I just shelled my first corn cob of the season. Shucked. Whatever. So satisfying. Corn on the cob is surely the summit of Nature’s achievement in terms of packaging. Apart from bananas, of course. And ladies.

I don’t really care if mankind in the developed world wants to have his food cut into identical shapes, wedged into a polystyrene tray, shrink-wrapped in polythene, refrigerated to the edge of morbidity and delivered in a square van in the half-hour slot most convenient to his withering and entirely self-inflicted schedule. Really, I don’t. But to do it with a corn on the cob is too much of a shame.

Sliced off to a flat plane at either end, pressed into a supermarket tray with its identical pair and trussed in plastic (Buy One, Get One Free! Buy Five, Get Nine More for the Price of Two! Buy 12, Take Home a Checkout Girl!), a corn on the cob is a pretty pointless thing. Peel off the protective polymers, sweaty with post-mortem juiceflow, cram the empty plastic plate into your landfill-shaming kitchen bin, stick the two pale yellow truncheons into a pot of water, boil them for a bit, scrotch down the hot starch with some salt, and go back to your miserable life. Marvellous. Lucky you. Sing “Huzzah!” for the harvest and all the bounty of the earth.

But bring one home from the greengrocer, like I just did, and lay it on the kitchen table, and look at it for a while, and you’ve got a whole different proposition. With its ends still on and its pale green prepuce intact, Nature’s intended length and taper still there, the tangle of dark, pubey fibres exploding at one end, the full hardness of its late-summer swell still potent in your hand, it’s a hell of a symbol of the fertility of the land.

Nothing keeps a corn better than the canoes of cellulose, layer after layer, which you peel off to expose the fruit. Nothing better regulates the air flow and moisture to the treasure inside. It is a job that no man-made packaging yet comes close to – a corn hits the pot pretty much as perfect as it left the farm. Peeling back those layers and snapping them off at the stem, stripping the fibres, boil, boil, boil, and then hot, hot, hot on to a brick of butter (although it’s better if you leave it ten minutes to set, but who in the world could?), and only a touch of salt.

That’s good eating, that is. And if, because you were lazy about stripping the fibres, your enjoyment of the smooth flesh is compromised by the odd stray hair between your teeth, well, isn’t that always the way?

Even better than straight from the greengrocer is straight from the ground.

My grandmother used to grow them in an allotment at the end of her garden in Stanmore. I thought she was having me on at first. At 6 or 7 I lived on boil-in-the-bag cod mornay, Angel Delight and Humphrey straws. I had no idea you could grow things.

She would take me down the end of the garden to choose my corn and then we’d bring it back to the kitchen and shuck it and boil it (“With a spoonful of sugar, that’s why it’s called ‘sweetcorn’”) and scoff it with glee. Reason alone to travel to Stanmore, as if getting to see the northernmost station on the Jubilee line wasn’t in itself enough.

Then one day I went out to get a sweetcorn and there weren’t any. Because it was the wrong time of year, I guess. And so I screamed and I screamed and I screamed, until she went to the shops and bought a couple of corns to tie on the plants, which fooled me completely.

These days I am (slightly) better able to accept the vagaries of the season, and I confess I only knew it was sweetcorn time because of the Whitechapel Gallery Dining Room.

The dish that reminded me was called “Textures of English sweetcorn” and was not nearly so pompous as it sounds. On one of the funnest plates I’ve seen in ages there was a teeny bowl of gorgeous, tangy lemongrass and sweetcorn soup; a weeny parmesan “taco” filled with sweetcorn and salsa; a creamed corn and mushroom roll; a little puff of cornbread; a corn custard; and then also two sly little roundels off a plain old boiled corn which I left till last because I knew they’d be the best.

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