Kernels worth saluting

It is still morning-hazy when Pete Flynn nudges his old barn-clearing dog, Sarah, off the passenger seat and drives me up through the steamy fields of new-wave corn.

The tomatoes have been slowpokes this season. The corn was late, too, the first picking closer to the end of July than, as it typically is, the beginning.

But there has been something of an epiphany on this hilly farm in Westtown, Chester County. It has been the summer of the coming of the Mirai (me-RYE), and I've shown up to see what all the fuss is about.

It was my friend Conrad who told me about it. Said he'd taken it to a party and it's all anyone talked about: "Where'd you get that corn?"

Mirai is a new thing, a variety of yellow corn naturally crossbred to pick up the tenderness of "sugar-enhanced" varieties and the sweetness of the "supersweets" (whose kernels tend to be tougher).

In Japanese, the name means "The future is almost here." For fours years or so, Mirai was available only in Japan, even though the seed was developed by Centest Inc., a research farm northwest of Chicago.

It isn't the juggernaut kind of crop corn that Big Ag goes for. "It's not like you're going to plant 100 acres, turn around and pick 100 acres," Centest's Gary Pack tells me.

Even so, the distributor, Siegers Seed Co. of Holland, Mich., has watched sales triple as it waves off the big growers. Mirai needs careful seedbed prep, warm soil, well-monitored moisture, and hand, not machine, picking.

That was a perfect fit for Japan's boutique vegetable farms. And for the Japanese nose for novelty: Stores stacked it beyond the corn case, marketing it as the next Vidalia of sorts, a dessert vegetable, even a fruit.

In season, it accounts for an astonishing 35 percent of Japan's sweet-corn market.

Mirai's tender sensibilities made it perfect for another venue - the quintessential American roadside farmstand.

Which is a pretty good description of Pete Flynn's bountiful operation - Pete's Produce Farm, set on 200 rolling green acres between Newtown Square and West Chester.

He was wary last year. Ever since Silver Queen dethroned Golden Bantam decades ago, white corn - not yellow - has been the local cob of choice. (He still carries white corn, now Silver King, and he's got a bicolor variety, too, the good-eating Xtra Tender.)

There was another factor he weighed before planting this spring: Siegers' Mirai seed goes for nearly twice the price of regular corn seed. Flynn would have to sell Mirai - which he'll have through September - for $5.50 a dozen, $1.25 more than his other varieties.

We pass the girl picking sunflowers, and the late-ripening heirloom tomatoes. The stalks of Mirai are farther apart than typical corn, the ears fuller. Flynn cracks one off.

I strip it: It is a voluptuous, corn-poster beauty, creamy yellow with, as they say in the trade, "good tip fill."

I take a chomp. The kernels are deep and full, their skin startlingly thin and taut. Every bite pops off the cob, as crisp and juicy as a water chestnut.

It is sweet, all right - its 20 percent sugar content in the mid-range of modern corns, a subtle corn flavor wafting through. I finish the whole ear raw, right in the muddy row.

Then I buy more Mirai. Steam it for breakfast. I have it again for dinner, sucking the cob, understanding, deep down, all the fuss.