King Corn
By Monica @ 12:56 PM   
I took out King Corn from my local library a couple of weeks ago at the suggestion of a friend. It is a documentary about the prevalence of corn in our society. The two twenty-something filmmakers move to Iowa for a year to document their life as it revolved around the planting of one acre of corn and to follow where that one acre of corn actually goes. King Corn is not a fraud like Supersize Me, but it’s not as informative as it could have been. On top of that, it has an annoying Napoleon Dynamite feel to it. What I mean by that is that there are long stretches of silence without any narration or musical score. Often these stretches are taking up by footage of the wind across a cornfield, or a bunch of people sitting or standing in cornfields staring at one another. Despite the propensity for more and more films to use this technique, I do not share the belief that this silence coupled with a lack of information is intellectually enlightening. However, if you don’t know anything about the agriculture of corn in this country, I’d recommend King Corn so long as you have a computer or book available to do something else while you’re waiting for the interesting points. If you know something about American agriculture already, you probably won’t learn too much. However, I’ll sum up the salient points of King Corn.
First, we grow an incredible amount of corn in this country. Production capability has increased roughly 8-fold in 100 years, mostly through breeding to produce crowd-tolerant strains. There are some interesting shots of the filmmakers sliding down mountains of corn in the Midwest as one would slide down a snow-covered hill on a sled. These are piled up higher than salt and sand for road service in the northeast. It is quite an amazing spectacle! Because corn is a C4 plant, it fixes a higher ratio of C13 into sugar, as opposed to C3 plants. (I wasn’t really paying great attention at this point so I don’t know if they specifically explained this -- I just happen to know this as a previous instructor of botany.) Isotopic studies show that most Americans are made largely out of corn. If you were born after 1970, chances are you’ve never tasted grass-fed beef, and the carbon molecules in your body prove that a lot of your food (whether beef, corn oil, fructose syrup, etc.) is coming from corn if you eat a typical American diet. What corn is not made into cattle feed, ethanol, or oil is made into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – this is only about 5% of the corn although HFCS is in almost every sweetened item in the US. That gives you an idea of the immense amount of corn the United States produces. Because the filmmakers are not allowed into factories to view this process, they research the process and start from pure dent corn, going through the chemical extraction process of making HFCS. It’s mildly interesting but the process is performed too swiftly to figure out what all the reagents are. This is another example of why this film is less informative than it could have been. It’s important to realize that the vast majority of the corn is actually not eaten directly by humans except as food additives such as HFCS and corn oil. Roughly 55% of it is fed straight to cattle. Practically all beef in the United States is now finished on corn, in the feedlot. That grain-finishing time has greatly expanded in recent decades to up to a third of a cow’s life, not just the last few weeks as it used to be. This is a complete anomaly in the history of animal husbandry. Grain-finishing makes cattle sick and can quarter a cow’s lifespan. It also believed to have created at least one acid-resistant strain of E. coli not seen before 1980: E. coli O157:H7. Cows aren’t supposed to eat corn and soy: they are evolutionarily designed to eat grass. When they are fed grain it creates an acidotic state in their bodies, which makes them susceptible to bacterial infections, which then necessitates the routine feeding of antibiotics to all cattle in feedlots. What the film doesn’t tell you is that this also alters the omega fatty acid profile of the meat and dramatically increases the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids. The film also features Loren Cordain bashing the amount of saturated fat in hamburger (sigh). Personally I think this is not a concern and the problems with the “saturated fat is bad” argument may be found here, here, and here. Seeing how cattle are raised in feedlots was one of the more interesting points of the film. Not only are there resulting issues of animal welfare, but of pollution as well. The larger feedlots cause tremendous pollution in the form of enormous manure lagoons that pollute water supplies and create obnoxious odors for local residents, which many residents are now suing over. Because of the pollution created by feedlots (which are really exacerbated by corn subsidies, as enormous feedlots did not exist in such high quantities before subsidies), the USDA has had to create “conservation incentives” like EQIP to get these factories to clean up their waste, to the tune of $450,000 per feedlot. To call something like this a conservation incentive is a fraud. Would we call it a “conservation” incentive to get a city to clean up an enormous holding tank of human waste that spills over into rivers? This is another example of how a proper understanding of property rights (and a privatization of our waterways), rather than a government prop-up of a certain industry as “economically necessary”, would go a long way toward improving environmental