"King Corn" Scared Me Too Much To Think of a Clever Title

There were a few things in "King Corn" that I found particularly striking. The first of which goes along with Clare's point that pretty much everything has high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in it, even those foods that aren't considered "sweet". In the back of my mind I always kind of knew this was true, but I guess I always thought that it was a necessary component of these foods that served some purpose. But after watching the film its clear to me that the prevalence of HFCS is due to the overabundance of corn. They did not start growing more corn because they needed to produce an important sweetener that would go in everything, rather, the HFCS industry was created to utilize the corn being produced and uses for it were found after the fact.

The fact that corn has made its way into our diet through beef wasn't incredibly surprising, but what it actually does to the cattle was. An old roommate of mine grew up on a small-scale cattle farm and always refused to eat corn-fed beef. When I asked him why he responded, "because it tastes like [expletive] and it kills the cow." He also always claimed that he could cook ground beef from his parents farm without pouring off the grease and it would be healthier than the leanest ground beef that you could buy from the supermarket. "King Corn" confirmed all of these statements that I disregarded as crazy in the past. It also blew my mind when the documentary stated that cattle consume 70% of the antibiotics in the United States. 70%! I'm suddenly less concerned about the corn and more concerned about the amount of prescription strength drugs I'm taking in through my Whopper with cheese.

The last thing that I took away from the film was the lack of actual farming that goes into corn farming. I've worked on a couple different small scale farming operations that grew multiple types of crops each, and there was always work to be done. Aside from spraying a few times, it seems like the majority of the work in large-scale corn farming is clerical. I think that this corresponds to Rick's point that we, as the millennial generation, have never had to go through any large-scale hardship. Throughout time human nature and instinct has evolved into what it is now. At first humans sought to maximize survival, once we mastered that we moved on to maximizing comfort, and once we got that under control we sought to minimize work and any type of discomfort. The unintended consequence of this evolution seems to be looming on the horizon. All of this effort that has been put into making life easier has had negative cumulative effects on our health and the environment, and soon our generation will be the ones that are tasked with taking these problems on. But as previously stated in Rick's post, we have no idea what hardship looks like and we've forgotten what hard work is.