Kernel Knowledge

[November 7th, 2007]

Last night I had a helping of corn for dinner. So did you. Odds are, in fact, that we’re getting several servings of corn at every meal—not in its original, vegetable state, but as a hamburger, as French fries, and as the can of Coke washing it down. In its various forms, corn is making us fat. Corn is killing us.

Of course, nobody wants to hear this news, let alone have mealtime spoiled by a documentary. Which is why I’m delighted to report that King Corn , a new movie made in part by Portland native Curt Ellis, is the exact opposite of the harangues and stunts that have previously identified movies that explore how we eat. Instead the film, directed by Aaron Woolf, takes an aw-shucks tone epitomized by Ellis, who recently moved home to Portland and spoke with WW last week. “People are actually going to theaters to watch a movie about watching corn grow,” Ellis said, “and we’re all shocked.”

They shouldn’t be. King Corn is the best and most important movie yet made about the American diet—in no small part because it is the most open-minded and inquisitive.

The kernel of the film is the decision by Ellis and his college buddy Ian Cheney to embark to Greene, Iowa, where they will grow one acre of corn and see where their crop ends up. If this kind of investigation sounds familiar, it’s because the filmmakers were exchanging ideas with reporter Michael Pollan while he was writing The Omnivore’s Dilemma , and they share his curiosity. “We don’t know a thing about corn,” they explain to the farmer who will loan them the land. “Seems like a good time to find out.”

The farmer’s response is a baffled “What the heck?,” and rightly so: Distrust is a perfectly reasonable reaction to two wised-up Yale kids who decide to expose the underbelly of American agriculture. And there’s plenty to expose: “If you’re standing in a field in Iowa,” a professor explains in the film, “there’s an immense amount of food being grown—none of it edible.” Ellis and Cheney figure that out for themselves when they taste-test their crop, and immediately spit it out. (“Tastes like chalk,” one mutters.) So then they’re off on another agricultural odyssey: Finding out how we eat inedible corn.

It’s not pretty. The gorging of cattle with thick, corn-based feed is explored in nauseating detail, as is the movie’s chief target, high-fructose corn syrup. That’s the processed sweetener used in foods from hot dog buns to ketchup, and that downright floods bottles of soda. Developed in the 1970s, partly in response to a corn surplus, high-fructose corn syrup is one of those modern agribusiness marvels that fuel a national obesity epidemic.

Here’s where King Corn has every opportunity to go wrong, to degenerate into the sort of pedantic sermonizing that Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock has turned into a franchise. But the filmmakers the nerve to learn as much about the people raising corn as they do about the product itself.

“Because we lived in Iowa for two years,” Ellis said, “it seemed really out of place to start pointing fingers at anyone.” This is more than good manners on the filmmakers’ part—they want people in Iowa, who consume as much high-fructose corn syrup as anybody, to watch their movie, too.

King Corn feels like a tonic not only for the ills of American food production, but for the shrillness of the nation’s documentaries as well. The movie’s finest moment comes at the end, when Ellis and Cheney visit an old man named Earl Butz in a nursing home. As secretary of agriculture under Nixon, Butz was the man responsible for the “philosophy of expansion” that led to the overproduction of corn—and eventually to expanded waistlines. So what do the filmmakers do when they meet him? They listen. And they hear Butz sensibly explain that his goal was to reduce the cost of nourishment for the average citizen. “It’s America’s best-kept secret,” he says quietly. “We feed ourselves with approximately 16 or 17 percent of our take-home pay. That’s marvelous.”

In that moment, King Corn completes its growth from something that sounds like a middle-school science project into a movie that fulfills the first responsibility of art: It turns a mirror on us. A generation ago, Americans looked at the system of eating they had, and decided the next generation deserved something better. Now three filmmakers have simply and eloquently asked us the same question. And we have to make dinner plans. [i]