the.com/sweetcorn
The vegetable that's secretly candy wearing a tiny yellow raincoat.
means A variety of maize bred to be harvested young while its kernels are still soft and sugary, eaten as a vegetable rather than ground into flour.
from From 'sweet' + 'corn' — and 'corn' itself is the old trap here: in British English it once just meant 'grain' in general (as in 'corn laws', which were about wheat), while Americans narrowed it to mean maize specifically. Sweetcorn is a sugar-rich mutant strain of regular field maize, bred and selected by Native American farmers and later seed breeders for a gene that stops sugars from converting to starch — so the kernels stay sweet instead of going starchy and tough.
- botanical status
- technically a fruit, since it's a seed
- sugar trick
- starts converting sugar to starch within hours of picking
- digestion fact
- the hulls survive you almost entirely intact
- history
- bred from a wild grass called teosinte