I assigned myself the movie King Corn a while back and rented it from iTunes. Well, you can only keep your digital rental for 30 days and today was the last of my 30 days, so I guess the assignment came due. Way to go me, leaving everything to the last minute! So I watched the movie today. It’s a 90 minute documentary by two guys from Boston fresh out of college, who decide to buy an acre of land to grow some corn and learn about the industry in the process. Here is its preview:
As you might be able to tell from the preview, it’s a movie very much in the style of Super Size Me. It’s about the two guys’ personal journey through their own experiment, with several surprises surfacing along the way. I was a bit disappointed that their surprises weren’t all that surprising to me. They even had several interview segments with Michael Pollan (who’ve I’ve much quoted on this blog). I won’t sum up the whole movie for you, since that would be rather dull (and you can rent it for yourself from iTunes for $2.99 or watch it on your computer if you have Netflix and a PC), but instead I’ll give you a couple of highlights:
- If you try to grow an acre of corn without government subsidies, you will lose money. Ian and Curt demonstrate this as they determine that it cost them $349.92 to produce their acre of corn (seed, renting the land, fertilizer, renting equipment, etc). Even at a high yield of 200 bushels of corn, which they could sell to the elevator for $1.62 per bushel, they were out a loss of $19.92. As one farmer says, the government payment keeps the industry going, not the true value of the crops.
- The industrialization of the farm has contributed to monster sized farms and equally large corn harvests. As tractors took over farm work, a single farmer could work more and more land and didn’t need their kids to help with the farming, so younger generations moved away. As the people disappear from the land, even more farming can happen without houses in the way.
- Livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics in the United States. Because cattle were never intended to graze on corn but were forced from a no grain diet to one of 90% corn in a relatively short period of time, more acid is produced in the cow leading to acidosis. If not treated for this condition, the cow could die, so cattle are regularly treated with a low dose of antibiotics to combat this condition.
- A feedlot with about 100,000 head of cattle produces as much waste as a city of 1.7 million people. The use of antibiotics in feedlots helps cattle survive the conditions of confinement which are standard to factory farming.
- A piece of corn fed meat has approximately seven times the fat of a piece of grass fed meat. Cows in feedlots are packed tightly into spaces so that they cannot move and merely eat all day long. This allows the cows to fatten up to slaughter weight more quickly. It’s lucky that they do fatten up more quickly because the corn diet they subsist on would otherwise kill them. The corn diet creates an obese animal, such that, as one man says, hamburger meat isn’t meat, it’s just fat disguised as meat with 65% of calories from fat.
- The corn plant that originally migrated north from Mexico had a higher protein content than what we eat today. As it was bred for higher productivity, scientists managed to expand the endosperm, or starch fraction of the kernel, rather than focus on the segment related to its protein. As one scientist said, most of what we’ve done in so called agricultural improvements has actually degraded our food supply from a nutritional standpoint.
- 1 in 8 New Yorkers has diabetes, though many cases go undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to diet and exercise has boomed along with the soda industry. There seems to be something about drinking calories that doesn’t trigger the same stopping mechanism as eating calories. One soda per day doubles one’s risk of diabetes.
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