Review: King Corn Documentary

 Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are best friends from Boston, Mass.  For some reason, they decide to see what their bodies are made of and human hair is the tape recorder.  They visit University of Virginia scientist Steve Macko who is an expert in analyzing hair.  They find that the carbon make-up of their body is predominantly corn.

Why are our bodies so filled with corn?  The meat you eat every day from beef to pork to chicken is fed with corn.  In the supermarket, everything is made with corn.  Cookies are made with corn.  Juices are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Cereal is made from corn.  Everything has a form corn in it from HFCS to the corn glutens to corn starch. 

Most cattle feedlots only feed their cattle corn.  It allows the cows to hit market weight fast - and it’s a good thing because the cows would die from disease and stomach issues from eating just corn.  Past 120 days of eating just corn, many of the cattle suffer from acid overdose or acidosis. 

Coincidentally, Ian and Curt both have great grandfathers that hail from Greene, Iowa.  A tiny midwest town - just a speck on the map.  Since they found out they are made up of corn, they decided to pack it up and and move to Iowa for a year and plant one acre of corn - trying to follow their corn from planting to harvest to the food stream.  In their grand parent’s day, 30%+ of the take home pay went to food - today it’s 10-16%. 

After securing a one acre plot in a corn field in Greene, Iowa, the boys head to learn more about corn.  Corn is a very close relative of turf grass - just on steroids.   They also learn that because of the farm bill and subsidies, they will earn $28 from their one acre of corn - without doing a thing.  Thanks to pesticides and fertilizers, one acre of corn can produce up to 200 bushels of corn (4 times what their great grandfathers were capable of harvesting).  That’s 5,000 pounds of food.  So the boys start planting.  They spread plant 31,000 kernels on their acre by machine and the field is sprayed with anhydrous ammonia.  31,000 kernels of Liberty  Lake corn is planted in 18 minutes.  Once the corn is growing, weeds become a problem.  They spread Liberty fertilizer which is specially formulated to kill everything except for the genetically modified Liberty Lake corn.  In the end, the boys harvest 180 bushels from their acre. 

More facts:

• 32% of corn goes to ethanol production
• More than half of the crop will go to feed animals
• Livestock consumes 70% of the antibiotics in the US
• An Iowa farmer can’t feed himself from his land because the corn is inedible until it’s processed
• Real vegetables for eating aren’t subsidized

Watch the movie or buy the DVD and watch the guys make HFCS in their kitchen. 

Overall, I really liked the documentary.  It was recently on PBS.  I thought it flowed pretty well.  It was more about their journey than the facts over how predominant corn is in our society.  I guess it left us to draw our own conclusions.  I really think that without so much corn everywhere, America would be a leaner society.  Michael Pollan is interviewed in the movie.  I always think of when he said in an interview,  ”don’t eat food that doesn’t rot.”  It’s so true.  So much of food isn’t real.  The western diet is that of convenience and total crap - yet most of us (and I am definitely one of them) don’t know how to prepare and eat real food.  I’m definitely infinitely guilty of eating crap.  I even know I’m not making smart food decisions.

Source: King Corn Website, PBS