King Corn (2007)

So, guess what cornstarch, corn syrup, and, yes, America's massive, fast-food industry all have in direct connection with each other? (Believe me, the answer to that question should be pretty obvious to most thinking viewers) To be honest - It wasn't this documentary's subject matter (which certainly held some noteworthy potential) that this viewer found to be supremely dull and forgettable - No - It was, above all else, King Corn's pedestrian presentation and the lacklustre personalities of its 2 producers/stars (who injected themselves into the story) that promptly lost some serious points for this real-life investigation into fast-food's #1 ingredient.To say that King Corn could have been a helluva lot better, on all counts, would truly be an understatement of the highest order.By the time that King Corn's producers, Ian Cheney & Curt Ellis, had made their monumental revelation about corn and its connection with fast-food, this bored viewer had already figured things out for himself and had lost significant interest in this tired documentary well within the first 30 of its 90-minute running time.

Undoubtedly, this documentary starts quite slow. They started off talking about how they were going to plant an acre of corn and follow it throughout its lifespan, including all the way to consumer. Nice premise, but over the first 30 minutes of this were talking about planting and growing corn, with no mention of where it was going ("it" being both the corn and the documentary). My wife even asked at one point where the heck this documentary was going.Once they sold their corn in the documentary, it started to get interesting. They actually started talking about where the corn goes, and all the various ways it gets into our bodies. Most of the rest of the documentary was devoted to this topic, and the makers of the film managed to explore this topic without judgment. While you could infer the filmmakers' position from the film if you're reasonably intelligent, they don't come out and say it explicitly. They allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. This is one of the bonuses of the film.Though a lot of the information in the film is old and relatively well known, especially if you watch some of the modern food documentaries, it's a nice introduction to a lot of the food issues we face as a society.

This movie is a great movie in getting down to the core of what is really going on in the food that we eat. As American's we tend to sit back and trust what food vendors are providing us. However, after watching the film one might not be as happy or trustworthy about what the food vendors are doing to the food that we are ingesting. What I love about this movie is that they take such complicated material and break it down so that the average person can understand what is going on. They do this by using demonstrations, actually doing something, pictures, graphs, and interviews with individuals. This movie will really get you to start thinking about what you are eating, why you are eating it, and how you can start to make a change.

Corn used to be food. Now it's a food product. This is the point of this excellent documentary. Cattle, one of the main consumers of corn, were never meant to eat corn. It makes them sick. It kills them. Humans were never meant to eat High Fructose Corn Syrup. It's making us fat and killing us. This is what happens when we turn food into food products and growing food into agri-business. Worse, government subsidies, meant to help farmers grow food to make people healthy, are now paying multinationals to manufacture food products that make people sick. This is one of several excellent warnings about where BigFood is taking us. Also read Omnivore's Dilemma; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; and In Defense of Food. This ain't your grandpa's farm (or corn), people!