King Corn

For a free country, we’ve got an awfully tyrannical food chain. Our current system of food production is really founded on a contempt for life; it pummels the planet and exploits migrant farm workers, defying the laws of both nature and man. If we truly are what we eat, I guess that makes us a nation of nature-hating misanthropes.

We’ve shoehorned corn into every corner of Iowa, and shoveled it into every cow--or so it seemed to me as I watched the screening of King Corn that Eating Liberally co-hosted this week at the Tank with our friends from the Green Edge Collaborative. We’ve taken the already fertile soil of our heartland and jacked it up on steroids, to grow a bazillion bushels of a variety of corn you can’t even eat till it’s been processed into some sort of by-product.

We coax an astonishing amount of corn from each monocropped acre by saturating this precious topsoil with fertilizers and herbicides, and then we convert this nutritionally bankrupt bounty into high fructose corn syrup, or feed for cows whose digestive systems literally can’t stomach it (hello, E. coli), or the eco-disaster we call corn-based ethanol.

As King Corn’s food court jesters Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis discovered in their pilgrimage to our feedcorn fiefdom, this ultra-efficient method of growing corn has created ever larger farms run by fewer and fewer farmers, draining the soul of our rural communities even as it depletes the soil (and drives our diabetes epidemic, and fuels global warming, and makes cheap spaghetti sauces sickeningly sweet, and--oh, nevermind.)

And this is the model of agriculture that Wall Street, K Street, and Main Street all celebrate as a shining example of good ol’ American know-how that the rest of the world would do well to emulate. Feedcorn is on the march!

We were fortunate to have Ian Cheney on hand at our screening to do a Q & A, and the questions were pretty much the same ones people peppered Michael Pollan with at an Omnivore’s Dilemma reading I attended in April of 2006 (Pollan, an advisor to the King Corn crew, appears in the film expounding on the evils of industrial agriculture against the backdrop of his own abundant veggie garden, including a suitably monstrous patch of dinosaur kale!)

What folks want to know, after reading Pollan’s books or seeing a film like King Corn, is “What can we do about this awful food system?”

The knee-jerk response is, of course, to endorse community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, but Cheney noted that we run the risk of creating an alternative food chain that serves only those fortunate enough to live in the more affluent communities where farmers’ markets and upscale stores like Whole Foods thrive.

Living at the Ethicurean epicenter of NYC, it’s easy for me to opt out of our crappy food chain; I can walk to Union Square and shop at the Greenmarket four days a week all year round, and whatever I can’t find there I can get at the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that are a stone’s throw from the Greenmarket. There are several mom-and-pop health food stores in our neck of the woods, too.

So it’s easy for me to follow Pollan’s advice to stay out of the supermarkets. But a few miles north of us, in East Harlem, they’ve hardly got any supermarkets left to stay out of. As the New York Times reported last Monday:

To us farmers’ market fanatics, the very notion of a New York supermarket as a source for fresh, healthy food seems laughable; the typical supermarket is a food desert to us, with aisle after aisle of mysterious food-like substances encased in plastic and no grass-fed anything. But when your only sources for food are bodegas and fast food joints, a supermarket that actually sells fresh--though far-traveled--fruits and vegetables is a step up.

No wonder more and more city dwellers are becoming urban farmers, as another New York Times article noted yesterday; communities decried as food deserts are creating their own oases by reclaiming unused lots where they grow fruits and vegetables for themselves and even sell the surplus to others.

The Times article heralds the revival of urban agriculture that’s taking root all around the country, with the help of organizations like Milwaukee’s Growing Power, and NYC’s own GreenThumb and Just Foods, two groups who’ve done so much to support our community gardeners and local farmers. I had the pleasure of hearing Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, speak at the Food & Society conference in Arizona last week and came away convinced that Growing Power’s one-acre farm represents the future of urban agriculture.

As the Times notes, this “one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats…grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.”

