King Corn

Ian Cheney:
When my best friend Curtis and I graduated from college, we thought we were done with professors and were supposed to feel like we had our whole lives ahead of us.

Curt Ellis:
But we just heard some disconcerting news: some day, we were going to die - and maybe sooner than we thought. The first time in American history, our generation was at risk of having a shorter life-span than our parents. And it was because of what we ate.

Ian Cheney:
[their 1 acre has been planted] Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience. But then again, it only took us 18 minutes.

Michael Pollan:
What you're growing is an industrialized corn. It has been changed over the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years with one goal in mind, which is yield. The way it was done was, not to make every plant produce more so much, as to make the plants tolerate living close together. This plant is kind of an "urban" creature; it lives in these cities of corn. We're now up to close to 200 bushels of corn per acre. That's what, 10,000 pounds? 5 tons of food from 1 acre of land. It's an amazing amount of food!

Michael Pollan:
If you're standing in a field in Iowa, there's an immense amount of food being grown, none of it edible. The commodity corn... nobody can eat it. It must be processed before we can eat it. It's a raw material, it's a feed-stock for all these other processes. And the irony is that an Iowa farmer can no longer feed himself.

Ian Cheney:
It was already clear that when the time came to say goodbye to the corn from our acre, we would never know exactly where it would end up. After the crop is delivered to the elevator, following corn into the food system becomes a game of probability. Of the 10,000 pounds of corn our acre is likely to produce, 32% will be either exported or turned into Ethanol. In neither case ending up in our food. Or in our hair. But 490 pounds will become sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup. And more than half our crop, a full 5,500 pounds, will be feed to animals to become meat.

Curt Ellis:
The corn fed to cattle is supplemented with low doses of antibiotics, that help them combat acidosis. Live stock now consumes 70% of the antibiotics in the United States.

Loren Cordain:
The meat that we eat in this day and age is produced in a feed lot. It's grain-fed meat, and we produce a characteristically obese animal, animals whose muscle tissue looks more like fat tissue than it does lean meat in wild animals. And if you look at a T-bone steak from a grain-fed cow, it may have as much as 9 grams of saturated fat. Whereas a comparable steak from a grass-fed animal would have 1.3 grams of saturated fat.

Walter Willet:
One great changes in the American food supply during the last 20 years is that we are now drinking many more calories than we were before. And there does seem to be something about drinking calories, in the form of soda for example, that just doesn't generate the stop signals.

Ian Cheney:
We've heard from some people that they think there is too much food.

Earl L. Butz:
Well it's the basis of our affluence now, the fact that we spend less on food. It's America's best-kept secret. We feed ourselves with approximately 16 or 17% of our take home pay. That's marvelous, that's a very small chunk to feed ourselves. And that includes all the meals we eat at restaurants, all the fancy doodads we get in our food system. I don't see much room for improvement there, which means we'll spend our surplus cash on something else.

[last lines]

Curt Ellis:
We are wondering if there's anyway you'd let us try and raise the money to actually buy that acre.

Pyatt:
Ah ha ha ha. You guys, you're gonna starve this country.