King Corn

In my line of work, I'm sometimes called upon to take a topic most people would find profoundly uninteresting, and turn it into something entertaining, or at least worth reading about. That's why I was so impressed with King Corn, a film that takes on such scintillating topics as farm subsidies, high fructose corn syrup, ulcerated cattle and animal feedstocks, and turn them into an amusing narrative.

King Corn's starting point is the revelation that corn -- the genetically engineered, industrial-grade yellow stuff, not sweet niblets or the fresh kind you'd eat on the cob -- is so pervasive in the American diet that we are actually made of the stuff now. This inspires a couple of Elis to live in northeastern Iowa for a year and raise exactly one acre of corn, then trace the grain's path through the food chain and the food processing industry to see where it all winds up.

I was initially put off that these two guys inserted themselves so prominently into the story, but they won me over in time. As with Super Size Me, a film to which King Corn is rightfully often compared, it helped that they brought some understated charm to their adventure. They know they're mostly playing to non-farmers like me who know relatively little about the primary economic sector, and I think their estimate of farming-for-dummies content was just about right for a broad audience.

Somehow, the filmmakers obtain a brief interview with the infirm, 95-year-old ex-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, in their Charlton Heston moment. (One of the filmmakers who was present at the screening, Curt Ellis, subsequently told the crowd that they didn't want King Corn to turn out like a Michael Moore film.) Butz still seems to think the best decision of his life, and the best-kept secret in American economics, is that he made food cheap enough that we spend money in other places, despite the public health problems that the processed-food industry is creating.

You could make an argument that for people below the poverty level, starving is worse than getting diabetes, and King Corn doesn't quite air that one out. Nor do our young heroes challenge, say, the CEO of Cargill, although they do have a nicely-edited sequence with a spokesperson for a corn-syrup processor. But, as Ellis noted, a key farm bill is expected to go to the Senate floor next week. I see that Butler County, Iowa favored Bush to Kerry by 59%-40% in 2004, and while King Corn ultimately shies away from saying whether such legislation will be in the farmers' best interest, it leaves little doubt whether it would benefit the nation. Hope to see it at Doc Days in March.