A month ago, after the rains arrived, I received a text from a friend asking me where he can get some bhutta. His wife is pregnant, and at that moment, she had a desperate bhutta craving. He was on a hunt.
I had previously suggested the small thelas outside Premsons department store in Breach Candy. When I lived in that neighbourhood they always had some, along with singada (water chestnut), and overpriced imported fruit. A few days later, my friend and I had another conversation.
Dad-to-be: Mrs wants her corn fix. The Breach Candy guy doesn’t seem to sell them any more.
Me: Huh!? Did he say why?
Dad-to-be: I was too dejected to ask. He kept pushing the yellow stuff.
Me: You’ll get some at Prarthana Samaj Market. And maybe at Grant Road Market.
Dad-to-be: Nah, none at Grant Road Market.
Me: Many farmers may have switched to golden corn. Possibly more profitable.
Dad-to-be: Just to mess with my life, surely.
I grew up in a flat on Marine Drive, a vantage spot to enjoy the city’s rains. These were a few of my favourite monsoon memories: being sent home early from school because of torrential rains and inevitable floods; taking a notebook to the lake-like gymkhanas and ripping out pages to make a thousand paper boats; and walking on the promenade with my parents eating bhutta, and enjoying the mist from the surf before it started vomiting trash on to the pavement. My rubber flip-flops would sometimes float away in the streaming water underfoot, because I was paying more attention to the freshly roasted bhutta steaming in a husk, tightly held in my grip, and sparkling with salt and lime, and speckled with red chilli powder.
Then, bhutta meant the white, not-too-sweet, slightly starchy but deeply aromatic makkai, the only corn we knew of in Bombay for decades. So these days, I find it very disconcerting that we have to hunt it down. In the last few years, at bhuttawalas, in markets, and in restaurants, white bhutta has become a novelty. There are a few bhuttawalas in Colaba’s Strand Market and all of them predominantly roast yellow corn, at best stocking only four or five ears of white corn. If I ask them for white corn, they say, “If you want it then I can get it for you, but nobody wants to eat it any more. Everybody only has the yellow ones.” In markets across the city, I hear the same from yellow corn sellers. For me, the sweetness of yellow corn just doesn’t doesn’t work with roasting, lime, salt and chillies.
Last week, I went to Prathana Samaj vegetable market to figure out why this was happening. I met Datta, a man whose entire family helps run a makkai stall on the street. He does most of the sales; his tiny, always-smiling, toothless mother plucks or slices the kernels from the cobs, and his wife joins her in winnowing them until the ground around them is a carpet of soft, fluffy chaff. He was pointed out to me by sellers of yellow corn, as the neighbourhood expert on bhutta. The Dattas’ inventory is more white than yellow.
He told me that the flood of yellow corn in our markets is due to simple economics. When it first became popular in India less than a decade ago, American sweet corn was exotic. We liked its sweeter flesh, its crunchier, larger kernels, its pleasing golden-yellow colour. Demand increased, and farmers, traders, and retailers figured out that it made more sense for them to deal in sweet corn. Yellow corn yields two to four ears per plant, white only one. Yellow corn cobs are larger, so it takes fewer cobs to fill a gunny sackful for sale. A 250 gram plastic bag of yellow corn kernels is about the same size as a 350 gram bag of white corn kernels. Yellow corn grows year round, white corn is seasonal.
Yellow corn, the super-sweet variety we have, travels better, barely converting any sugar to starch, tasting good even ten days after it is harvested. In contrast, white corn becomes unpleasantly starchy in just a couple of days.“People who cook with corn, mostly Gujaratis, use white corn,” said Datta. “And then some people have diabetes, so they don’t eat sweet corn any more.” While white corn is more likely to be found in the Gujarati pockets of the city – Prarthana Samaj, Matunga and occasionally even Breach Candy – I doubt Datta’s second statement would be endorsed by a doctor.
