Byline: MAUREEN GROPPE - Gannett News Service
From his Indiana nursing home, former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz lets the makers of the documentary 'King Corn' in on 'America's best kept secret.'
Americans spend only between 16 percent and 17 percent of their take-home pay on food, Butz tells the camera.
'That's marvelous,' says Butz, who transformed agriculture policy in the 1970s. 'It's the basis of our affluence now.'
But the filmmakers aren't so sure. Recent college graduates Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who grew an acre of corn to follow it through the food chain, point out that their generation will have a shorter life span than their parents because of what they eat - much of it corn-fed meat, corn-based processed foods or those sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
'If the American people wanted strictly grass-fed beef, we would produce grass-fed beef for them,' feedlot owner Bob Bledsoe says in the movie. 'But it's definitely more expensive and one of the tenets in America is America wants and demands cheap food.'
'King Corn' follows recent best-selling books 'Fast Food Nation' and 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' as well as the popular documentary 'Super Size Me' in raising questions about the nation's food system and whether low price is worth the trade-offs to health, the environment and taxpayers.
The filmmakers believe those costs include:
Small, family farmers taken over by large, commercialized operations.
Pollution caused by the chemical fertilizers.
Confined feeding operations where livestock, standing shoulder to shoulder, are quickly fattened on cheap corn instead of roaming on ranges, eating grass. Corn-feed beef contains more saturated fat than grass-fed. Also, the cattle are given antibiotics to avoid getting sick on the corn or from the confinement conditions.
Subsidized unhealthy products like sodas and snack cakes instead of fruits and vegetables.
The Corn Refiners Association responded to the movie by arguing that no single food or ingredient is the sole cause of obesity, which should be blamed on too many calories and too little exercise. The association's statement on the movie also says obesity and diabetes incidence continue to rise even though per capita consumption of high-fructose corn syrup is on the decline.
The National Corn Growers Association calls the film 'an interesting idea for a movie' but complains that it 'does little to cultivate real knowledge of agriculture production.'
'Unfortunately, it fails to communicate to its viewers the efforts by corn growers to develop new markets for the crop,' said Ron Litterer, the group's president. In addition to criticizing the film for not focusing more on ethanol, Litterer also complains that its intent is to influence the farm bill. Congress is in the midst of setting farm policy for the next five years and some lawmakers have advocated a major overhaul of the subsidy system, which benefits only a minority of the nation's producers.
Ellis, however, said he's not expecting that his film will necessarily change anything.
'At this point, it feels like the most powerful part of this opportunity is that it's a chance for people for the first time to see the farm bill as also a food bill,' he said. 'The foods we eat are corn, and they're the least healthy foods for us to be eating.'
'King Corn'When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and 6 p.m. Saturday Where: Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia St., Hudson Tickets: $7; students $5 Info: 822-8448
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PROVIDED BY TIME AND SPACE LIMITED FILMMAKERS Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis grew an acre of corn to follow it through the food chain in their film 'King Corn.'
