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In Florida Recovering from Being Abused in Texas |
Date: 2008-04-19
Although not perfect, I'll give any documentary, movie, TV show or book five stars if it alters my life and King Corn definitely rates five full stars. I would highly recommend that everyone purchase or at least view this movie once; I had the opportunity to see it this week on PBS's series "Independent Lens." Corn is nothing but a "raw material" that is separated to almost its basic elements and used to build our daily "garbage" diet.
I learned about the relationship between obesity and the use of high fructose corn syrup (aka HFCS) by accident a few years ago when I made a visit to Victoria, Texas and they sold Dr. Pepper with "Imperial Sugar" and the 10-2-4 logo on the bottle. I didn't know that sometime in the early 70's that the soft drink companies switched from sugar to HFCS as the sweetener. Who would have thought that decades after being told that sugar is bad for your teeth, etc., etc. that it is actually much better for you than the HFCS alternative!
After watching this documentary I did some research and HFCS is in almost everything you buy. For example, it is that main ingredient in many of the ice cream syrups on the supermarket shelves... HFCS is in everything form hamburger and hot dog buns to "low fat" salad dressing! Honey graham crackers... EVERYTHING! Fast foods are full of this HFCS junk and this is only one of the many things you'll learn from this documentary.
Where I live in Corpus Christi most of the population is obese, they exercise little (if at all), have a high incidence of diabetes and fast foods are their favorite filler. In fact, at the local Driscoll Children's Hospital on one side you have the emergency entrance and on the other the "golden arches." No joke! It is really sad.
One can only project into the future after the wheat gluten from China killed our pets in the United States... Will we outsource growing corn to China so we can get even cheaper HFCS to fatten and kill our population off?
My only minor criticism is that the filmmakers didn't explore our government's role in ruining our diets by providing a version of "corporate welfare" to factory farms that produce this junk. As it turns out, they would not be in this business, save the subsidies they get from the USDA. Go figure!
UPDATE 13May08: A recent story in the The Wall Street Journal [1-year subscription] (May 7, 2008, Page B3A) by Susan Buchanan raises some interesting points on the use of corn syrup.
I do not want to give anyone the impression that the only reason that our nation is obese is due to HFCS. In fact, the problem with obesity in the United States is the result of many interrelated and complex factors. They include, cheaper foods coupled with larger portions, an increase in eating out (especially at fast food joints), reduction in exercise and, unfortunately, a greater acceptance of being overweight as the "norm" in our society.
As this film points out, our government is responsible for subsidies to make something that is unprofitable profitable, while at the same time making food cheaper with heavy doses of HFCS inside. I wish, instead, that our government would give big subsidies to organic farmers and tax breaks to those who walk or ride their bikes to work. Instead, our government (FCC) is more concerned with giving us more channels of digital TV by February 2009; another major cause of obesity is the time spent sitting in front of the tube. Where I live the Corpus Christi Police Department and Nueces County Sheriff's Department have almost a zero record in regards to protecting pedestrians, joggers and bicyclists. It is downright dangerous to make an effort to be physically fit where I live. At the same time, the situation in Corpus Christi is not, by any means, unique in our country.
To reduce the epidemic of obesity in the United States we need a multi-pronged attack on the problem that includes support from our government for more healthful ways of life and a population that will say NO to eating junk and YES to exercise.
Preston C. Enright |
Date: 2008-06-29
This interesting film illustrates what happens when food becomes more of a vehicle for making money than for feeding people. Most of the corn we grow in our 'breadbasket' is inedible for humans, and is used as feedgrain for cows (I wonder how much the cows like it as well).
In addition to documenting their farming experiment, the filmmakers visited a massive cattle feedlot in Colorado. It brought to mind another movie that explores our meat industry Fast Food Nation. As the meat industry, like the cigarette industry, increases their global marketing, ever increasing amounts of grain are being used to feed cattle; along with creating fuels. Amazingly, some crops are being genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals Transgenic Plants: A Production System for Industrial and Pharmaceutical Proteins.
With growing food crises around the world, one wonders when we'll reach a tipping point and decide to create a food system that serves people instead of serving the interests of executives at Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Rats in the Grain: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer Daniels Midland, the Supermarket to the World. Thinkers like Frances Moore Lappe have long argued that the real issue behind a lack of food security is not a lack of food, but rather a lack of democracy World Hunger: Twelve Myths. We need to dethrone 'Kings' of corn and many other commodities and put decision making power into the hands of civil society, as Vandana Shiva has advocated for so eloquently Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. See some of Shiva's presentations on YouTube, she's a modern-day Gandhi.
A couple other resources to help us create a sustainable, organic, biodiverse, and localized food system:
Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works (Our Sustainable Future)
Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth
Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair
Mother Earth News
How to Save the World
Jon Reiss |
Date: 2009-08-29
This film is a must see for anyone interested not only in food
production and food policy in the United States, but also what ailes
(sp?) us as a nation. The US government, and the agricultural industry
has unfortunately created a system that is out of whack. While we spend
less than at any time on food, we are spending more and more on
health-care (the one point I wish the film had made more directly).
This film should be seen by all Americans. I saw another comment that
quiblbed with the particulars in the film. The film is not a doctoral
thesis, it is a piece of art trying to raise awareness. I also thought
the device of the two filmmakers staking out an acre of corn and
following it through the year as a spine to the story was quite
wonderful, as well as the animations that they did with a still camera.
As far as I know you can also get the film to screen in your community
from the film's website. I highly recommend it - would be great food
for thought.
Jon Hunt |
Date: 2008-07-02
America's heartland, (Iowa, particularly, in this film) is undergoing some serious changes and Aaron Woolf's exposé on the commodity of corn is a welcome addition to those authors and filmmakers who investigate what we eat and how it's made. One thing stands out more than anything else....corn is ubiquitous.
Gently told by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, friends who move to Iowa to raise an acre of corn and then try to follow it to its destinations, "King Corn" goes farther than how corn is planted and tended. The lives of the residents of Greene, Iowa, where the film takes place, become central. This is not your average Chamber of Commerce town tour, by any stretch. Unlike the hard-driving Michael Moore or the self-absorbed Morgan Spurlock, Cheney and Ellis let the camera and the townfolk do the work. It's a winning combination and what the viewer learns from this documentary might not be shocking but nonetheless revealing in sobering terms. "King Corn" is well worth a look.
A. Adams |
Date: 2009-07-22
I just read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and then stumbled upon this DVD at the library. Michael Pollan is actually in the movie and if you've read the book you will like how the movie dovetails nicely with his writing. It still manages to be homey and entertaining while teaching you that corn is the basis for our food industry and why this is problematic. A few things you will learn:
1) Corn is in EVERTHING we eat, from our soda sweetened with high fructose corn syrup to our meat as almost all the animals we eat are corn-fed. Corn fed animals are not natural, cows don't have the digestive tracts to process corn, they are meant to eat grass. A corn fed diet must be supplemented with antibiotics to keep the cows alive as corn eventually kills them. According to the movie, 70% of antibiotics in the US are fed to animals grown for human consumption.
2) In the last several decades self-sufficient family farms have gone the way of the dinosaur because the best way for a farmer to eek out a living is to grow Corn on every square inch of land thanks to our unsustainable agricultural policies.
3) Corn has been genetically altered to the point where industrial corn grown on farms really can't be eaten until it has been processed with all sorts of nasty chemicals to break it down into all kinds of weird food products.
King Corn is really sort of gentle expose on what is wrong with our food system.
