Local View: Enjoy some sweet history with your sweet corn this summer

Jun 08, 2024

It’s that time of year when we go into a grocery store and get swamped with silken ears of sweet corn to buy. Or the most enterprising of us can go for a drive in the country and stumble across a farmer’s stand like the one run by Mike Klingelhutz, a fifth-generation farmer in Waconia, Minnesota, about 40 miles from Minneapolis.

I am an old commodity trader who once bought and sold corn and other grains for a living. So, I thought I’d give you corn-challenged people a little lesson.

The U.S. produces lots of corn. How much? Ever watched a freight train go while waiting at a crossing? Usually, these trains have 100 hopper cars. We produce enough corn annually to fill 5 million hopper cars — ergo, it would be a long wait at the crossing! But sweet corn accounts for only 1% of corn production, while 40% is used for ethanol gas (corn is a fermentable carbohydrate) and the rest for mainly animal feed. Many Europeans look down on our eating corn on the cob, as it’s considered pig food.

Another issue is that “corn” is the word Europeans and most of the world use for grain. Maize is the term most people use for corn.

The Mexicans are given credit for first growing corn. And the colonizing Spaniards are credited for spreading maize around the world. However, it goes by different names in some countries. In Turkey, it is kukuruz, the same word we northern Latvians use thousands of miles from Middle Eastern Turkey. Go figure.

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There are some 75 varieties of sweet corn. Klingelhutz grows Trinity. And since you asked, an average cob has 800 kernels, many of which get stuck between our teeth. A friend of mine was the chief agronomist for Green Giant (remember the Jolly Green Giant?) and explained this to me. They helped the spread of sweet corn by perfecting the concept of using degree days to figure out when corn is at its peak sweetness. So, if the peak came at 2 a.m., that’s when it would be picked.

Le Sueur, Minnesota, is the sweet corn capital. Green Giant tried everything to get people to use more canned sweet corn. In the 70s, Green Giant-Géant Vert made a push to introduce corn in French supermarkets. Green Giant also tried to develop a line of yogurts with corn and other vegetables but to no avail. Alas, when nothing worked, Green Giant was acquired by one conglomerate, then a second acquired the first, and finally a third conglomerate acquired the brand. Did you get all that? The home of the Jolly Green Giant is now located in Parsippany, New Jersey! The only vestige of the Valley of the Green Giant is a 90-foot statue of the Jolly Green Giant on I-90 near Mankato, Minnesota.

The term canned corn lives on. Baseball fans, consider this: According to Quora, you can find the term “can of corn” in the Major League Baseball glossary. The term dates all the way back to the 19th century. Workers at stores would use sticks or other mechanisms to reach food (like cans of corn) that were too high to reach. The food would fall from the shelves and be an easy catch for the worker. So, when you hear “can of corn” yelled at a ball game, it means an easy pop out.

And the next time you stop at Klingelhutz farmstand to buy sweet corn, you now know the full story.

John Freivalds of Wayzata, Minnesota, is the author of six books, is the honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota, and is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page. His website is jfamarkets.com.

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