King Corn

One of the keynote speakers at the Farm to School Convention last week was Curt Ellis. Back in 2007 he made a movie called King Corn about the impact of cheap, tasteless corn on American society. In the last few years he has founded Food Corp, a non-profit that tries to bring some of the food advantages we have here in Easton to poorer communities. He compared corn and carrots in his keynote. Here in New England most of the corn we see is green corn produced for human consumption right off the farm. Most corn in America, however, has been developed to be full of corn starch often with resistance to powerful herbicides built in. Mr. Ellis' point, elaborated in King Corn, is that recent human meddling with corn has turned what was once a healthy food into an dietary and environmental disaster.

Carrots, on the other hand, have taken the opposite journey. Descended from wild plants in Afghanistan that are related to our Queen Anne's Lace, for several thousand years carrots were only used in herbal medicine. The seeds were more likely to be eaten than the bitter woody root. Along its journey on the Silk Road, farmers changed the pale bitter root into one that had several different shades of yellow, red, and purple and more sweetness with less woodiness. Finally Dutch farmers in the 17th century produced the orange carrot we know today. Unbeknownst to these farmers they had maximized the amount of beta carotene in the root. Beta carotene is used by our bodies to produce Vitamin A. So while farmers working on corn produced varieties filled with tasteless starch that could only be turned back into food through chemical processing, farmers working on carrots produced a big boon for human health. Add the fact that carrot production is harder to mechanize, and you have a poster child for good agriculture. This caused no end of joy on my part because Soups On Center's Carrot-Ginger Soup is a regular feature of my diet.

I checked out King Corn through my Nook Color on Saturday morning. Mr. Ellis and a college friend had discovered that their great grandfathers had come from the same tiny Iowa town so they decided to go there and see how farming had changed. Ultimately, they leased an acre of farmland and followed the corn they grew from seed to high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed lots, and ethanol. Unlike Waiting for Superman, a crass, exploitative polemic about American education, King Corn follows the evidence carefully and objectively to discover what one policy change did to American agriculture. This change came back in 1973 when Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, convinced Congress to end subsidies to not grow crops and instead began to pay them for producing a surplus. Today, corn prices are so low that the only profit comes from the government subsidy. This kind of subsidy created a consolidation of farms into commercial units "where the tractors didn't have to turn around as much" and destroyed the family farm. Still, one of the climactic scenes in the film is a visit to the aged Earl Butz who, despite all the evidence of damage to public health, animal welfare, and the environment, cogently and rationally defends the fact that we now spend much less on food than we did just fifty years ago.

King Corn is available as a streaming video from Netflix. I recommend it highly.