The grocery store wised up, removed the big trash can near the corn (because people were shucking whole ears and throwing the waste away!) and put up a sign saying, in so many words, to take the corn home and put it in your own trash. They are selling 5 or 6 mostly peeled ears wrapped in cellophane, at a higher price, next to the unshucked corn. I will look at the first couple inches checking for catepillars or immature kernels, but mostly I just feel around for the heaviest ears I can find. Heavy = ripe. If there IS a catepillar in an ear, I will still shriek and drop it, but then just pick it up and trim the bad part away.
I husk the first inch-ish. That tells me well enough whether it’s nasty or immature without wrecking the ear for a different person if I don’t take it. I’m also looking for ears of about the same age so they’ll cook at the same rate and be comparably sweet. Not being in big corn country, there’s great variability.
Organic corn fresh from the fields is, like, 6 for $2 at the farmer’s markets that I go to. And this is with the premium on stuff in San Francisco. For that price, I grab some without looking, and if there is a juicy caterpillar on it (as there was last week), I give it to the kids to play with and throw the ear away. Or if an ear looks bad, I just toss it. I’m not going to sit there worrying about it and husking every ear and pissing off the farmer’s market guys just to save a quarter once in awhile, I’ll just get a few extra.
I worked at a grocery store for many years as a kid, and I can really remember the people shucking ear after ear of corn, tossing it back to shuck the next one. They wouldn’t pre-peel a banana before buying, but somehow, the meme got started – you must peel each ear of corn before you buy it, because you should never pay for a slightly less than perfect ear of corn. And after you’ve shucked an entire display case, demand another case be bought up, because they know I’m hording the really good stuff.
Sorry if that sounds too angry, and of course, a customer has every right to ask for the best value for their money. And of course, I wouldn’t put it past a company to try and sell sub-par items on purpose. But just like the O.P., the corn obsession is just ridiculous, to me. Not that people have the obsession, just that they get away with fouling product, looking for nothing they can define, just to play lord of the manor over the high school kid working there.
I still check egg for breakage, most of the time, but I haven’t found a cracked egg in years. I don’t buy packaged meat if is visibly browned, but if its hidden in the package, I cook it, or discard it, or maybe return it for credit. But I don’t rip it open before purchase to check.
And I buy my corn shucked and wrapped in plastic, where I can see that its mold and bug free. And so can the shuck squadron. Although they won’t be fingernail testing for the very juiciest kernels. Hope their friend and family know better than to accept a Whitmans chocolate sampler from them.
Hear, hear. I don’t want to pay more for corn because people have to peel them and then put them back.
I do check eggs, and have found a cracked one every so often, but the difference is that it is rare and the eggs are not damaged in any way by my checking. Usually just making sure they are loose in the carton is good enough.
My store charging extra for shucked ears (and having no barrel) is a feature in my book.
Just FYI, usually when fresh meat is found with a brown cast, it’s just oxymyoglobin becoming metmyoglobin, the same enzymatic change as occurs when you cook meat. It happens in packaged meat when there’s low oxygen levels, or even slightly higher than usual pressure, e.g., if packaged meat is stacked up. You’ve probably seen ground meat that’s pink on the outside and brown or greyish inside. It’s perfectly healthy to eat, it’s just that the air has been restricted from the inner surfaces of the meat.
Return your meat if it smells bad.
Washington? Seriously, people don’t really understand how easy it is to get local sweet corn in the US. Someone on this board was recently bitching about how it’s so much easier to find sweet corn in Indiana than Georgia, not knowing that Georgia grows about 5 times as much of the stuff.
I’m with ya, brother! I’m in the western high desert and my neighbor grew a 12 X 12 plot of corn. Nobody ever harvested a single ear. But, his daughter and another girl down the street flooded that plot and proceeded to wrestle in the mud, amongst the corn stalks.
I didn’t ask for it. I was just standin’ outside my shop. I didn’t move away, however.
That was some *sweet corn! *
I’ve never heard of worms being in corn before
now I can never eat corn again without thinking about it
thanks for fighting my ignorance