I wrote about King Corn last year when it had its theatrical release. If you missed it back then, now is your chance to catch it on TV. The film is about two recent college graduates, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who decide to move to rural Iowa to plant an acre of corn and follow it through the food production chain all the way to the dinner plate. Along the way they learn some rather nasty facts about the way our food is produced. The bottom line: Americans eat too much corn and the cost of food in this country does not reflect the true cost of producing it. The industrial process of food production is literally “fast food” and it is doing terrible things to our health and to the wider eco-system.

I have been getting rather obsessed with Michael Pollan’s writing because of King Corn and thinking about my food perhaps more than I’d like to! I just read Pollan’s excellent Power Steer article in The New Kings of Nonfiction (a fantastic book by the way, edited by This American Life’s Ira Glass).

Check out local listings for King Corn on the Independent Lens website. Dinner will never be the same again!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Documentary, Screenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.