By Rowan Dunlap

Did you know that the U.S. Farm Bill subsidy program paid $51,261,278,801 to corn growers between 1995 and 2005? It is the most subsidized crop in America. Subsidies have driven the price of corn so low that many farmers don’t make any profit at all from corn sales. Their entire profit consists of government payments. This has created a situation in which it is cheaper to feed cows corn than let them graze naturally, and cheaper to sweeten products with processed high fructose corn syrup than with natural sugars.

When I think of corn, the image that pops into my mind is of sitting down to eat with my parents. We pass around the grilled salmon, the French bread, then the salad and finally the bowl of corn-on-the-cob is passed. My personal favorite is sweet white corn eaten without any butter or salt. As someone who is committed to learning about and improving our food system, I’ve come to realize there is a darker side of corn that I can’t ignore. King Corn isn’t about the organic corn that I buy from the farmers’ market, or even about the cut corn served as a side with fried chicken and mashed potatoes at KFC. It’s about the corn that we don’t even realize we’re ingesting; the corn that sneaks into our soda, fruit juice, potato chips, french fries and hamburgers.

In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis travel to Iowa. Their goal: to learn where their food comes from. They contracted with a local farmer to use one acre of his land to plant, tend, and harvest corn. They navigate the complex machinery, the convoluted commodity payment system, weather the skepticism of neighbors, and end the season with a respectable harvest of corn, which they soon discover is not even edible! The corn is a genetically modified variety that is designed for processing into animal feed and has a flavor with little resemblance to my sweet white corn. The story heats up as they try to follow their corn through the food system.

This journey takes Ian and Curt to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and to the doors (but not inside of) several high fructose corn syrup factories. One hilarious scene in the documentary depicts the friends attempting to cook high fructose corn syrup in their kitchen after being repeatedly denied entry into the factories. The process is incredibly complicated and involves the use of many chemicals that I can’t even begin to pronounce, a sure sign that it’s not a substance I want to put into my body. Their visit to a CAFO is less amusing. The animals are kept in crowded pens with not a blade of grass in sight. Their movements are restricted by the limited space and they have nothing to occupy them save the over-consumption of processed corn, husk and all. A cow must consume six pounds of corn for every pound of meat that makes it to the market. Since cows are not accustomed to this diet of corn, their health is adversely affected resulting in shorter lifespan and the increased use of antibiotics to prevent now commonplace illnesses.

In the final stage of their journey, Ian and Curt take us to New York City to meet some of the people who regularly consume corn through these covert means (remember the soda, fruit juice, potato chips, French fries and hamburgers we were talking about before?). Not to give away the entire film, I’ll leave you to imagine what kind of effect the over abundance of low-cost, unhealthy foods have on the general public. I will say that the ramping up of subsidies in the 1970s conveniently coincides with a dramatic increase in obesity and diabetes in the U.S.

King Corn is a great film. Curt and Ian manage to do something truly remarkable: remain objective and present a balanced and nuanced perspective of corn production, processing and consumption. The gentleman who owns the CAFO they visit is not villainized any more than the farmers who grow GMO corn in Iowa. There are no scare tactics, gross exaggerations, or vociferous speeches in this film. It is a film that leaves you feeling educated rather than lobbied. I highly recommend taking the time to watch it!

by Monica Pless

As the BLAST (Building Local Agricultural Systems Today) Program Coordinator, I’m always looking for new films about sustainable food issues. So I was excited to see that The Media that Matters Film Festival just put out “Good Food,” a DVD on food. As a compilation of 12 short films, it examines the many issues facing our food system from a variety of perspectives and via a variety of styles. I watched these films with our Urban Education and Outreach interns at The Food Project, and this is what we thought. You can also check the films out online at: http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/mtm_good_food/. Enjoy!

“The Luckiest Nut in the World” started the DVD off on a high note. A barbershop quartet cartoon musical was the backdrop as peanuts and groundnuts explained the effect of trade policy on the economics of different countries. I loved the throwback style and found the history clear. In a longer version, I would want a bit more about the economics.
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By Monica Pless

Warning: don’t go into this movie expecting what you read in the book. Like biting into an oatmeal raisin cookie when you believed it was a chocolate chip, you will likely be disappointed. However, this movie does come away with some worthwhile lessons.

The new movie “Fast Food Nation”, based on the book by Eric Schlosser, was released in theatres nationally this November. It bears resemblance to ” Thank You for Smoking” in its celebrity-laced docudrama style. It follows a marketing exec of the fast food chain “Mickey’s” to a Colorado town to explore the issues surrounding the food and culture the chain both builds and depends on. The exec (Greg Kinnear) is coming off of successful marketing campaign for “The Big One,” and for his next assignment, is sent to find out why there are such high levels of E. coli in the meat. Through interviews with old time ranchers and the brokers for meat packing plants (with a cameo appearance by Bruce Willis), Greg Kinnear determines that in fact, there is “sh*t in the meat.” That said, the shock-value of the climax of the movie, showing the kill floor of a meat packing plant, drilled in the message not to eat meat. (more…)

A review of The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Written by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. Published by Rodale Books.

By Katie Fiorella

As I stood staring at the eggs at the supermarket the other day, I was thoroughly confused by the variety of labels on each package. With about six varieties of eggs to choose from, I read the labels over and over trying to decide if “cage-free,” “fed an all vegetarian diet,” “organic,” or “farm fresh” was the right choice. At that point I wondered if reading Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter had done more to confuse me than inform me. Then I realized, despite the fact that a dozen store-brand eggs were about a quarter of the price of the other brands, I had not even considered adding that package to my cart.

For omnivores, vegetarians and vegans, food choices are rife with moral dilemmas. As Peter Singer and Jim Mason describe in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, consumers’ choices of where to purchase food and which products to buy are, or at least ought to be, moral decisions. Singer and Mason examine the choices of three families, representing the standard American diet (SAD), the conscientious omnivore diet, and the vegan diet, to frame an exploration of how Americans shop and eat. As the families decide among venders such as Wal-Mart, farmers’ markets, and Whole Foods, Singer and Mason note the foods they buy and trace the products back to the farms from which they originated.

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What illusions do we have about the food system? What are factory farms like on the inside? What can we do to reform the factory farm system? All of these questions are answered in “The Meatrix 2: Revolting.” An entertaining and informative parody of the “Matrix” movies, this video distinguishes the meatrix - the lies saying that modern farming involves families and animals living happily and symbiotically - from the realities of farming - in which cows live in small cages, get their tails cut off, receive growth hormones, and create real health risks for humans.

“The Meatrix II: Revolting” is just that - revolting. It uses some powerful and disturbing images to describe factory farms and it might just be enough to make you stop eating meat from factory farms - or even throw back up the meat that you just ate. In “The Meatrix,” a cow named Moopheus helps a pig named Leo “look through the illusion of the Meatrix” to see the true reality of factory farming. He is not impressed, to say the least. In fact, Leo is the one that will lead the fight to defeat the agents of factory farming and improve the future of farming.

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