King Corn (Standard Packaging) |  | Director: Aaron Woolf
Actors: Earl L. Butz, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis
Studio: New Video Group
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $9.82
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Seller: Supermart
Rating:  68 reviews
Sales Rank: 639
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Running Time: 88 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 767685115046
UPC: 767685115046
EAN: 0767685115046
ASIN: B001EP8EOY
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Follows the story of two college friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, as they take a year to grow an acre of corn and follow it through the American fo
Picking up where Super Size Me left off, King Corn examines America's health woes through the multifaceted lens of one humble grain. Director Aaron Woolf and co-writers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis offer irrefutable proof that the US is virtually drowning in the stuff. Corn meal, corn starch, hydrologized corn protein, and high fructose corn syrup fuel a multitude of products, from soft drinks to hamburgers. The starchy vegetable grows with ease and government subsidies insure over-abundant production. Woolf documents the 11-month effort of college friends Cheney and Ellis, who trace their ancestry to the same small Iowa town, to raise their own crop. After finding a farmer willing to lend them an acre, they meet with agronomists, historians, and other experts before plowing, seeding, and spraying. Prior to harvesting, the easygoing Yale grads travel to Colorado to compare the grass-fed cattle of yore with today's corn-fed counterparts; then to New York to explore the links between corn syrup, obesity, and diabetes. With assistance from author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), a whimsical score, and stop-motion animation--farm toys and corn kernels--Woolf and associates bring biochemistry to vivid life. On a micro level, this genial eye-opener celebrates friends and farmers; on a macro level, King Corn bemoans the subsidies and genetic modifications that have turned a formerly protein-filled product into the fatty "yellow dent no. 2." Bonus features include a music video, photo gallery, and "The Lost Basement Lectures," an amusingly fake instructional movie about the aims of agriculture. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 68
 And what we eat is garbage... April 19, 2008
In Florida Recovering from Being Abused in Texas (Surfside, Florida)
50 out of 53 found this review helpful
Although not perfect, I'll give any documentary, movie, TV show or book five stars if it alters my life and King Corn definitely rates five full stars. I would highly recommend that everyone purchase or at least view this movie once; I had the opportunity to see it this week on PBS's series "Independent Lens." Corn is nothing but a "raw material" that is separated to almost its basic elements and used to build our daily "garbage" diet.
I learned about the relationship between obesity and the use of high fructose corn syrup (aka HFCS) by accident a few years ago when I made a visit to Victoria, Texas and they sold Dr. Pepper with "Imperial Sugar" and the 10-2-4 logo on the bottle. I didn't know that sometime in the early 70's that the soft drink companies switched from sugar to HFCS as the sweetener. Who would have thought that decades after being told that sugar is bad for your teeth, etc., etc. that it is actually much better for you than the HFCS alternative!
After watching this documentary I did some research and HFCS is in almost everything you buy. For example, it is that main ingredient in many of the ice cream syrups on the supermarket shelves... HFCS is in everything form hamburger and hot dog buns to "low fat" salad dressing! Honey graham crackers... EVERYTHING! Fast foods are full of this HFCS junk and this is only one of the many things you'll learn from this documentary.
Where I live in Corpus Christi most of the population is obese, they exercise little (if at all), have a high incidence of diabetes and fast foods are their favorite filler. In fact, at the local Driscoll Children's Hospital on one side you have the emergency entrance and on the other the "golden arches." No joke! It is really sad.
One can only project into the future after the wheat gluten from China killed our pets in the United States... Will we outsource growing corn to China so we can get even cheaper HFCS to fatten and kill our population off?
My only minor criticism is that the filmmakers didn't explore our government's role in ruining our diets by providing a version of "corporate welfare" to factory farms that produce this junk. As it turns out, they would not be in this business, save the subsidies they get from the USDA. Go figure!
UPDATE 13May08: A recent story in the The Wall Street Journal [1-year subscription] (May 7, 2008, Page B3A) by Susan Buchanan raises some interesting points on the use of corn syrup.
I do not want to give anyone the impression that the only reason that our nation is obese is due to HFCS. In fact, the problem with obesity in the United States is the result of many interrelated and complex factors. They include, cheaper foods coupled with larger portions, an increase in eating out (especially at fast food joints), reduction in exercise and, unfortunately, a greater acceptance of being overweight as the "norm" in our society.
As this film points out, our government is responsible for subsidies to make something that is unprofitable profitable, while at the same time making food cheaper with heavy doses of HFCS inside. I wish, instead, that our government would give big subsidies to organic farmers and tax breaks to those who walk or ride their bikes to work. Instead, our government (FCC) is more concerned with giving us more channels of digital TV by February 2009; another major cause of obesity is the time spent sitting in front of the tube. Where I live the Corpus Christi Police Department and Nueces County Sheriff's Department have almost a zero record in regards to protecting pedestrians, joggers and bicyclists. It is downright dangerous to make an effort to be physically fit where I live. At the same time, the situation in Corpus Christi is not, by any means, unique in our country.
