When you were a kid, if you were like me, your parents probably told you not to play with your food. It was futile because children are naturally playful and will play with whatever object is in front of them. In the hands of a child, a stick becomes a sword or a magic wand, a leaf in a puddle becomes a sailboat. So, of course, a mound of mashed potatoes and butter becomes a volcano and peas become missiles to be fired from a spoon at one’s little brother because that is clearly all peas are good for.
Fall is a time of harvest and bounty in Iowa. Traffic slows to a crawl as tractors pull wallowing green wagons, groaning under the weight of shelled corn. Fields of rust-colored soybeans that had seemed so much a permanent part of the horizon are now swept clean by combines that labored throughout the night, racing to beat the start of winter. Food is serious business. Food is not a toy.
And yet, when did the corn maze become a thing? What would our pioneer ancestors have thought of farmers who intentionally mowed paths through their healthy fields for the purpose of perplexing visitors? Is turning a cornfield into a maze a form of flaunting our abundance or is it just a way of creating a new revenue stream? (And when did getting lost become a form of recreation?)
A trip to the Colony Pumpkin Patch corn maze in North Liberty costs $8 on weekdays and $10 on the weekend. As if it isn’t easy enough for some of us to get lost in the daylight, they offer special tours after dark. So now, visitors can wander aimlessly through a labyrinth of damp corn in the cold and dark, scraping up against scratchy corn stalks, wondering if they will ever find their way out again and wishing they had thought to go to the restroom earlier when they had the chance.
Kroul’s Farms in Mount Vernon has a corn maze and they also have pumpkins for sale. Pumpkins are technically food, although in America, nobody expects you to eat them. Pumpkins are for carving grotesque faces in or for smashing on the street or throwing off tall buildings to watch them explode. In New Zealand, pumpkin is a common ingredient in many dishes, like potatoes in Idaho or, in Iowa, Jell-O. The fact that we don’t seem to honor pumpkins as food isn’t so much flexing our status as a well-fed nation as it is a way of having fun with the resources at hand.
We’re lucky in Iowa to have corn mazes nearby so that even townies can immerse ourselves in the agricultural experience if only on a recreational level. I feel sorry for city slickers who don’t have easy access to a corn maze. Maybe in some place like Pittsburgh, they could turn off the lights in the grocery store and let people stumble through the isles in the dark, groping the yams and frozen turkeys until they found the exit. But I suppose that wouldn’t be the same thing.