dir Aaron Woolf, writers Ian Cheney & Curtis Ellis, cin Ian Cheney, Sam Cullman & Aaron G. Woolf , ed Jeffrey K. Miller
“That’s the basis of our influence now, the fact that we’ve spent less on food. It’s America’s best kept secret. We feed ourselves with approximately 16 or 17% of our take-home pay. That’s marvelous. That’s a very small chunk to feed ourselves. And that includes all of the meals we eat at restaurants, all of the fancy doodads we get in our food system. I don’t see much room for improvement there, which means we’ll spend our surplus cash on something else.” – Earl L. Butz, 18th United States Secretary of Agriculture
For good or for ill, in the United States today, much of our agricultural policy can be directly traced to Earl L. Butz. As Secretary of Agriculture from 1971-1976, Butz abolished the strategic grain reserve and shifted government crop subsidization policy to reward surpluses. Butz was also an advocate of monocropping, and encouraged farmers to plant their crops “from fencerow to fencerow.”
In addition to fostering corporate agriculture, these policies led to an abundance of inexpensive commodity crops, like corn and soy. Cheap corn gave rise to corn-fed livestock, and by extension cheaper meat. It also made high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) an affordable alternative to sugar.
In their documentary King Corn Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis explore corn’s ubiquitous place in the food chain. Beginning with a hair analysis demonstrating how much of their diet can be traced to corn, the recent college graduates decide on a radical next step.
Cheney and Ellis move to Iowa, rent an acre of land and spend the next year growing a crop of government subsidized corn. They plan to ultimately follow their crop as it makes its way through the food system.
King Corn is an unexpectedly sweet film. Though both Cheney and Ellis grew up in the east, each had ancestors from the same rural county in Iowa where they grow their corn. The story of corn is intertwined with a history of agriculture, personalized through their families’ biographies and interviews with distant relatives.
In the age of Michael Moore’s self-aggrandizing, gotcha documentaries, Cheney and Ellis treat their subjects with an abundance of respect. They have an obvious reverence for the family farmer. And, while they are clearly troubled by corn’s place in our diet, they don’t fault the farmers—many of them barely making ends meet—who grow the subsidized commodities.
In fact, I think that King Corn may be a bit too generous. By focusing their documentary on smaller farmers, Cheney and Ellis ignore the rise of corporate agriculture. And in neglecting the fact that the top 10% of growers receive 75% of agricultural subsidies, King Corn glosses over a major contributing factor to the corn in our diets. The conglomerates that are growing these monocrops are tied to the large companies that package corn-syrup sweetened processed foods and offer 99¢ corn-fed beef burgers.
I suppose Cheney and Ellis recognize that most advocacy works best from the ground up. In educating consumers about their food supply and the sheer quantity of corn-based foods being ingesting, they’ve provided the tools for people to modify their own diets.
Cheney and Ellis close the film with a simple action of their own, mostly a symbolic gesture, by purchasing the acre of land they’d rented for their experiment. Sure, it’s a futile effort, that will do nothing to curtail the pervasiveness of corn. Yet watching the two baseball fans play catch in their now fallow field made me smile.