quality. I’m not bashing meat. I love meat. But it’s a plain fact that most people in the cattle industry do not like this method of raising cattle. The older ones were around 40 years ago doing things differently and they know that what they are doing is intensely inhumane and polluting. However, the fact is that government subsidization of the corn itself and the pollution cleanup process have made the feedlot method cheaper than it otherwise would be. (I'm not convinced that such long grain-finishing times or feedlots would necessarily disappear under the free market but I do believe they'd largely return to some minimum level and a smaller scale.) A key point in the film is that it’s very difficult to make money as a Midwestern farmer, and that the subsidies have spurred a great deal of consolidation due to the lower prices for corn caused by the subsidies. The cost of the special herbicide-resistant seed and other inputs (fertilizer and herbicides) is very high. Farmers would simply not make money without the government subsidies. (Of course, if subsidies were immediately eliminated the prices would eventually adjust because the government wouldn’t be promoting overproduction with subsidies that drive down the price of corn.) Many farmers now rent their land rather than owning it. The filmmakers don’t discuss this too much but it’s obvious to me that there is less incentive for farmers to care about the long-term effects of what they are doing to the land when they are just renting it. Like the people raising cattle, the people producing corn aren’t all exactly proud of the product they are producing. However, they also know that’s what the government wants them to plant. Frankly, with its long periods of silence, roughly half the movie is devoid of any truly informational content. I think much more could have been revealed, including the rotation of soy with corn, how such intensive agriculture has led to soil fertility problems and the USDA’s CRP program, and the manufacture and effect of corn and soy products (including vegetable oils) on human health. The filmmakers spent a good deal of time on corn subsidies, high fructose corn syrup, and the feeding of corn to cattle, which are all worthy of attention but are the not the entire picture when it comes to corn. There are other aspects of corn production that deserve attention: the absurdity of subsidizing ethanol production, the pollution of waterways from soil runoff and the resulting soil fertility problems necessitating more expensive inputs, the displacement of third world farmers by the dumping of cheap grains onto the international market, and the deleterious effect of corn oil (not just HFCS) on the health of Americans. Others have pointed out the absurdity of subsidies for biofuels, and I couldn’t agree more. It makes no sense to sink money into something that is economically infeasible and make it artificially cheaper at taxpayer expense, not to mention that it’s a violation of an individual’s right to his or her own income. But those that agree that we shouldn’t be subsidizing ethanol agree that we shouldn’t be subsidizing any of the commodity crops, either – which means they would almost certainly be more expensive in a free market, as would the foods (corn oil, HFCS, meat, and all corn-, wheat-, and soy-based foods) made from them. The lack of emphasis in the film on these more subtle points is probably evidence itself of how influenced even the filmmakers are by media and other government information. There are simply many other indictments against corn that should also have been included to fill the sheer amount of silence in the film. The film concludes with the filmmakers deciding to plant their one acre the following year with wheat instead of corn, and a really visually interesting overhead shot of the two playing catch in a square acre plot of wheat grown within acres upon acres of corn. The take-home point is assumed to be that they decided to use their acre to grow something healthier. Ironically, what they may not realize is that it is not corn that is really directly king in the American diet, but wheat. King Wheat. Wheat, too, is also subsidized and is probably just as bad for human health as corn. Same for soy. Now that we have a film entitled King Corn, someone should perhaps make films entitled King Wheat and King Soy. Maybe the makers of these hypothetical films could conclude their works by sticking a cow on a square acre of grass that is surrounded by a wheatfield or a soyfield. To conclude, this little film was somewhat flimsily researched. The filmmakers lifted most of their ideas straight from Michael Pollan, who is an ardent critic of the corn-based system of agriculture. But I don’t want to be too hard on this little film because most of the public probably doesn’t know this information – and they should. But enough of my opinions. Has anyone else seen this film? If so, what did you think of it? Labels: corn, Government Idiocy, Grains, Nutritional Guidelines, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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6 Comments:
Michael Polan's "Omnivores Delima' might be called a 'resident experimenter's journal' that details the ubiquity of corn in our society plus other timely topics. The most surprising thing about the book is the lack of a particular axe to grind (or Gov agency or industry to promote or demote) and mostly just states the facts. What is impressive is that the book is an interesting read (with maybe one exception), albeit the mundaneness of the topics.
