The Corny Thing Said About Corn

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I have grown up knowing corn is a vegetable. Dynamite those brakes! Apply the emergency brakes! Stop this vegetable-mobile! I grew up on a dairy farm and we grew a garden every summer. We grew peas, green beans, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and vegetables like that. And we grew corn which we called a vegetable. But the corny thing is, corn is not a vegetable. A friend of mine jumped all over me when I called corn a vegetable. “Corn is not a vegetable,” he said. “Huh?” I asked. It had always been a vegetable to me. “After World War Two we sent corn to England to help feed the hungry,” my friend said. “They wanted to know why us stupid Americans would send them cattle feed to eat.” That was a new one on me. Who doesn’t like corn on the cob or even corn without the cob? And, yes, I knew cows ate corn. I was raised on a dairy farm, for heaven sakes. But cows also ate oats and we didn’t go around saying oats was nothing but cattle feed. I thought the teeter-totter in my friend’s brain must have tottered a little too far from the teeter. Then my friend explained that corn is a grain, not a vegetable. Yes, after all these years of calling corn a vegetable, it is actually a grain. I had always thought of grain as wheat and oats which grows as a grass-like plant. Corn is nothing like that. It grows on a large stalk as high as seven feet or so. The “ears” of corn has to be broken off the stalk. Then the husk has to be removed to expose the corn–which is on a cob. I never thought corn was not a vegetable. The corny thing said about corn is that it is a vegetable when it’s actually a grain.