To reduce the epidemic of obesity in the United States we need a multi-pronged attack on the problem that includes support from our government for more healthful ways of life and a population that will say NO to eating junk and YES to exercise.
Growing awareness of food vs. agribusiness. June 29, 2008
Preston C. Enright (Denver, CO United States)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This interesting film illustrates what happens when food becomes more of a vehicle for making money than for feeding people. Most of the corn we grow in our 'breadbasket' is inedible for humans, and is used as feedgrain for cows (I wonder how much the cows like it as well).
In addition to documenting their farming experiment, the filmmakers visited a massive cattle feedlot in Colorado. It brought to mind another movie that explores our meat industry Fast Food Nation. As the meat industry, like the cigarette industry, increases their global marketing, ever increasing amounts of grain are being used to feed cattle; along with creating fuels. Amazingly, some crops are being genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals Transgenic Plants: A Production System for Industrial and Pharmaceutical Proteins.
With growing food crises around the world, one wonders when we'll reach a tipping point and decide to create a food system that serves people instead of serving the interests of executives at Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Rats in the Grain: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer Daniels Midland, the Supermarket to the World. Thinkers like Frances Moore Lappe have long argued that the real issue behind a lack of food security is not a lack of food, but rather a lack of democracy World Hunger: Twelve Myths. We need to dethrone 'Kings' of corn and many other commodities and put decision making power into the hands of civil society, as Vandana Shiva has advocated for so eloquently Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. See some of Shiva's presentations on YouTube, she's a modern-day Gandhi.
A couple other resources to help us create a sustainable, organic, biodiverse, and localized food system:
Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works (Our Sustainable Future)
Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth
Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair
Mother Earth News
How to Save the World
Must see film as much about health as it is food August 29, 2009
Jon Reiss (Los Angeles)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This film is a must see for anyone interested not only in food
production and food policy in the United States, but also what ailes
(sp?) us as a nation. The US government, and the agricultural industry
has unfortunately created a system that is out of whack. While we spend
less than at any time on food, we are spending more and more on
health-care (the one point I wish the film had made more directly).
This film should be seen by all Americans. I saw another comment that
quiblbed with the particulars in the film. The film is not a doctoral
thesis, it is a piece of art trying to raise awareness. I also thought
the device of the two filmmakers staking out an acre of corn and
following it through the year as a spine to the story was quite
wonderful, as well as the animations that they did with a still camera.
As far as I know you can also get the film to screen in your community
from the film's website. I highly recommend it - would be great food
for thought.
Iowa Corn Farm Owner Agrees and Adds a Thought May 21, 2010
Joel P. Leenaars (Danbury, Iowa)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
King Corn tells the truth. No one in my area wants to rent a farm with farm buildings. Farm management experts at [...] advise tearing down most, if not all, buildings. At one time there were neighboring 'ghost farmsteads' with trees, orchards, but no mailboxes. Most of those remnants are now gone.
I've burned down all my wooden buildings, except for the 'century house'. I'm 75. When I'm gone someone else can raze that.
The impoverishment and de-humanizing of Iowa is deliberate government policy, the opposite of some European countries. Our present system does work well for huge agricultural supply and commodity conglomerates.
High tarrifs on imported cane sugar exacerbate the problem. The goal is to keep Americans eating inferior corn sugar products at protected prices.
It takes a lifetime of on-farm experience to successfully operate a viable 'sustainable agriculture' farm. Such expertise is dying or dead. Iowans raise 'export kids' to find careers in other states.
The DVD 'King Corn' tells the true story on many levels. The rationale for providing much food at low cost is deeply flawed and unsustainable, but highly appealing to the 'sound bite' crowd. Food that is truly 'good for you' may cost twice as much in stores and four times as much in restaurants. Are you ready, willing and able to pay for good quality rather than poor quantity?
Kernels of truth July 2, 2008
Jon Hunt (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
America's heartland, (Iowa, particularly, in this film) is undergoing some serious changes and Aaron Woolf's exposé on the commodity of corn is a welcome addition to those authors and filmmakers who investigate what we eat and how it's made. One thing stands out more than anything else....corn is ubiquitous.
Gently told by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, friends who move to Iowa to raise an acre of corn and then try to follow it to its destinations, "King Corn" goes farther than how corn is planted and tended. The lives of the residents of Greene, Iowa, where the film takes place, become central. This is not your average Chamber of Commerce town tour, by any stretch. Unlike the hard-driving Michael Moore or the self-absorbed Morgan Spurlock, Cheney and Ellis let the camera and the townfolk do the work. It's a winning combination and what the viewer learns from this documentary might not be shocking but nonetheless revealing in sobering terms. "King Corn" is well worth a look.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 68
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