corn smut

While other farmers fear outbreaks of the crop-killing plague they curse as "corn smut," Burns hopes to get rich off it.

There is, of course, truth in the claim that these horrendous episodes are not communism but distortions of communism just as we might say that corn smut is not corn but a disease of corn.

Corn smut, a fungus, mutated to select for the Texas sterile gene and destroy this particular species.

And if the latter project is sabotaged by warm, rainy weather, you'll still reap the savory bonus of huitlacoche--a delicacy dating back to the days of the Aztecs, who would no doubt recoil from our more prosaic description of this edible mold as "corn smut."

And if ethnobotanist Kevin Dahl has his way, this much-maligned fungus -- known as corn smut -- will soon become part of American nouvelle cuisine.