King Corn

King Corn is a documentary about growing an acre of corn and trying to follow it through the food system in the U.S. “King Corn tells the story of two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. As the film unfolds, 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, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-ubiquitous grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they questions about how we eat—and how we farm.”

This eye-opening documentary is available on DVD and to Netflix subscribers where you may also watch it instantly. The brothers also attempt (and fail) to create corn fructose from a portion of their crop because the sheer amount of organic chemistry involved leads to a creation they dare not eat. I watched this last year, but never really connected the dots between isoglucose / high fructose corn syrup and health.