There isn’t even a name for my phobia
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- October 21, 2022
- 1093
I spoke recently about the overgrown mess of a garden we had in the backyard when I was a child: tomatoes, fertilized by cow patties cribbed from the neighboring farm, peppers, beans and corn, all consumed by weeds by midsummer. The corn we grew exhibited something I’d forgotten about until it came up in a television show this week.
There are many phobias out there: fear of heights (acrophobia), fear of water (aquaphobia), of spiders (arachnophobia), clowns (coulrophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), patterns of holes (trypophobia) or even the number 13 (triskaidekaphobia). I have a paralyzing fear of corn mold, or huitlacoche. My phobia is so bizarre there isn’t even a name for it.
I remember clearly pulling up short in the backyard corn row and seeing an ear bulging with gray, oversized monsters. It made my blood go cold, my heart race and nausea swell in my throat.
I felt like I was seeing something from another world, not meant to be seen, like looking death in the eye. It looked like a monstrous, cancerous growth, slowly consuming our poor corn crop. I was powerless to help this poor ear of corn, completely subverted by an invasion of the corn snatchers creature. I think I may have run, screaming, from the garden.
Turns out people eat that stuff. Knowing this is like learning people like to snack on mummy lungs. What the heck is wrong with you?
The stuff I saw is called huitlacoche, corn smut or Mexican truffle. It is said to taste “earthy,” which is suspicious right out of the gate.
Mushrooms are earthy in a good way. You can just taste the stinky soil from which they arose overnight, and it’s pleasant.
Some French cheeses are earthy, tasting like a gym sock that has spent time buried in the earth near a fish graveyard.
Huitlacoche is the kind of earthy you might scrape from Dracula’s coffin lid, or so it seems to me, having never tried it.
This description, from eater.com, sums it up: “huitlacoche is a fungus that feeds off corn before its ears fully develop. The contagion is usually brought forth by annual rainy seasons and results in bulbous, blue-gray growths that deform maize kernels into Frankenstein-esque galls.” I’m shuddering even as I hit copy and paste — “bulbous growths and galls” indeed.
The Aztecs consumed it as a delicacy centuries ago, and it remains quite popular in Mexico as an umami-packed meat substitute. In America it is labeled a blight, a disease and a problem for farmers.
There is little market for it here, and I suspect my own phobia is common enough in the U.S. to warrant naming it. It is described so disparagingly here that it is no wonder huitlacoche hasn’t caught on as the new, little, black dress. Here, it’s a problem to be dealt with aggressively.
Farmers have long thought of huitlacoche as a nuisance that wreaks havoc on corn crop yields and clogs up harvesting equipment. The USDA devoted years of research to eradicating huitlacoche through fungicides and hybrid corn species that are resistant to its spores, with little success.
For those silly enough to eat this corn from hell, it is treated much like mushrooms or truffles, cooked as a savory addition to soups, as a side dish with meats or by itself in a taco.
Honestly, just writing about this gives me the heebie jeebies. You might be afraid of ants (myrmecophobia), but let me tell you, running up against an unexpectedly bloated, gray blob of corn will send anyone screaming from the garden like a karaoke singer at a tractor pull.