Store Bought Corn vs. Home Grown Corn

I was interested to see if growing your own corn is actually worth it. They had corn for I think 8 for a dollar so I bought some. I was also able to harvest some of my own about the same time from my community garden plot.

Here's the two ears I harvested next to one store-bought:

Mine has a much prettier purple color to it :)  Now I imagine the store bought corn was grown in a massive corn field and sprayed with countless amounts of some sort of biological warfare. Mine was not. Soooo, I opened up the ears to reveal this:

Gross. And all the pre-munched mush/catepillar poop came crumbling out. But as you can see, they only got the very tip, so did I eat these? Yep. I just cut the tops off. (The rest of my corn from the second harvest was not so lucky - almost every ear of corn was a total loss.)

So here's the naked ears of corn next to each other:

Aside from the cut off tops, mine are a little smaller, but the kernels are a little bigger and a richer shade of yellow.

Now for the taste:

I had read that farmers will literally have a pot of water boiling and then will go out to the field and pick the corn and plop it in the pot. The reason is because as soon as an ear of corn is picked, the sugars start being converted into starches (for non-sciency people out there, this = not as sweet). Which now makes sense to me why these huge massive commercial growers are growing supersweet versions of corn - who know how long it takes for corn to get from the commercial enterprise to my grocery store, and then how long it sits there before ending up in my refrigerator, and then how long after that it sits in there until I feel like making corn. I bet if you ate this corn right from the field you would get a sugar high.

Anyways, I think my home-grown corn sat in the fridge for 2 or 3 days, but I figured that was still better than the possibly weeks (?) the store-bought corn had been sitting there, so I felt it was still a fair trial.

I tasted my corn first - it had a good, robust corn flavor. Then I took a bit of the store-bought corn. Eating that right after my home-grown corn made it taste like nothing! It was like drinking sugar water - I could tell it was sweet but it basically had no taste. Interestingly, as I continued to eat the store-bought corn, my tastebuds adapted and it just tasted like normal corn. But then I went back and took a bite of the home-grown one - it tasted like I had slathered it in butter or something - super flavorful!!! 

So the verdict: if you have the space, yes, grow your own corn because it tastes AMAZING compared to the crap sold in stores. Just watch out for the corn earworm guys!