Smut

     Don't worry blogger, I'm not about to go back on our little agreement. This is a different kind of smut! It lives out in the corn...

     I'm sure a great many of you can imagine a multitude of horrors lurking in the dark depths of a corn field, so you may be disappointed to see this...

     This is corn smut. See how it grows out of the ears? Long story short, smut is a fungus and it invades the kernels and replaces them with bulby things.

     There they are. They will eventually fill full of spores, but these are still growing. Some folks eat these, and in Mexico there is a long culinary tradition with them that goes back to the Aztecs. They called them "huitlacoche." I ate the little one up there. I'm still alive. It didn't taste like much at all, a little cornesque perhaps. That said, I'm not going back for more.

     Smut invariably destroys corn and can be quite a problem in a field. It has decent nutritional characteristics when young, but will mostly dry out into skin and spores later in the year. So what do farmers do about it? Not much, because there isn't much you can do. Fortunately its not very virulent and won't cause too much harm. And I suppose you could eat them, if you wanted...