This year Summer Run Farm grew a variety of corn called "Painted Hills". Its kernels include reds, yellows, whites and blues, and its flavor isn't nearly as sweet as the sweet corn we generally roast or boil and eat with butter.
One of the Alvarez guys says that this is a variety that is traditionally ground and used to make tamales. My cursory internet research said that it is actually a recently developed, open pollinated variety, or a plant whose seeds can be saved and planted to produce a similar crop.
More often than not, when I set out to learn about a plant variety that I'm finding at the market, I run into conflicting information, or common names that don't fit Latin names, or a name that one farmer has been using that doesn't match the names other folks use. I find these discrepancies fascinating. They're the mark of a body of knowledge--seeds and plant varieties--that has evolved over eons in a wide range of places, the ultimate open-source document.
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