With Arms Outstretched

King Corn, reviewed

From the outset, King Corn, the feature-length documentary from director Aaron Woolf, seems a bit late to the party. Food weighs heavily both in our minds and on our thighs these days; we have a national obesity crisis, have all but declared war on trans-fat, and everyone is writing a book, making a movie, or simply throwing out their own two cents on food production. It’s all about eating organic, buying local, and getting rid of the processed in exchange for foods that are whole and natural. But even with all the information out there in a variety of easily consumable formats, the McDonald’s across the street still seems to be kicking and I’m guilty of dropping in more often than I’d like to admit.

Luckily, King Corn (mostly) refrains from regurgitating the same old story and even manages to provide a fresh perspective on domestic food (or nonfood) production. The setup is simple: two friends from college, Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, leave the comforts of east coast city living for the tiny, farming town of Greene, Iowa. Their task: to grow one acre of corn in order to figure out how the golden crop gets from a field in Iowa to, quite literally, their hair. It’s a regular, do-it-yourself type of documentary, a la Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, a film that King Corn owes much to not only in terms of style but also in content and personality.

But unlike Spurlock, who was well aware that a month of McDonald’s was far from healthy, Ian and Curtis seem to truly believe that their experiment will bring them back to their roots in some way; both of their great-grandfathers hail from Greene, adding a sentimental face to an otherwise information-heavy piece. And yet this naïveté, if you can call it that, works in their favor. Not only does the town seem excited to help them and see their project through, their search for answers to all things corn comes across genuine on screen. There is no pretentious, condemning attitude or Ivy League elitism (both went to Yale); instead they sit back, allowing the wise farmers to bestow their knowledge on them, humbly accepting the role of ignorant consumer.

Growing the corn, turns out, is not what Ian or Curtis would call “a hands on experiment.” Not only does their one acre look pitifully small in light of the 14.3 million acres planted in Iowa alone that year, it takes a mere 18 minutes to plant 31,000 seeds across 8 rows. That’s what struck me most about the whole process; despite the millions of acres to be tended, these farmers don’t seem to do much, well, farming. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading a book with similar themes, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, which follows a family of four through a different one-year experiment: eating only local (within 100 miles) or home grown food, meat included. Needless to say it’s hard work, from sunup to sundown quite literally. Yet the life of the corn farmer looked strangely idle in comparison; a waitress at a local café seems well aware of this, remarking with laughter during the planting season that within a few days the farmers will no doubt be back in, twiddling their thumbs and eating pie.

The reason for such an easy-going farming lifestyle rests in the product they’re growing; it’s not sweet Silver Queen or my Southern family’s favorite, Peaches and Cream, but rather something called Yellow Dent, a variety scientifically engineered to resist most pests and grow in tightly packed rows, thereby yielding shockingly more corn than ever before. When its time to taste their product for the first time, both Ian and Curtis spit out the inedible, corn-resembling grain, disturbed by just how bad it actually is. Shortly after, a university researcher explains it best to the boys saying, “the irony is that an Iowa farmer can no longer feed his family.” And yet we find out that 80% of the domestic corn crop is comprised of this unpalatable variety and used not for human consumption but rather for making our cows fatter, quicker in grain-fed lots and increasing our own girth in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which is found in far too many products, most of which you’d never suspect.

The film doesn’t try to fully explain the complicated government farm bill and all the paperwork that goes into actually getting paid, but it does show just how grim the life of a (non)farmer is when the guys only pocket $28 from their harvest, and that’s after government subsidies. Neither do the guys try to convert the masses from their corn-fed ways; both Ian and Curtis continue to eat corn-fed hamburger meat and chug sodas chock full of high-fructose corn syrup throughout the film, proving just how hard some habits are to break. It’s not even that polished of a film technically speaking, as it is marred with video deterioration that varies from mildly annoying to incredibly distracting. But this much I can say; two days later I found myself reaching for the grass-fed ground beef at Whole Foods, paying a whopping $9 for just a pound and a half of meat and not even caring. The corn-fed alternative, though half the price, just wasn’t that appetizing anymore.

posted by Alison @ 2:59 PM