King Corn

Driving in any direction out of Minnesota, witnessing the endless rows of swaying stalks, it’s easy to get the feeling that corn is ubiquitous. You have no idea.

The other night I got a sneak peek at a movie that will change how you feel about that drive. King Corn is a documentary film about one acre of corn … and destiny.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are two college chums who, during some typical post-college introspection, realize their mortality and how it may be linked to what they, and their generation, eat. So they pull up their East Coast stakes and move to Iowa to farm one acre of corn.

From planning to planting to harvesting, the two guys ponder the impact of corn on our country: its dominance as a subsidized crop, its influence on the price of food, its prevalence in fast food, even its effect on the farmers that grow it. Some of what they find shocked me, like the fact that corn-fed cattle are responsible for 70% of the total antibiotic consumption in the US. I personally identified with their efforts to find food free of high fructose corn syrup (a hillarious scene when they try to make HFCS at home). Michael Pollan fans will not be disappointed.

Coincidentally, both Cheney and Ellis have an ancestral link to Greene, IA, the small farming community that plays host to the film and the single acre of corn. To their credit, they never belittle the farmers or town-folk. Instead they invest themselves in the community, trying to find their own roots through local relatives and the honest work of raising a crop.

While this film will be compared to Spurlock’s Super Size Me, I think it runs deeper. Instead of a sweeping and snarky attack of a corporate giant, Cheney and Ellis take the fight home, raising the hardest questions first with themselves. These aren’t preaching hippies out to condemn corn farmers, they’re burger-lovin’ college kids who actually care about the crop they’ve raised and where it ends up. They just have questions, and hopefully you will too.

Right now, King Corn is in limited release around the country, but there are efforts afoot to bring it to the Twin Cities. The timing couldn’t be better, or more obviously planned, as congress is due to debate the Farm Bill for the first time in seven years.