packaging won’t give you a name like Silver Queen; you have to look at seed catalogs for that. And seed catalogs tell you more about growth times and yields and less about the actual product. Sometimes they will tell you which of the three varieties of sweet corn you’re looking at: standard, sugary enhanced, and supersweet.

At your average grocery store, labeling doesn’t focus on names or varieties. Most of what’s sold in stores is supersweet because it has the longest shelf life. You can look at the corn itself and see if it’s yellow (as far as I know, that’s just called “yellow” and that’s mostly what you get in bags of frozen corn; it is slightly healthier because it has more beta carotene), white (which is probably Silver King, sweeter than Silver Queen) or a mix of yellow and white (the appetizingly named Butter and Sugar that doesn’t really taste like either but is definitely improved by both). Thing is, the color still won’t tell you how sweet the corn is.

This is why Oreos are better. An Oreo is an Oreo. You won’t get a sweet one on Monday and a bland one on Tuesday. But guess what key ingredient is in Oreos? Yup. Corn syrup and cornstarch.