|
|
|
|
|
|
King Corn 
Actors : Michael Pollan, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis, Stephen Macko, Chuck Pyatt
Studio : DOCURAMA
by DOCURAMA
Brand : NEW VIDEO GROUP INC
Release Date : 2008-04-29
Publisher : DOCURAMA
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 0767685110898
UPC : 767685110898
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 13 reviews)
List Price : $26.95
Our Price : $13.36
|
|
| |
|
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 |
| |
|
Americancivilwar.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 |
| |
|
| |
|
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. |
| |
|
light hearted look at very serious issue |
|
I am still processing everything I learned from this documentary. I encourage everyone to watch it and have donated my copy to the local library. The interviews with farmers, professors from the university, and food industry professionals is very interesting. I also looked up the King Corn website and was intriguied by the challenge to go 'corn free' which for me meant really taking a look at all the products I eat which contain corn. Perhaps a word of caution when you get to the feed lot portion of the documentary. I had absolutely no idea cattle were raised like this and the impact that eating corn based diets has on them. It has really put me off eating beef. I feel this topic needs to become more mainstream so everyone is aware of the impact of their choices on their health. And if I could encourage people to do one thing to change their diet - stop drinking sodas!!!!! |
| |
|
Ten star winner!!! |
As documentaries go this is a wonderful one and if I do say so myself a fair one. Never fully realized that all that corn grown in places like Iowa, is inedible until its been processed and doctored up in some way.
Or that some towns are supported by pure farm welfare programs called farm support, that we the taxpayers pay for. And now with the flooding in the region we will pay even more.
I especially appreciated being reminded that we have cheap food in the United States because so much of it is made in some way by corn or corn syrup.
But cheap food as the documentary notes also means higher health care costs because of the increased health problems that arise from eating foods made from corn. And sadly as the documentary shows, its the small family farm that wants to raise healthy crops, livestock who is being shut out. |
| |
|
Growing awareness of food vs. agribusiness. |
This interesting film illustrates what happens when food becomes more of a vehicle for making money than for feeding people. Most of the corn we grow in our 'breadbasket' is inedible for humans, and is used as feedgrain for cows (I wonder how much the cows like it as well).
In addition to documenting their farming experiment, the filmmakers visited a massive cattle feedlot in Colorado. It brought to mind another movie that explores our meat industry Fast Food Nation. As the meat industry, like the cigarette industry, increases their global marketing, ever increasing amounts of grain are being used to feed cattle; along with creating fuels. Amazingly, some crops are being genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals Transgenic Plants: A Production System for Industrial and Pharmaceutical Proteins.
With growing food crises around the world, one wonders when we'll reach a tipping point and decide to create a food system that serves people instead of serving the interests of executives at Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Rats in the Grain: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer Daniels Midland, the Supermarket to the World. Thinkers like Frances Moore Lappe have long argued that the real issue behind a lack of food security is not a lack of food, but rather a lack of democracy World Hunger: Twelve Myths. We need to dethrone 'Kings' of corn and many other commodities and put decision making power into the hands of civil society, as Vandana Shiva has advocated for so eloquently Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. See some of Shiva's presentations on YouTube, she's a modern-day Gandhi.
A couple other resources to help us create a sustainable, organic, biodiverse, and localized food system:
Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works (Our Sustainable Future)
Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth
Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair
Mother Earth News
How to Save the World
|
| |
|
|
|
