King Corn, directed by Aaron Woolf, follows the story of two college buddies Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis as they move to Iowa to plant an acre of corn for kicks. King Corn is their documentary-style, one-year experience of renting farm land, planting corn, fertilizing the corn, applying pesticides and eventually taking their corn to market to sell.
Their corn journey is eye opening and more than a tad unpleasant. Interestingly enough, corn is the most subsidized crop in the USA and American farmers can no longer raise corn for profit without receiving federal government subsidies. For the last thirty years the emphasis placed on American corn crops has been to achieve maximum yield, valuing quantity over quality. High yields are achieved by using genetically modified corns and pesticide resistant, or pesticide-ready corns (in this case Liberty corn that is Liberty pesticide resistant).
For the last few years corn crops in the USA have produced record harvests. The compromise for increased production is taste, quality, nutritional value plus the environmental consequences of using genetically engineered crops and heavily applied applications of fertilizers and pesticides.
King Corn exposes everything you ever wanted to know about the cornification of the American food system.
The central irony in King Corn is that much of America’s bumper corn crops are unpalatable and can only be consumed after the corn has been processed into something else like corn syrup or meat. Cheney and Ellis estimate that from their one acre of corn; 32% will be exported or turned into ethanol, 490 pounds will become sweetener, and more than ½ the crop will be fed to animals to eventually become cheap hamburger meat.
The corn and cattle sub-story is particularly unpleasant as the filmmakers discover that from calf to slaughter takes about 150 days on a bulking diet of corn, coupled with strict confinement to prevent movement, making the cattle is fatten as quickly and economically as possible. The result is weak, sickly animals. Livestock now consume more than 70% of the antibiotics in the USA.
King Corn, aside from showing us behind the scenes of raising a ‘typical’ North American crop, also documents the erosion of small farms in favor of the larger farms. With most farms in Iowa and Colorado now averaging more than 1000 acres as the smaller farms are folded into the larger factory-like operations, no longer even vaguely recognizable as the farms of yesteryears.
I wanted to like this film but found the two central characters carefully constructed indifference, and the monotone narrative, a bit of a challenge to engage with. Rather than appearing neutral or unbiased, the two main protagonists seem complacent and compliant in the industrialization of their food while continuing to stuff hamburgers and other forms of corn-fed meat into their mouths for much of the film. King Corn will appeal to Americans with similar food malaise and for individuals who have limited environmental knowledge about the interconnectivity between food production and the many environmental problems we now face as a planet.
King Corn exposes everything you ever wanted to know about the cornification of the American food system.
Order this film on Amazon.com King Corn
Visit: http://www.kingcorn.net/ or http://www.bullfrogfilms.com
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