Taking on “King Corn”
A new documentary explains why the U.S. agricultural system is to blame for America’s obesity epidemic.
By Sommer Mathis
November 2, 2007
Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis taste their harvest in Greene, Iowa. Photo by Sam Cullman
Near the end of the new documentary “King Corn,” Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the film’s narrators and de facto main characters, sit in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of an Iowa field and eat some McDonald’s. They’re trying to make a political point about, of all things, corn. It’s by no means the first time McDonald’s has come under the scrutiny of a zealous filmmaker, but it is the first time that the fast food giant has been targeted as merely a small player within the entire U.S. agricultural system.
Overweight America likes to tackle its fast food vices one at a time. In the early 1990s it was movie theater popcorn. Or, more specifically, it was saturated fat found in the coconut oil most commonly used to pop corn in theaters. In 1992, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group that educates the public about nutrition, gave an infamous press conference announcing that a typical medium bag of movie popcorn contained 37 grams of saturated fat—more than three McDonald’s Big Macs. Every major news outlet reported the story, and it soon became a national obsession: Popcorn sales plummeted, and theater chains quickly replaced their coconut oils with lower-fat alternatives.
More recently, the debate over artificial trans fats, the artery-clogging substances listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated oil, has dominated the headlines. The anti-trans fats movement caught fire after Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, and Morgan Spurlock’s 2005 film, “Super Size Me,” brought the debate to national attention. Since then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has mandated that all food labels list trans fats amounts, many fast food chains have pledged to use healthier cooking oils, and cities like New York have barred restaurants from using ingredients that contain trans fats.
Although not nearly as slickly packaged as Fast Food Nation and “Super Size Me,” “King Corn” argues that corn should be the next target of America’s fast food watchdogs. Fear not: The movie isn’t targeting sweet corn on the cob. That type of corn is, as always, a good source of dietary fiber, protein, and vitamin A. The corn Cheney, Ellis, and director Aaron Woolf are concerned with is called “field” or “dent” corn. Humans can’t eat it raw, but it has nevertheless been the most abundant crop grown in the United States for the past 30 years.
The film explains why. In 1970, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz initiated a sea change in the way U.S. farmers did business. Previously, the federal government forced corn farmers to restrict their production in an attempt to stabilize the crop’s price. Butz changed the entire subsidy system to encourage the production of as much corn as possible. Cheaper and cheaper corn flooded the market, and the market answered by creating new, innovative ways to use it.
The problem, however, is that many of these innovations created more problems than they solved. Today, Americans use field corn for three major purposes: to make the gasoline additive ethanol, to feed livestock, and to produce the cheap, ubiquitous sweetener, high fructose corn syrup. While each of these uses has its upsides—ethanol is a renewable energy source, and high fructose corn syrup is inexpensive—they all come with heavy downsides, too. Ethanol is often cited as an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline, but some contend that producing it actually requires more energy than the fuel itself generates. Replacing a cow’s traditional grass diet with corn-based feed is an inexpensive way to produce more beef, but it also creates much fattier, less healthy meat—not to mention countless health problems for the cows themselves. As far as humans are concerned, excessive consumption of high fructose corn syrup—the main ingredient in soda and found in other products like cheap breads and spaghetti sauces—has been linked to a worldwide surge in obesity that is fueling the growth of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes.
While “King Corn” raises compelling questions about the fate of those generations who have grown up in the corn era, it does so rather clumsily. The story’s entry point is an overly staged visit to a scientist who tests strands of Cheney’s and Ellis’s hair, only to find that they are made mostly of corn. The artificial set-up, coupled with a ham-fisted bit of narration about how the two men, college buddies from Yale, became interested in the topic because of some vague concerns they had about “people their age,” makes it difficult to become invested in the narrative’s central conceit: that the two men will pilgrimage to a small Iowa farming town where both their great-grandfathers happened to have lived, and grow one acre of field corn themselves.
It’s a narrative structure, to be sure, but too-personal scenes—they look up distant relatives in the town where they’re farming—tacked onto an otherwise fine documentary doesn’t a compelling story make. That they also spend an awful lot of time shrugging their shoulders in helpless dismay as other farmers work their land for them with giant, modern machines also doesn’t make the lead characters any more sympathetic. By the end, though, director Woolf brings the topic at hand back into sharp focus, deftly driving home the point that any American under the age of 30 today has never lived under any circumstances except in the age of corn dominance, with health consequences likely to play out only later in life.
So, despite its flaws, could “King Corn” push Americans to rethink our relationship to corn? The filmmakers would probably be the first to admit that it’s unlikely. In a revealing interview with Butz (who’s best known for a racist remark he once made to Rolling Stone) near the end of the film, the former agriculture secretary reiterates the reality of his subsidy-laden legacy: Since the United States now produces so much extra food, meals cost less than they used to. Americans now spend a lower percentage of their income on nutrition than they ever have, which has led to an increase in our wealth. Changing the country’s entire agricultural system could alter the way our entire economy is structured.
What is more likely to come is a one-at-a-time approach to the distinct effects of the over-sized corn industry. High fructose corn syrup, with its clear relationship to type 2 diabetes, appears ripe for the same kind of consumer-led attacks that trans fats have received lately. An attack on unhealthy beef from corn-feed lots could come later. But considering our increasing reliance on corn-based alternatives to gasoline, it’s a good bet that “king” corn will continue to reign for some time.
Sommer Mathis is the editor-in-chief of DCist.
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