By Sharon Dowell
Food Editor
A simple film with a powerful message about our country's abundance of corn and the impact that grain has on our health, our nation's economy and the dwindling number of family farms is coming to public television next week.
"King Corn” has found a niche among those concerned about the quality of food being grown and eaten in this country since the independent film was released in limited distribution last September. If you've eaten a fast food burger, an order of fries and a soft drink in the past 30 years, then you should take time to see how the subsidized corn crop fuels our fast food nation.
The 90-minute film presents the impact corn is having on our country by following two college friends who decide to move to Iowa, grow an acre of corn, and follow their grain harvest into the food system.
What they learn is that 80 million acres of corn are grown each year to feed cows that are eventually turned into hamburgers. Potatoes are cooked in vats of corn or soybean oil for French fries served at restaurants across the country. And soft drinks we gulp by the gallons for breakfast, lunch, dinner and all hours in between are made with high fructose corn syrup, a cheap alternative to sugar that began showing up in soft drinks 30 years ago.
The film explores why obesity is so rampant in our country, why the farm subsidy program derailed years ago, and why we need to learn more about the food and beverages we're shoveling into our mouths every day.
One Iowa corn farmer in the documentary was blunt about the American-grown corn that goes into so much of our food today: He said, "We're not raising corn, we're raising crap!”
The film's two subjects,
Ian Cheney and
Curt Ellis, learned a lot more than how to grow corn during their year in Iowa, they said recently during telephone interviews.
"When we started out, we were very naïve,” Ellis, 28, said while on the road to promote the film. He currently lives in Portland, Ore. Neither Ellis nor
Cheney had been to Iowa before filming this project, but the experience was profound, they both agreed.
"We spent so much time learning about the world behind our dinner plate and then spent so much time with the footage of that world, it had a real effect on how I make decisions about what food I buy,” the 27-year-old
Cheney said.
"It's really hard to swallow a bite of steak that I know is coming from an enormous, 100,000-head-of-cattle feedlot in which the smell stayed in my clothes days after my visit,”
Cheney said.
"And the flip side of that is it feels really good to eat a bite of grass-fed beef that I know comes from a farm whose owner I've gotten to meet and shake hands with.”
"I've tried to become a lot more careful about what food I'm spending my money on and what I put in my body,” he said.
Ellis and
Cheney knew nothing about planting, growing and harvesting corn when they landed in Iowa. They planted their acre of corn, learned to run farm equipment and eventually harvested their corn. They also applied for a farm subsidy, and spoke to a variety of scientists, nutrition experts, government officials and farmers to tell their story about corn.
They followed the corn trail to a Colorado feedlot, and learned from agriculture experts why a cow's stomach is not equipped to handle grains and what problems that poses in sprawling feedlots with tens of thousands of head of cattle. They prepared a batch of nearly inedible high fructose corn syrup made with toxic ingredients, and talked to people whose families have been affected by Type 2 diabetes, impacted in part by the role of a corn-based diet.
"I'm really proud of the way we approached the film, and I'm proud of how ignorant we were of how the whole system worked,” said Cheney, a Boston native. "I think we brought to the making of the film a strong sense of curiosity and a deep desire to know what exactly was going wrong with our food system.”
That naivete also helped them become accepted by the people of Greene, Iowa, where they lived and got to know the residents of the small rural community. It was the same community where Cheney and Ellis' great-grandfathers had lived and farmed.
"Our minds really were empty and they were filled up by smart corn farmers like
Chuck Piatt, who was good enough to share his perspective on how this system works,” Cheney said.
Piatt's family farm was where the acre of corn was planted and harvested.
Both Cheney and Ellis said they've kept in touch with
Piatt since the filming, talking to him regularly; Ellis even visited
Piatt during a return trip to Iowa several months ago. Cheney said they'd still like to buy that acre of Iowa farm land they worked several years ago.
Cheney said while his generation loves technology, something major is missing with all the computers, cell phones and
iPods: "I think hand in hand with all that love of technology comes a yearning for real things — a connection to the soil, an understanding of what good food is or just for an understanding of what food is at all.”
How did growing that acre of corn affect Cheney and Ellis?
"I understand the processed foods so many of us have relied on should not be considered food in the same way as foods we might buy directly from a farm,” Cheney said.
"Spending a whole year growing what was essentially a nutrition-less crop made me think a little more deeply about what I want to put into my body.”
The two filmmakers continue to promote their film, addressing high school and college students, small farm organizations and community-supported agriculture groups.
"It's a treat for us, not only to be able to share the film with others but to be able to learn from all the different communities ways in which the film touches them, ways in which they're trying to solve some of the problems raised by the film,” Cheney said.
Meanwhile, Cheney and Ellis have completed a second documentary entitled "The Greening Southie” about Boston's first green building and what a modern building is made of today. That film, Cheney said, will debut April 22, Earth Day, on the Sundance channel.