Allen’s model demonstrates that city dwellers do have the capacity to produce at least some of their own food in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner. And as more and more folks become aware of the rampant abuse that’s a hallmark of industrial agriculture, from cruelly confined chickens to Florida’s enslaved migrant farm workers, people are seeking alternative food chains untarnished by institutionalized exploitation and environmental degradation.

For a really comprehensive and inspiring look at the enormous potential of this movement to provide less privileged folks with an abundance of fresh, affordable produce while building community, preserving open space and creating an environmentally beneficial habitat, check out “Vitalizing the Vacant” from Thoughts On The Table blogger Annie Myers, who never ceases to astonish me with her clear, beautiful prose and even clearer observations.

Annie’s one of a dozen or so twenty-somethings I’ve met who blow me away with their commitment to changing our world; I was too cynical and alienated when I was that age to do much more than mouth off about our decaying culture. I’m doing that still, while folks like Annie and the Real Food Challenge students and “Greenhorns” filmmaker Severine Von Tscharner Fleming are running around remaking the world the way they want it to be. Considering how badly we've messed things up, it’s the least we can do to cheer them on.

GUEST BLOGGER EVE FOX:

Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, the stars of the just-released documentary King Corn,
first developed an interest in food and agriculture as classmates in college. After graduation, they moved to Greene, Iowa, to find out where their food comes from. With the help of government subsidies, friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, and potent herbicides, they planted, grew, and harvested a bumper crop of corn from a single acre of farmland. Curt's cousin, documentary filmmaker Aaron Woolf, came along to direct this hair-raising, heart-sinking foray into our corn-fueled food chain.

Berkeley food blogger Eve Fox interviewed Ellis and Cheney last week, and gave them some great questions to sink their teeth into, so we’re pleased to be posting her Q & A here. King Corn is currently playing—or about to open--in cities all over the country. Check KingCorn.net for theaters. Please go see it!

EF: What surprised you most in making the film?

Curt: The most surprising part to me was the reality of farming. I had this pretty romantic notion of what life on a farm was like. Granted we were only growing one acre of corn, not hundreds or thousands of acres, but we really only farmed for a few hours and during those few hours we never really had to touch the dirt at all. It was amazing to me how divorced from the land our experience of farming was.

Ian: I agree with that. I was also surprised that the majority of the country's calories are stored in a few dozen buildings in the Midwest.

EF: I was really shocked by the use of anhydrous ammonia as a fertilizer.

Curt: We were totally shocked. We actually went to an anhydrous ammonia factory (though it's not in the film). It's made by burning an incredible amount of natural gas. When Ian applied it to our acre before we planted our corn, one of the farmers, Rich, picked up a handful of the dirt and showed us a dead earth worm - and said, "You see here how applying the ammonia kills everything in a four inch swath." It was pretty unbelievable to us that the first act of farming was to kill all the living things in the soil. Seemed kind of counterintuitive.

Ian: That's not what Wendell Berry would do.

EF: Has this exploration changed your interpretation of the term “corn-fed”?

Curt: Very much so. It has this sort of wholesome connotation but it turns out that things that are corn-fed are really very far from wholesome.

EF: I loved all the stop-motion animations - how did you guys come up with the idea to do those?

Curt: Long, long Iowa winters with nothing to do at all except hang out in the basement and move little corn kernels around. I think that was Ian's idea and it ended up being really appropriate to the film because it has that sort of hand-made quality to it in the sense of we really were just trying to figure things out. Throwing glossy, digital effects in would have probably detracted from the experience. It was my childhood Fisher Price barnyard set and Ian's very affordable labor that made it all possible.

Ian: That Fisher Price barn totally reflects the mindset we had when we moved to Iowa in 2004. It was the perfect symbol of what we imagined agriculture to be -- the little red barn and the little animals and the two farmers. And, needless to say, that wasn't the reality at all.

EF: You credit Michael Pollan with being the inspiration for the movie. How did you first get introduced to his work?

Ian: We would read his essays in the New York Times Magazine in college. There was that wonderful article about his experience of buying a steer and following it through the food chain. I think that was undoubtedly an inspiration to us. He became an early advisor to the film. Curt and I were just about to embark on a cross-country research road trip and he advised us to take a good hard look at all the corn we saw along the way. I actually traded him my Masters thesis in exchange for him being our advisor.

