When was the last time you had corn? Probably more recently than you think. Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the two protagonists of Aaron Woolf’s 2007 documentary King Corn are surprised when tests of their hair samples reveal that their diets consist mostly of corn. The two friends trek from the East Coast to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and to learn more about the king crop that has come to reign over the American diet.
Cheney and Ellis soon discover that corn is very different than how they’ve imagined it. Today’s farms are huge, not at all like the farms their families owned generations ago. Farmers are producing an excess of corn, and the corn they grow tastes terrible right off the stalk because it’s meant to be processed before people consume it.
While their acre is still growing, Cheney and Ellis set out to investigate where their corn will go after the harvest. This second half of the movie begins to critique the consequences of corn-heavy diets. The duo doesn’t focus much on the toll mass corn production takes on the environment, except to note that a cow feed lot with 100,000 head of cattle (who eat mostly corn) produces as much waste as a city of 1.7 million people. Although they note that 32 percent of harvested corn is exported or turned into ethanol, they don’t explore the environmental implications of exports or ethanol production.
King Corn makes a stronger case for the detrimental health effects corn-heavy diets have on both animals and people. More than 50 percent of produced corn is fed to animals who are raised for human consumption. Corn isn’t part of cows’ natural diets. In fact, too much of it can actually make them sick. But it’s cheap and helps fatten cows quickly. Since cows are obese, the beef people consume is extremely fatty. Corn also delivers a blow to people’s health in another form: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which has been linked to obesity and a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes. HFCS also happens to be in many supermarket items, including soda, cookies, bread, and condiments. Cheney and Ellis strike the perfect balance between being humorous (in trying to make their own HFCS) and being serious (in interviewing a cab driver who talks about diabetes’ toll on every member of his family).
While informative, the movie never gets too heavy-handed. Cheney and Ellis are likable in their enthusiasm for their corn growing project, and the farmers and other people in the Iowa community are portrayed in a sympathetic light. Still, King Corn has enough bite that you might regret that soda you opened when you sat down to watch it.
Source: BecauseAction.com
