Sweet are the uses of adversity
The Cold War era influenced the food of today, says Toby
WHEN I was a boy, there were infomercials on television explaining what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, and two gems of advice stick in my mind: paint the windows white to reflect the ‘flash’ and then hide under the kitchen table. “At least we have a table!” my dad used to exclaim, and looking back, we were lucky.
I mention this as I’ve been reading extracts of American author Jo Robinson’s Eating on the Wild Side, a book in which she claims that the Cold War and the threat of nuclear oblivion affected how we eat today.
After World War Two, the US government conducted extensive nuclear tests in the Pacific Bikini Atoll, where farm animals were exposed to the blasts. Without the protection of plywood they didn’t stand a chance; however miraculously, their feed did survive.
In a turn of events reminiscent of an X-Files storyline, the US government collected up the sweetcorn that the animals were eating and although seemingly ruined by radiation, it was discovered that they had exceptionally sweet kernels.
To cut a long story short, the seeds were raised in a secret government laboratory (where else!) and back-bred with regular strains, making them more reliable and according to the book, forming the basis of the sugary F1 super-sweet corn varieties available today.
I grow the supersweet variety ‘Conqueror’ which is vigorous, reliable and so sugary sweet that you can eat the cobs straight from the plants like apples, and they stay like that for weeks, even when picked.
The downside is that I have trouble keeping sweet-toothed badgers from toppling the plants and stealing the lot and have to protect the crop by using a stout fence.
Whether the ‘nuked-cob’ tale is true, only time and more releases of classified US military documents will tell.
I must admit that being reminded of those terrifying infomercials has made me want to seek out less highly-bred open-pollinated varieties.
Maybe the best way to look at it is that sweetcorn breeding benefited from an otherwise awful episode in the history of our planet, and that even nuclear clouds have silver linings.
“You can eat cobs straight from plants”