Product Description

Engrossing and eye-opening KING CORN is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial pesticide-laden heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom - corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naivet college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their ancestral home of Greene Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America.With the help of some real farmers oodles of fertilizer and government aid and some genetically modified seeds the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America's modern food system."A graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors" (Salon) KING CORN shows how and why whenever you eat a hamburger or drink a soda you re really consuming corn.System Requirements:Running Time: 90 mintuesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Rating: NR UPC: 767685110898 Manufacturer No: NNVG110891

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2820 in DVD
• Brand: NEW VIDEO GROUP INC
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
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 Herbivore'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

Review
Further evidence that everything is bad for you is offered by KING CORN,which reveals how the U.S. farming staple is much more present in our diet -- and having much more of an effect on our ever-expanding national waistline -- than consumers realize.
No doubt inspired to some degree by Super Size Me, this equally engaging, slightly better-crafted documentary deftly balances humor and insightArresting factoids are delivered by helmer Aaron Woolf and collaborators in a package that's as agreeable as it is informative.
Subjects' low-key antics, their affectionate regard for the small-town milieu, some delightful stop-motion animation and an excellent rootsy soundtrack by the WoWz all make KING CORN go down easy, even if you might regard your burger, fries and Coke with suspicion afterward. --Variety

Review
Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary KING CORN is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex. Like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, it's about ho corn, raised on vast corporate farms, has become the starchy DNA of American diets, whether it's fattening up cattle or processed into the high-fructose corn syrup that greases everything from soft drinks to spaghetti sauce. Woolf follows two college chums as they go to Iowa to harvest one acre of yellow ears, which they then trace through the system. You'll be amazed to learn how much corn is in your system. A- --Entertainment Weekly

Customer Reviews

What you all don't get...
is that CORN FARMERS, or farmers who grow ANYTHING, grow what makes money. Crops are subsidized so the gov't can keep control. Control how much is grown (acres), control the prices, and make sure they are "nicey nicey" to other countries and buy commodities from them. I want to laugh and say, if you could get a promotion and make more money, would you do it? Why should a farmer not do what makes them money? DUH! If commodities could be sold in a free market economy, it would be great. We don't want subsidies, we want a free market and the government's hand out of our business.

Many farmers in the western high plains are barely making it. They're not rolling in money, they don't have retirement plans, they don't have many of the luxuries you city dwellers (and not self-employed workers) have....you work for someone who pays for your health insurance and offers a 401k? Must be nice! You worry about how much gas cost in your little car? Must be nice.....we spend THOUSANDS in fuel each month.

I am not saying that they don't have some valid points, especially regarding the over processed food we eat. But its pretty ignorant to "blame corn" over it. 99.9% of my crop feeds cattle. Cattle ranchers would like to make money too, and feeding corn is more profitable in the long run than grass...besides, I hate to break the news to you, there is not an abundance of grassland in the country. You want exclusively grass fed cattle? Be prepared to pay....a lot!

So before you go jumping on the anti-corn, anti-farmer bandwagon, make sure you have "walked a mile" in a farmer's shoes.

LOVED IT!!
What a wonderful movie, besides being well put together and easy to watch and follow it was so enlightening!! I loved how they went step by step on how the corn becomes the stuff that's in everything we eat/drink!! I eat almost all organic and this is just another motivating factor to stay on that path. No feed lot burgers for me ever again!

Kernels of truth
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.