“Wherever you have religious food or traditional recipes, they call for white corn, “ said food blogger and consultant Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, who has been concerned about its disappearance for a while. “Like rushi ki bhaji
However, all corn, from the blue-purple and red varieties found in and around Delhi and the North East, to the white monsoon staple of Mumbai, and the hybrid yellow American sweet corn that now dominates our markets, is the same, just with genetic mutations that lead to different characteristics of colour, sweetness and size. Yellow corn for example contains genes that give it more beta carotene and that colour. Most yellow corn comes from companies that supply seeds to farmers. These seeds are what scientists call F1 (or first generation) hybrids, a combination of two previously inbred lines. The hybrid combines the best characteristics of both parents, but is unable to reproduce effectively. (Mules are F1 hybrids of horses and donkeys. Most mules are sterile.)
To keep growing yellow corn, a farmer needs to keep buying seeds, as opposed to planting seeds set aside from the previous crop. This makes the farmer’s work easier because it yields a perfectly crafted crop with high resistance to disease and pests; many desirable characteristics including sweetness and size; consistent quality, and often a ready market. But it also makes the farmer completely dependent on the company that sells him the seeds. Organic veggie suppliers Hari Bhari Tokri use only open varieties of seeds, or seeds that are naturally cross-pollinated or self-pollinated in a field. “Hari Bhari Tokri wants to make our farmers independent and self-sustainable,” said co-founder Ubai Hussein. “We still haven’t found yellow corn seeds that meet this criteria.”
The ratio of yellow to white corn sold at the Agriculture Produce Market Committee market in Vashi, I found out, is 10:1. According to grain trader Vijaykumar Shirke, on average, for every 4,000 sacks of corn sold in a day, about 400-500 are white; the rest are yellow. Shirke said that farmers are no longer interested in white corn because yields are low, it takes more work, and has much lower profit margins. Additionally, yellow corn seeds are more easily available than those of white corn. Indeed, white corn has become much more expensive than yellow corn. Most vendors in Prarthana Samaj are currently selling yellow kernels for Rs20 per pouch, and white for Rs50.
I closed my investigations into corn after chatting with Nameet Modekurti, the co-founder of First Agro, a ‘zero-pesticide’ farm in Karnataka’s Cauvery Valley. Modekurti said that he foresees a future when white corn is no longer sold in our markets. “Yellow corn is a result of manufactured demand, just like mineral water,” he said. “Seed companies have taken away the farmer’s power and given him convenience, but most times the farmer doesn’t even know where the seed comes from. Even worse, our farmers have no idea of seed diversity [and therefore no desire to preserve it].”
He compares the situation to that of rajgira and raagi, both regional staples that fell out of fashion, until people noticed their nutritive value, or got into wheat-free diets, and perhaps even thought about the likely loss of diversity in their food. When rajgira and raagi came back into our cities, they came back in a posher and pricier avatar, in our cereals and processed foods. “Our food choices are being made for us, by retailers, by companies, and they are affecting our food patterns,” said Modekurti.
I’ve been putting together a database of bhuttawalas and bhajiwalas who sell white corn. I have found a few that make it available all year round somehow, drawing from the harvests of both the rabi and kharif farming cycles across the country. And last week, after completing this column, I fixed a dinner of two cobs of roasted white corn, each rubbed with half a lime dipped in red chilli powder and salt. The kernel-less cobs will flavour the stock for a soup soon. There are a few kilos of white corn sitting in my freezer for future meals.
WHERE TO GET WHITE CORN ALL YEAR ROUND
Rajesh Corn Corner
Plot No.196, Road No.3, Jawahar Nagar, Goregaon (West). Tel: 98921 11234/99691 64450. Open daily, from 3pm to 10pm.
Rs20 for roasted white corn, Rs 70 for “cocktail” corn with a variety of sauces and toppings.
Datta
Prarthana Samaj Vegetable Market (Kelkar Market). Tel: 93231 11513/77385 46030 (home delivery available from Backbay Reclamation to Lokhandwala).
1 kilo of white corn kernels, Rs200 for knife-cut and Rs300 for hand-plucked. Delivery charges apply.
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.