XX 



Sweet Corn Ripe 



A; YOU read the title of this chapter it is likely that you 

 will think of these words as you have seen them many 

 times, printed crookedly on a shingle, and nailed to a fence or 

 a tree by a roadside farm. 



Every year, along about the first of August, about one 

 million such signs go up on all the roads in at least forty out 

 of our forty-eight states. Simultaneously, some thirty million 

 American mouths begin to water. There is no doubt about 

 sweet corn being America's favorite vegetable. The dieticians 

 have worked hard to make us value the vitamins in the tomato 

 and the chemical properties of the carrot. They sold us acres 

 of spinach on the iron it was supposed to contain. But no 

 Dr. Hauser was needed to sell America sweet corn. Even those 

 American men who during ten months of the year will ac- 

 knowledge no vegetable but the potato look forward to August 

 and September and devote those months to the solid enjoy- 

 ment of corn on the cob. 



What the sweet-corn season does to the sale of butter I 

 have no way of knowing. But medical men who are interested 

 in the production and reduction of human avoirdupois know 

 very well that no one in this country loses weight during 

 the months of Golden Bantam. There isn't sufficient will- 

 power or vanity in the American temperament to enable even 

 an overweight motion-picture star with a contract hanging 

 in the balance to say "No" to temptation when it is pre- 

 sented in the form of two or three of those short, golden, 

 eight-rowed ears, with plenty of butter to spread along the 

 rows as one gnaws. Or to leave it at two or three, either. 



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