Children of the Corn

Getting back to the blog after a four-day birthday bacchanalia, and turning away (for a moment, as promised) from the Williamsburg waterfront, we take this opportunity to ruminate on the simple, nearly forgotten beauty of farming.

The weekend before last, when imnotsayin went upstate to bring you wall-to-wall coverage of the Area 52 Music Festival, we alluded to our brief - yet paradigm-shifting - encounter with nature. Our revelation was likely fueled by the post-apocalyptic absence of vegetation here on Kent Avenue, and sparked by our recent screening of "An Inconvenient Truth".

The morning after the concert, having camped out in a field of empty beer cans, our little tent staked down midway between the ash heap of a smoldering bonfire and the small compound of overused porta-johns, we set out alone on a short stroll down a country road lined with acres and acres of perfectly-tended, ready-to-harvest corn.

As we walked along in the near-perfect stillness of a rural Sunday morning, we were dumbstruck by the simple beauty of it all: here in this Rockwellian agricultural paradise, a massive feat of production and commerce was taking place right in front of us.

Thousands of bushels of corn, with all of its food (and fuel!) value, was being manufactured, imperceptibly slow and completely silent, without the clatter of machinery, the rumble of trucks, the belching of fumes, nor any other of the fuss and fury that we now take for granted when we think of the production of goods.

This was Mother Nature's own River Rouge Plant, where Stuff gets Made on a massive scale; but here the factory is already biodegradable, clean-burning, and recycleable - no environmental consultants or catchy green PR campaign necessary. Just add water.

Corn Porn on Flickr