BobL, my family practised your first method (run-not-walk-back-to-the-kitchen) of corn preparation when I was young and, since we grew a tender white variety called Country Gentleman (now long disappeared), that was just about right. (My mother would probably have started a grass fire if she had ever been given custody of a camp stove.)

The corn we eat these days comes from local farmers who bring it to market in great heaps in the back of pick-up trucks. It is picked just after dawn, cooked within the day, and eaten before dark. Not optimum by the standards of true corn purists, but okay for our aging olfactory senses.

I never buy corn on the cob at the supermarket. That's just sad, and totally unnecessary in southwestern Ontario, where corn has grown since time immemorial. I see it there, all wrapped in plastic, and wonder if the people who buy it come from Mars or Antarctica, or perhaps had their tastebuds (and common sense) shot off in the war.

Jon Freeman's remark about teeth is very pertinent, however. I thank every higher power there is that I still have a full set of natural-grown, original-to-me choppers, inelegant as they may be, for at the age of 65 I can still gnaw a bone or a corn cob to good effect. Mind you, I have to set aside enough time later for a close encounter with the dental floss, but there you go.