How Sweet It Is

Think of Palm Desert and what comes to mind? Golf, date shakes, camel races, Bob Hope? What about corn? Not Hope’s variety, but the kind that comes on a cob. Riverside County--centered around the Coachella Valley and Palm Desert--is the leading corn-producing area in the state, far ahead of runners-up Imperial and San Joaquin counties. Both Imperial and Riverside counties are in full harvest right now; production has increased 10-fold in the last three weeks.

Joe Kitagawa’s family has been growing corn in the area for more than 50 years. And the family’s ties to the area go back several generations.

“My grandfather came to America at the turn of the century, and he came to the Coachella Valley in 1906,” Kitagawa says. Though Kitagawa’s grandfather couldn’t legally own land because he wasn’t an American citizen, his children could. Now, in addition to other crops, they farm some 1,800 of the roughly 5,000 acres in Riverside County that are planted in corn.

Not just any corn, mind you, but mostly white supersweet corn. They were among the first to introduce the variety some dozen years ago, and it now accounts for about 75% of their harvest.

There are also yellow supersweet varieties, but Kitagawa figured the new white corn would help consumers tell his corn from the regular varieties. “Then some joker came out with a white corn that wasn’t any sweeter than regular and it confused everything again,” he says.

How sweet is supersweet? At the time of picking, it contains roughly three times as much sucrose as regular corn. What’s more, the sugar in the supersweet varieties converts to starch much more slowly than regular corn--a week after picking, it’s more than five times as sweet.