King Corn

By Josh Blau

King Corn is a feature length documentary about two friends, one acre of corn and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. When they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat, and how we farm.

Their film adds a new facet to the conversations started by Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Morgan Spurlock and Barbara Kingsolver, among many others, giving us another avenue to explore the wide subject of what and how we eat, where that food comes from and is this what we want?

New York Spirit’s Josh Blau caught up with Co-producer Ian Cheney in October. King Corn had been in limited theatre release in New York, selling out its screenings and generating a lot of conversation and buzz. The film toured 15-20 cities across the country. It will be broadcast on PBS in April of ’08.

JOSH BLAU: Are you tired of talking about corn?

IAN CHENEY: No.

JOSH: Are you hearing that people now are looking at what they’re eating?

IAN: Yeah. We hear from a lot of people that they are obsessed with ingredient labels now. Which is wonderful. It’s great to feel like we’re sparking some curiosity in what our food is made of.

JOSH: I’m driving my wife a little crazy. I’m going through the refrigerator now, looking to see what has corn syrup. I have 5 kids, who doesn’t love Cap’n Crunch? You want to be reasonable, but it’s in everything.

IAN: It’s in everything and it’s amazing how many products have been invented because high fructose corn syrup became available. That’s very striking to me. I wasn’t alive in 1970, so I don’t know what the supermarket looked like then.

JOSH: You weren’t alive in 1970?

IAN: No.

JOSH: That’s upsetting.

IAN: But I can imagine the difference between what you saw then and what you see now. I mean, the incredible, dazzling, colorful displays—those are made possible because of these malleable food ingredients that we more or less invented in the early 70s.

JOSH: But there was sugar and sugar has been around ...

IAN: But it hasn’t been so cheap.

JOSH: Let’s start with this. I’ll tell you one thing about the film that was very interesting to me. I didn’t really know the difference between the corn on the cob I was used to eating at a barbecue and this corn. It’s not the same.

IAN: It’s not the same and it’s not meant to be the same. The corn that we were growing, we realized, isn’t meant to be eaten off the cob. It’s meant to be processed. So it’s been hybridized and engineered and selected over the years to increase yield. That’s been the goal. They haven’t selected field corn to be tasty the way the corn you’ll buy for your 4th of July picnic is.

JOSH: In Iowa, are they growing just this corn? It seemed like that’s all there was—this corn.

IAN: In the film there were two guys. There’s Chuck Piat, our neighbor and farm mentor who leased us the acre, and then his neighbor, Rich, who actually farms those acres. Rich and his family keep a little tiny plot, maybe a quarter of an acre, of sweet corn that they plant right next to their house, but they’re actually not allowed to plant that type of corn on their main farm acres which are under the subsidy system. That’s one of the curious parts about the system.

JOSH: You’re not allowed?

IAN: You’re actually not allowed to grow anything but that yellow dent corn on the land for which you’re receiving subsidy money. That’s one of the things that people are interested in changing about the farm program, helping those corn and soybean farms become a bit more diverse. I think part of that is allowing farmers to plant actual edible foods on those subsidized acres so that they can make a little bit more money by selling foods directly to the market as opposed to just the elevator.

JOSH: Okay, so you guys are friends from school?

IAN: We were involved in this project in college that evolved into the Yale Sustainable Food Project. It was aimed at trying to bring local foods to campus.

JOSH: So in other words, you were interested in this already and had been involved?

IAN: Yeah, absolutely. I was always very curious about the stories behind our everyday things. Whether it’s how a car gets made or a plate of food gets made or how that building works. So that, combined with a desire when I graduated from college to go work on the land or do something vaguely real, I think, was part of what spawned this project.

JOSH: Were you surprised at what you found out?

IAN: Absolutely. We didn’t really think about corn. All we knew was that we had a decent understanding of where Connecticut apples came from and how lettuce would be grown. But most of the stuff we were eating in our dining hall: hamburgers, chicken, sodas, cookies, any processed food, that came from a system we didn’t really know a thing about and had no way of learning about, growing up in the city. And so the commodity corn system was a complete mystery to me. I didn’t know that the fields we were driving through in the Midwest were not sweet corn. I thought, “Oh that’s the same stuff we used to put on our picnic tables.”

JOSH: That’s so important. You know why? That was key for me in the film. I thought it was all sweet corn. Right? And it is totally not that. It’s freaky right?

IAN: It is freaky. It’s freaky partly because we pour so much energy, so much research and technology, so many tax dollars and so many fossil fuels into growing something that is essentially, by nature now, nutritionless. And this year, 90 million acres of that stuff.

There’s an incredible wall that existed between me, an average kid growing up on the east coast, and where all the things that I depend on for my everyday life come from. And I think we felt like in exploring those stories, we’d be able to maybe help nudge things in a better direction. We had a sense that all is not right with the American hamburger. Around then, Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation came out. And then halfway through our time in Iowa the movie “Super Size Me” came out. So those are kind of the pop culture manifestations of this growing understanding that maybe all is not right with the American diet. We wanted to know what is the American diet really made of when you get right down to it?

