The corn smut fungus (Ustilago zeae or U. maydis) infects corn plants early in the season via damaged plant tissue. As the fungus matures, it goes on to form the bluish-gray, swollen galls you ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Have you ever gleefully walked into your garden, anxiously anticipating your early summer sweet-corn harvest, only to find that ...

It’s been tough going for the Mexican truffle here in the U.S. It seems that neither time nor efforts by the James Beard Foundation to increase popularity have been able to make people understand that ...

Ashok Selvam is the former James Beard Award-winning regional editor for Eater’s Midwest region, in charge of coverage in Chicago, Detroit, and the Twin Cities. He’s a native Chicagoan and had been ...

IRAPUATO, Mexico (AP)—It’s now an established scientific fact: Smut is good for you. Corn smut, that is. For years, scientists have assumed that huitlacoche (WEET-LA-KO-CHEE) a gnarly, gray-black corn ...

One summer day, I went through two of my Dad’s cornfields with a mission: eradicate the gray, bulbous growth that seemed to appear in every field, particularly in the Silver Queen field. I pulled ...

Corn smut in California. Photo by David Cohen/flickr/CC BY 2.0 An unsightly fungal disease called corn smut strikes fear in the hearts of American and Canadian farmers. When it appears as fleshy, ...

I’m sure a lot of you, upon hearing the term “jarred corn smut,” might assume that this post would be better off as an addendum to John Seaborn Gray’s elegant treatise on whole chicken in a can and ...

One evening last July, Nat Bradford walked along rows of White Bolita Mexican corn at his Sumter, S.C., farm, and nearly wept. All 1,400 of the corn plants had been overtaken almost overnight by corn ...

In tall rows of brambles or tomatoes, farm interns can't always see one another, but our yelps and shrieks carry. On a few occasions a giant tiger bee toting a paralyzed cicada had buzzed a person's ...

Chef Dave Rawson of Meadowlark Restaurant in Washington Twp. recalled his mom growing gardens when he was a kid and getting something called corn smut in her ears of corn. She went ahead and threw the ...

IRAPUATO, Mexico (AP) — Now it is established scientific fact: Smut is GOOD for you. Corn smut, that is. For years, scientists have assumed that huitlacoche, a gnarly, gray-black corn fungus long ...