I've heard it said that on a quiet summer night, farmers can actually listen to their corn grow, hear the sigh of the stretching stalk, the whisper of leaves unfurling.
When I was a kid soaking up summers by the sea in Nova Scotia, I fancied that I could hear it too, and I'd wait, as if for Christmas, for the day when the corn was ready.
On the night of the corn boil, we'd build a bonfire on the beach and, gathered round it, we'd roll each steaming cob in bricks of butter and eat marshmallows - speared on a stick and burnt to a crisp - until we folded double from our gluttony.
This romantic chapter in my life came quickly to an end with Margaret Visser's fact-packed book, Much Depends on Dinner. Corn, I discovered, is not the once-a-year indulgence I had considered it to be. And it's more, by far, than sticky syrup and jonnycakes and the stuff of childhood memories. It is the very engine of our technology-driven universe.
According to Visser, the average North American consumes three pounds of corn, in some form or other, every day. We do so unknowingly of course.
It's just there, in everything we eat, everywhere we turn. Our livestock are fed on it, so butter, cheese, the meat we eat and the milk we drink are, in large part, corn. It's in soft drinks and instant puddings. It's in margarine, mayonnaise and everything that comes in a can. Corn syrup is the basis of ice cream, ketchup and candy. It's used in jams and gin and processed meats and beer.
And corn starch - white, odourless and tasteless - is the neutral carrier for the active ingredients in toothpastes and headache tablets. All adhesives utilize corn. As does most paper and cardboard and every plastic container on our supermarket shelves.
We make brooms from corn. We've carved the cobs into pipes and burned them as fuel. We've even used them as hair curlers and back scratchers and scrub brushes. Corn is with us from our cradles to our graves, from baby food to embalming fluid.
And now, according to news reports, the worst drought in the U.S. in half a century has pushed corn prices to record highs.
Which means that the thousands of products whose manufacture depends on corn will cost more too. Just how much more, economists are reluctant to predict although Sylvain Charlebois, the project leader of the University of Guelph's Food Retail Price Index, anticipates that food prices will increase by about 4.5 per cent in 2013.
We can probably swallow that. But it suggests a worrying trend. The more reliant we are on the production of corn, the more vulnerable we become to the vagaries of weather and climate.
Besides, our dependence on corn and its pivotal role in our everyday lives is a decidedly short-sighted one. Its cultivation requires more water than nature alone could ever supply and because corn so quickly depletes the earth in which it grows, crops can't survive without huge quantities of fertilizer and weed deterrents as well.
Even the act of propagation is actively discouraged: corn comes with nature's original, fool-proof birth control mechanism built right in. Because of the tight, impermeable husk in which it's wrapped, corn can't seed itself. It needs the hand of man to shuck it, pluck it and deliver its seed to the earth.
Think about that for a moment. Would you entrust the survival of the species to the same gang of bunglers who brought Froot Loops into the world, put pineapple on pizza and emptied our oceans of fish? It's like leaving Wile E. Coyote in charge of the hen-house and the folly of such an abdication is plain to see.
I can carry on bravely without the romance of the annual corn boil. But a life without corn? Fries without ketchup? Gritty ice cream? No gin or tonic or beer? And those Ecxedrin headaches?
Well, you'd better brace yourself. Without corn, they're not going to go away.