Cecil R. Williams
c1992w@gmail.com
Cecil -- thanks for the comment. I agree that Pollan doesn't implicate the root of so many of these problems: the government.
I've read part of OD. I've also read most of his previous book, Botany of Desire.
IMO, Pollan is your typical statist. He basically approves of massive government interference in our lives, from what I can see of his writing. He doesn't question the premise of any current government program or regulation -- he just wants to redirect the spending to healthier foods and think this can all be driven by the government. What can you expect from someone who works at UC Berkeley.
I appreciate his first hand research on the food supply and making this information so accessible to the public, but I have a love hate relationship with his ideas for the very reason you mention -- and believe you me, I plan to blog a whole lot more about them! :)
Monica, Yes. Polan is a statist exactly the same as 99% of educators and intellectuals in Western civilization. But that is not germain to the issue I raised. He conveyed a body of knowlege first hand with minimal editoralizing. He counted USDA and BigAg thugs in the same group - which they are - without either 1)implying that 'our gang could have done it better,' or 2) preaching to the reader to 'do what I do to fix the world.'
Both 'Botny of Desire' and 'Omnivores Delima' were excellent books that a thinking reader might enjoy. My personal evaluation of his treatment of BigAg is that he went into the Iowa segment with the goal of exposing their evils only to conclude and later lament that feeding 6 billion people wouldn't be possible without the current BigAg protocols [Reality goes on after the dream ends].
Thanks again.
Cecil R. Williams
"feeding 6 billion people wouldn't be possible without the current BigAg protocols"
I'd have to wholeheartedly disagree with that. We can't feed six billion people with Big Ag protocols, much less nourish them. Our goal shouldn't be trying to feed six billion people, anyway -- they should be feeding themselves. That's been the main problem since 1970. :)
And what I mean by that is not that large scale agriculture couldn't produce good, nutritious food (after all it certainly does in CA and FL), only that it's largely not doing so at present. Cheap commodity corn, wheat and soy isn't exactly what I'd consider nutritious and the meat production myths for grass-fed meat have been adequately exposed in my previous posts. That's what I think of when I think of "big ag."
I haven't read all the way through OD yet, but I'm skeptical that Pollan believes Big Ag is necessary, either, based on his views in his NYT "Farmer in Chief" article. Big Ag is necessary to produce grains *as cheaply as is done*, no doubt. But that's an important qualifier. I neither accept the premise of grains as necessary to feed the world (just more Malthusian nonsense) nor do I accept the premise that we should be feeding the world. If it works out that way in a free market, fine... but there's really no reason the agricultural knowledge that we have in the US in terms of small-scale, intensive agriculture for veg and meat production (and we've learned a ton about this in the last 50-60 years) couldn't be applied elsewhere. See this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7432972.stm
Government regulations are a huge factor in making healthy food more expensive than it should be and unhealthy food cheaper than it should be. I don't believe in the Malthusian stuff on either side -- either from environmentalists or Big Ag. I really doubt the consumer dollar or a revised regulatory scheme will redirect such hopelessly misguided agricultural programs, but that doesn't mean it *couldn't*.
As a eater, very interesting information.
The account of variances in beef according to feed reminded me of a story I saw years ago about research in Japan. They were working on the creation specialty beefs by varying feed so that ranchers could produce a distinctive product that was less of a commodity.
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