Curt: I think we got the good end of that trade.

EF: The tasting scenes were some of my favorites in the film. What did the corn syrup that you two made taste like?

Curt: It tasted sweet and nasty. I don't know that we made it exactly right though we did our best. It's a pretty complicated process but we only had a Cuisinart and a saucepan. We actually tried making it again at the NPR studios last week and it turned out even worse that time.

Ian: I think the kicker was the final filtering process. As it was explained to us we needed to pour it through a pile of diatomaceous earth to filter it but I don't think it filtered through so much as dissolved so we were sort of drinking corn syrup and partially dissolved hardened sea creatures.

EF: Did you feel uneasy about drinking something that you'd made with sulfuric acid?

Curt: The NPR reporter (Robert Smith) certainly did!

EF: Were you surprised by the way your interview with Earl Butz (U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford) went?

Curt: On some level, yeah. We had learned enough by that point to really disagree with his policies and question them. All around us we could see the kind of landscape that his policies had created - giant industrialized farms and de-populated areas. So I think that we did walk into that room kind of wanting to challenge him and be mad at him but as soon as we met the guy we saw that of course he's just a normal person.

He's old and he had ideas that were very reasonable for his generation. When he graduated from college there was a great depression and when we graduated from college there was an obesity epidemic. So it makes sense both that he would want to make food more affordable and also that Ian and I would want to do something very different.

EF: Has this journey changed the way you eat?

Curt: Now that we know the back story to industrial food we're no longer comfortable with it but it is a real challenge to find good food. It's particularly hard right now because we're back on the road to promote the film so the gains we'd made in changing the way we eat have been largely eroded. It's frustrating that it's such a challenge to find something to eat that is not corn-based.



Ian: I'm a card-carrying member of the society that believes in convenient, affordable food. And I really want locally grown, healthful food to be available at my corner store. There are times when I love to play the part of the scavenger and spend a few days trying to find a turkey for Thanksgiving that was raised outside on a good diet but I'm coming to terms with the fact that, like many Americans, I don't want to spend all my time being a hunter-gatherer.



Curt: Ian did find and eat a pecan pie in a dumpster in college.

Ian: It was very convenient. I was already in the dumpster. Affordable, too.

EF: What was your goal in making this film?

Ian: I think my goal (beyond doing something with my then 22-year-old life besides sitting at a desk,) my hope was to tell a story about where our food comes from. I don't think we knew all the problems associated with the stories behind our food - all the communities that are affected, all the ways that agriculture takes a toll on the land and our health so we didn't start out with an agenda in that sense. And by the end of our experience we certainly didn't feel like we had a solution to all of

the problems we'd been encountering but more felt that the job of the film was to tell a story and hopefully spark some discussions and debates. I think we're really seeing that happen now as we take the film on the road and talk to people about these issues. Because, at the end of the day, there are a lot of ways of creating a better food system. There is no single solution. And that's actually very exciting and invigorating. The hope is that as people learn more about where their food comes from they'll make more informed decisions.



Curt: I think Ian has it right. It's incredible the number of people who've come up to us after seeing the film and have told us that they've changed the way they eat since watching it. And that was our hope - to transform the system into something that both tastes good and is good for you and the people who produce it.



EF: What’s next for you guys?



Curt: So far it's just been making sure that this film does some real good in the world. Right now that work is mostly in theaters so we've been on the road and will be traveling for the next month or two. Increasingly there are small grassroots screenings that are starting to get off the ground so we're starting to put our energy into the right way to do that. I think we're going to be fairly busy until April when the film will be broadcast on PBS.

Ian: I think that's about the size of it. We spent so long making the film that when we reached the finish line (or what we thought was the finish line) we all gave each other high fives and celebrated a job well-done. But then we woke up the next day and realized that there was a lot of work to be done to make sure the story got heard and made an impact. Hopefully, it won't take us quite as long to get the film out into the world as it did to make the film.