Read This Before Eating Corn This Summer
I may never eat corn again. According to a story in today's New York Times Sunday Review, the supersweet corn I wait anxiously for every summer was born in a cloud of radiation. Jo Robinson writes that we are "breeding the nutrition out of our food." As farmers and scientists try to make our food more tasty, they're often breeding out the very nutrients that make it good for us, she reports. Corn originally started out more bitter, with kernels you had to crack open with a hammer, and farmers and others started mucking around with it to come up with a more tasty version. More on that later. Robinson says it didn't just happen with corn. She notes that while we're all being told to eat more fruit and vegetables, a lot of the very good stuff we're supposed to get just isn't there anymore. She gives corn as an example. "Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000...