Really, You Are What You Eat: A Review of the Documentary, King Corn

by Loey Werking Wells
 
 
           
            Corn is everywhere these days: in the news being blamed for higher food prices, in most of our snacks (as My Health Gate writer Avanti Vadivelu pointed out in “What’s Lurking in Your Favorite Snacks”) and even in your hair. 
 
            Best friends and Yale graduates Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney had a seemingly small question. Why was it that when they put a strand of their hair through a spectrometer ( a machine that can measure down to the nth degree what’s inside your body), they were composed 90% of corn-derived elements? They surely knew the age-old maxim “you are what you eat.”  Pump enough sugar or alcohol in a body, and the insulin or blood alcohol content is sure to reflect your well-being. Yet they were not chowing down on endless ears of corn-on-the-cob, or mixing up batches of cornbread every night. Somehow, without their notice, corn had infiltrated their bodies and they wanted to know why.
 
            This question sent them on a three-year journey, back to the farm land their ancestors once tilled. They spent a year growing a crop of corn on a leased one-acre plot and wanted to follow their corn from kernel to consumption. This quest is followed in their documentary King Corn (www.kingcorn.net), directed by Aaron Woolfe and featuring Ellis and Cheney. As an avowed city girl, I think that what goes on at the farm is best left on the farm.  But as this movie unfolds, it brings up some questions and answers that I find a bit unsettling.   Principally, most crops of corn are a starchy non-food product that is used to either feed cows or turn into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Sure I knew before seeing the film that HFCS was found in sodas and chips, but I didn’t realize how insidiously corn has gotten into food you’d never imagine would have it.  Take the average McDonald’s meal—where is the corn in that meal? High fructose corn syrup is in the bun, and the soda. The fries were cooked in vegetable oil, which is a form of corn, and the meat was more than likely fed corn.   As the filmmakers pointed out, “Corn is the raw ingredient for obesity.”
 
            Banish any romantic notions in your head of corn being a food grown for its own sake—you know, the “corn is as high as an elephant’s eye” kind of sentimentality from Oklahoma! Corn, specifically corn grown for feed and to be used for HFCS, is a subsidized commodity. Yet for all the intricacies of American farm policy, King Corn does not push any agenda, but lets the players speak for themselves. They include farmers growing the crop, the meat industry feeding the corn to cows, and even Earl Butz, who was Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford. Nonagenarian Butz points out how miraculous it seemed that Americans could be fed so relatively cheaply by turning the nation’s corn harvest into HFCS and using it as feed, which made for a cheap food supply. It was a wonder for people who had come out of the Depression.
 
            King Corn manages to do something rarely seen in documentaries: it charms you into action. From the stop-motion animation featuring a toy barn,  to their failed attempt at making HFCS in their kitchen, Cheney and Ellis take the viewer on a journey, understanding that they don’t need to broadcast their message with loudspeakers and humiliating antics, and respecting that viewers of King Corn will be intelligent enough to pick up on the ironies of the modern diet. 
 
            If there are no theatres close to you that are showing King Corn, the DVD is available on their website, and will be available for sale or rent in late April on Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon. It will also be airing nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens on April 15^th. If you are at all interested in what’s in your food, and how it got there, this is a movie that will stay with you, almost as long as the corn lingering in your diet.
 
 
To order the DVD and other mechandise, visit King Corn Store.