For anyone who doesn’t know, the majority of the food you eat is composed of corn. Cows, chickens, and pigs are all fed corn. Which means they eat the corn, process it, store it in their bodies, and pass it on to us. The sad thing is that none of those animals are genetically predisposed to consume corn. For cows, in particular, eating corn eventually destroys their stomachs. It creates an increase in acid, a condition called acidosis. To be grotesque for just a moment, the acid in their stomachs eventually eats them apart and kills them. But lucky for them they are slaughtered just before that happens, and copious amounts of antibiotics are pumped into their bodies to keep the acidosis in check until they can be processed. More than seventy percent of all antibiotics produced in this country is used in the beef industry. And in case you hadn’t reached the conclusion ahead of me, beef eaters are the ultimate consumers of those antibiotics.

I’m not a vegetarian, nor am I anti-meat, I am a meat eater. I do so knowing that the entire industry is fraught with problems. But beef is not the focus of the movie King Corn. Two young film makers set out to grow one acre of corn in Iowa and spend a year learning about and documenting the course of corn once it’s been harvested. Another primary use of corn, they point out, is sweetener – high fructose corn syrup. At a time prior to the government supported ‘cheap food’ program, producing corn syrup was more expensive than sugar. But as corn prices have fallen over the past three decades as vast surpluses were grown, the cost to produce corn syrup eventually fell below sugar. Today, the majority of all sweetener in food is now corn syrup. And as you may already suspect, our bodies aren’t wired to process it in the amounts we consume.

I knew most of this information prior to seeing King Corn. While watching, I was disappointed that the two film makers didn’t dive deeper. Judging by the movie, it didn’t appear to require too much time to grow their acre. So they had time to really investigate all the uses of corn. Certainly its use as a sweetener and animal feed are the two largest, but they could have done more to show how pervasive corn is in our diets. And, corn is also used extensively in non-food manufacturing. It can be found in our clothing, in plastics, in textiles, in chemicals, and much more.

In addition to exploring all the uses of corn, I wish they had done more to explain the corn plant itself. They glossed over issues regarding past corn varieties vs. what is now the most popular kind, and showed some of the farming process, but did little more than scratch the surface. One issue they failed to cover is the fact that the bulk of the corn grown today has been so genetically modified that it can only grow with human assistance. In other words, it cannot survive on it’s own. If corn crops were left alone, corn itself would go extinct in less than three years.

King Corn is an entertaining top level discussion of corn and its place in the U.S. food supply, but look elsewhere if you’re hoping for a deeper exploration.

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