King corn is a documentary that shows the journey of two friends
who discovered that most of what they ate was corn. They then decided to move to
Iowa for and year and grow an acre of corn and learn about how corn is grown
and where it goes after that.
The review I read (http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/10/19/king_corn_is_a_documentary_straight_from_the_heartland/)
presents my perspective on the film quite well. It has a good point when it
says that the reason this movie manages to win us over is that it does not
blurt out that the corn industry is terrible as one would expect in a
documentary about corn. Instead, it mildly presents the corn industry in a
seemingly objective manner. The two men discovering the corn industry seem to
know nothing about this industry, and so we can learn at the same time they do.
One of the main things they learn is just how huge most farms today have to be
in order to be sustainable for the farmer, and even then each acre of corn has
to be subsidized in order to turn a profit. The other thing we learn is that
most of the corn produced goes either to feed cattle in feedlots, or gets made
into high fructose corn syrup.
This movie makes me realize just how much corn there is in
our food. I certainly did not expect to find that there is a lot of corn in our
meat. This will certainly make me look
at ingredient lists before I buy food. It also encourages me to eat more
organic food, because it is much less likely to contain corn.
You are right, Daniel, that organic food is a good start to moving away from eating so many corn-related products in your diet. But why is it bad to eat so much corn? What would make us want to move toward more local and organic foods? Answering these questions (and more) starts to get at the story behind alternative praxis.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your observations on the structure of the film -- the way the filmmakers brought us along while they learned -- were excellent. In fact, this is one of the reasons King Corn is often a much more palatable first step into food conversations than other documentaries.