A Veritable Corn-ucopia

The one ingredient most responsible for providing the United States with food security unparalleled in the history of the world is….corn. In true tabloid sensationalism, of course the next sentence has to be: But at what cost?!

The film King Corn attempts to answer that question, or at least start the discussion. I haven’t watched this film yet (it just premiered at SXSW), but I checked out the preview and it seems an interesting premise: two college buddies move to the midwest, grow an acre of corn, and then see where it goes in the food system. A quick tally of snack-machine food ingredients reveals such unwelcome guests as high-fructose corn syrup, but I’m sure the corn-based-ingredient trail leads in unsuspecting directions.

I personally applaud this kind of food-chain investigation. The Future of Food is another great film about the food chain and what exactly is going on behind the scenes. Like the environment, food is something that affects everyone. Unlike the environment, food is immediately tangible and visceral in a way that a hot summer day just isn’t. When you get down to it, the food we eat literally reconstitutes itself as part of us—you can’t get more visceral than that. (OK, arguably the water and air we breath also becomes part of us, but they’re not on the same level of our consciousness.)

On a personal note, I remember standing in front of the butcher section of Whole Foods in Palo Alto and noticing a sign proclaiming “grass-fed beef”. At the time all I noticed was how much more expensive it was than the regular beef. It wasn’t until I was writing this post that I realized the real observation should have been: “What did they feed those other cows to make their meat so cheap?”

Here’s a hint from King Corn: about 60% of cattle feed is corn, and 6 pounds of corn are used to produce every pound of beef.

One take-away from this post should be that corn is not a bad thing. Just like most things in life, it’s our over-emphasis and over-reliance on a particular thing that’s to blame rather than the thing itself.

Here’s the official synopsis for the film:

Two recent college graduates travel to their ancestral home in rural Iowa, plant a single acre of America’s most powerful crop, corn, and attempt to follow its fate as food. In their yearlong adventure they see the realities of modern farming first-hand, explore a fast-food nation built on corn syrup sodas and corn-fed meat, and come to question government subsidies, intensive agriculture and the cheap food we eat.

Tags: king corn, corn, food security, sxsw, the future of food, origin, food production