Movie Review - King Corn | Prairie Fire - The Progressive Voice of the Great Plains

King Corn
Documentary
Directed by Aaron Woolf

It was a sobering introduction: For the first time in history, the young generation living today is at risk of a shorter lifespan than their parents.

How can that be? In short, it’s because of our poor diets, our alarming proclivity for fast food and the increasing epidemic of obesity and diabetes in our country.

Shorter yet, it’s because of our addiction to corn.

That’s the message of King Corn, a polished documentary-drama making the rounds and raising the eyebrows of many Americans, including Nebraskans. The film premiered Oct. 12 in New York City and recently played in Omaha and Lincoln, Neb., theaters.

In these parts, it is deemed un-Nebraskan or anti-farmer to find fault with our culture of corn. That may be a thing of the past, however, if King Corn continues to impress Americans coast to coast.

The movie traces the journey of Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, East Coast Yale college buddies who head out to the Heartland to find out where their food comes from. To do that, they purchase one acre of farmland near Greene, Iowa, plant and harvest it. They then follow the corn to a mega-feedlot in Colorado, where it is fed to fatten cattle quickly.

The corn is not only in our beef, the two find out, but also in a majority of other foods we consume in the form of high fructose corn syrup. HFCS is a a sweetener found not only in our soda drinks, but darn near everything else we consume - apple sauce, salad dressing, cookies, chocolate milk, ketchup, sloppy joe sauce, horseradish, granola bars, steak sauce, stewed tomatoes and chewing gum - to name just a few foods.

Corn-fed cattle - cows were not made to eat corn, it is noted, but evolved as grazers of grasses - and HFCS are the biggest culprits in America’s depressing slide into obesity oblivion. In 1971, 47.7 percent of Americans were categorized as overweight or obese. By 2004, that percentage had ballooned to 66.

“Hamburger meat is rather fat disguised as meat,” Loren Cordain, University of Colorado ag economist, says in King Corn.

The spike in our nation’s body fat coincides perfectly with the onset of HFCS as our No. 1 sweetener and the explosion of fast foods in our country. The corn lobby makes the claim that our obesity is by choice, but it is difficult to shrug off the disturbing parallels between our fatness and our growing fondness for fast foods and junk foods.

“Even our French fries - half the calories in the French fries come from the fat they’re cooked in, which is liable to be corn oil or soy oil,” says Michael Pollan, author of Fast Food Nation, in the documentary.

We are now living in a culture of corn, Cheney and Ellis find out, and it has taken America hostage by stealth in a matter of a few decades.

“We are made of corn,” Cheney said. “We have corn in our genes.”

King Corn investigates other flaws in America’s making of food:

*The industrialization of agriculture, which has fueled intensive use of farm chemicals, which has in turn contributed greatly to the environmental damage to our soil and water.

*A deeply ingrained subsidy system that rewards the overproduction of commodity grains and ignores the value of nutritious foods, such as vegetables, fruits and lean meats, (as in grass-fed beef). In 2005, nearly $10 billion in federal subsidies encouraged farmers to grow a corn surplus, and a small fraction of that went for subsidizing nutritious foods.

Because of that longtime excess of corn, the corn lobby has worked hard and spent big money finding alternative uses for the grain. Presto! From thence came high fructose corn syrup.
Cheney and Ellis cook up their own batch of HFCS and give it a taste. It’s sweet, they find out; then they research it further.

“What we were growing was essentially an acre of sugar,” Ellis said. That sweetener has degraded our food supply from a nutritional standpoint, the two added. Foods laced with HFCS amount to empty calories.

The end-all, the two students realize, is that cheaper food is not necessarily the healthiest food.

King Corn should and likely will stimulate needed discussion of our nation’s farm policy and the new farm bill presently being worked out in both houses of Congress. The gist of the movie is this: It is time, perhaps well past the time, to rethink how we do U.S. agriculture.

If we conduct business as usual, the documentary warns, we may see the life expectancies of our children and grandchildren actually decrease. And that would be the first time in human history that has ever happened.

Bookmark/Search this post with: