Baby corn: Why?

Our chubby hands reached for the tongs at the same time.
"Go ahead, you were here first," I told the woman who looked amazingly a lot like me.
"No, you go...I'll dig into these mushrooms," the woman said without making eye contact.
I don't generally talk to people in the salad bar line at the local Sizzler. Odds are we will become rivals over at the taco bar or perhaps race to get the last greasy fried chicken wing. People in line at a salad bar cannot begin to form any kind of bond. It will end when a single brown and serve dinner roll is torn four ways by seniors who paid their $7.95 and damn it, want their money's worth.

And yet, knowing that this woman obviously had a love for baby corn, I felt a kinship, some kind of bond. No one loves baby corn. The corn bowl at the salad bar is always full, while the garbanzo beans have begun to turn gray and only a few lay there in that thick broth that makes garbanzo beans palatable. When you can find canned baby corn at the grocery store, the tops of the cans are always covered in a film of dust. Are they the neglected vegetable because they are small?

They don't appear on the Thanksgiving table nor do they fit in at an Easter buffet. If you attend a back yard gathering you're gonna find the usual: cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, broccoli flowerettes.

So when I saw this woman lusting after the tender delicacies, I felt a need to talk to her.
"I love these," I said in a husky voice. "I mean, I really love these." I worked to grab a number of them with the silver tongs. The woman leaned closer to me and whispered, "I do too." Her eyes darted around the room and she continued, "Sometimes....sometimes I buy a whole can of them and eat them by myself."

I pushed her in the shoulder and said, "Shut Up! I do too! No one in my house likes them, so when I buy a can, I know I'm gonna end up eating the entire thing."

She nodded knowingly. It was her turn to handle the tongs and attempt to load her plate with these odd little garnishes. We studied their perfect little rows, their uniquely similar size and their firm but tender texture.

At the same time, we both questioned, "Who shucks these?" We both studied the bowl of corn imagining a farm with tiny rows of green that supported little bitty ears of corn. Did either of us know anyone who shucks baby corn? That would be "no." So who is doing it and how could any farmer make a living harvesting premature corn. It's not like you can take it to the fair, shove a stick into it, slather it in butter and sell it for two-bucks.

The two of us moved through the salad bar, considering other fixings but limiting ourselves to one or two. We worked as team, scanning the options, making careful choices and when we came upon the marinated artichoke hearts, we had to ask: "What do they do with the leaves?" Both of us agreed that besides baby corn, the buttery meat on the leaf of an artichoke, earns a close second. Who was it that discovered that the meat on the leaves was a good thing, while the hair around the heart was a bad thing and the mush in the stem area, was the "heart". And who among us hasn't learned that you don't throw artichoke leaves in the garbage disposal. Sure, when you leave home and your mom is prepping you for building a life of your own, she tells you how to remove candle wax from the rug and what to do if you get constipated, but not once does she tell you, "And by the way, if you cook an artichoke, for cris sake, don't send those leaves down the disposal."

And so the two of us carefully layered our plates, knowing that once we got to the cottage cheese we would part ways, her returning to her family of baby corn haters and me to mine. We knew the conversations at our tables would turn to cruel remarks like," Oh God, how can you eat those?" And so, as the bus people cleared tables and the waiters fetched clean plates, we both stuck our fork deep into one of the yellow delicacies and toasted each other. She probably went home satisfied that she'd had her yearly allotment of baby corn, and I sat down at my computer, opened my blog page and felt a need to share our story. None of this would have happened if she'd have reached for pickled okra. I would have studied her for a minute and deemed her to be crazy for eating such a slimy, tasteless veggie. And she would have taken less okra than she really wanted, knowing that I would be judging her.

I would have and I wouldn't have written this blog about a woman who ate okra. You only share the very special things in your life, like baby corn.