Video Recommendation: King Corn

Thanks to TiVo, today I watched a great documentary called King Corn, about two guys from Boston who spend a year growing and researching corn. King Corn was shown on PBS's Independent Lens last week.

First off, I just love documentaries and books like this: take a topic that seems so mundane and everyday and tease out the fascinating political, economic, and social issues that swirl around it.

The salient features:
1. Beginning in the 1970's, farmers were paid (by the gov't) to grow more corn than we as a country could reasonably use for food purposes.
2. Due to huge surpluses of corn, we developed new ways to use the grain, most notably animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Cattle get sick living on a diet of primarily corn, and we get sick from taking in so much of the sweet/starchy corn-based additives in processed food.

My only complaint about the film is that it did not address the environmental impact of turning thousands and thousands of acres of land over to this monoculture -- it doesn't address pesticide use, loss of habitat and ecozones, drops in populations of indigenous bird and animal species, algae blooms in rivers and lakes due to fertilizer run-off, etc.

However, the filmmakers do a good job of providing a film that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. If you can't find a showing or the DVD, here's an interview with Curt Ellis, one of the filmmakers.