JOSH: I sent my wife to the butcher, right? We go to the butcher. It’s expensive. And so she asked the butcher about our steaks and he said, “Well, it’s a combination of corn fed and grass fed.” So I figured, okay, that sounded better.

Why is a McDonald’s hamburger a dollar and the hamburger that I get which is ground sirloin at the butcher, $10? Do you know the different qualities? Because it was disgusting to see those corn fed animals in the film.

IAN: I don’t know where your steak at your butcher shop comes from. You have to jump through some hoops to figure out where it really is coming from. The system isn’t set up in a way that allows us to figure that out. Cattle get processed in a facility where the meat comes out the other end and you can’t snap your fingers and trace back to a specific farm, necessarily. More and more we’re recognizing that it’s important to be able to do that because of e-coli outbreaks and so forth. However, when your butcher says that it’s part grass fed and part corn fed or grain fed, all cows start out being grass fed on the pasture because you can’t start them out on corn. As calves they have to be out on the pasture, they can’t digest corn initially. What’s happened is that more and more of their lives are spent eating corn, which makes their lives shorter because they can get fatter more quickly. And they can be shipped off more quickly. And that makes them cheaper because corn has been cheap and if you can crank out more cattle per year, you’re going to be able to increase your volume and the price will go down.

JOSH: Well, but it’s not only that they get fat quickly. They’re not healthy.

IAN: Right, there’s a trade off. Cows didn’t evolve to eat corn and so it’s like a fast food for them. We didn’t evolve to eat fast food. We evolved as hunter-gatherers eating wild, lean meats and a lot of greens and vegetables and so there is some funny, almost symbolic correlation between the fact that we’re feeding cattle this really cheap feed, because it’s cheap and because it makes them fat really quickly. But it makes them sick. And we’re feeding ourselves a pretty darn cheap, unhealthful food, that as Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” showed, makes us fat pretty quickly.

I don’t think that we could ever blame America’s obesity epidemic on corn. But undoubtedly having a food system awash in cheap, fatty, sugary calories must have something to do with the fact that Americans are getting heavier. I think that would be hard to deny.

JOSH: Have you changed your diet at all since?

IAN: Definitely.

JOSH: It seemed like you ate a lot of fast food during filming. Why?

IAN: There are a few reasons we eat fast food throughout the movie. One is that we were broke filmmakers and cheap food was a great boon to us. The other is that old habits diehard and we grew up eating that stuff—especially on the road. And the third is that that’s what makes up the food landscape out there in our country. Just as corn covers the physical geography of the land, corn based foods make up the, let’s call it the Foodscape. So what there is to eat out there is largely fast foods or processed foods. Go into any gas station or convenience store and do a 360 and throw a rock and I’m sure you’ll hit something that’s based in corn, and that’s because those foods are cheap and we’ve incentivized those foods. So changing your diet is not just a matter of snapping your fingers and suddenly shifting everything that you eat. You have to change the system that supplies our foods because I think the demand outstrips the supply. I think it would be a full time job for me to eat the way that I want to eat. In the sense that it would take me about eight hours a day to track down meat that’s raised in a reasonable way, fruits and vegetables that are produced locally and without all kinds of crap sprayed on them. You know, milk that isn’t produced in a factory setting. If you start to really dissect your diet, you can make yourself nuts. It takes a lot of work.

JOSH: But I think that the first step is definitely the awareness of it.

IAN: Right, we didn’t want to make a lecture about the ideal or we didn’t want to be so bold as to suggest that we know what the solution is and we know exactly what the American diet should be. I think we have a decent sense of what some of the solutions are: reducing our breathtaking support of commodity corn and trying to actively increase our support of alternative agriculture—sustainable agriculture, farmer’s markets and the growing of edible crops. But I think there’s not one right way to eat.

JOSH: The film isn’t judgmental. It didn’t tell me that I was wrong for eating what I ate. I think that’s hard to do and I think that’s the goal of a good documentary. It’s hard to do sometimes because you start to infuse your personal opinions and I didn’t see that.

IAN: I think there were a number of reasons for that. One of the reasons is that Aaron Woolf, who shot and directed the film, and is Curt’s cousin, brought a more mature and nuanced understanding of how to put a documentary together. And Iowa changed us a lot. When we moved out there, we were fresh out of college and had a lot of strong opinions about how we thought the world should be. And when we arrived in Iowa, we realized how little we knew and how little we knew about farming. I didn’t even know how big an acre was. And so we were very humbled by the entire experience. We learned so much from these farmers and we came to feel like the best thing we could do with this film was just to try to tell our little story about this one acre of corn and all we learned about it and the audience could draw whatever conclusions they want. If somebody sees this film and sees that their beef comes from a 100,000 head feed lot where corn is sickening the cattle that turn into our hamburgers and still wants to eat those hamburgers, I guess that’s their choice. But hopefully if you just tell them a more or less straight-forward story of “here’s where your food comes from,” we can inspire some more informed decisions.

Photographs by Sam Cullman and Bryan Cheney.