King Corn
Closed CaptioningAaron Woolf
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Plot Summary
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 naivete, two college buddies 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 aide, 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 in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary.
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Movie Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes
TOMATOMETER
96%- Reviews Counted: 24
- Fresh: 23
- Rotten: 1
- Average Rating: 7.6/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.
Fresh: Deftly balances humor and insight.
Fresh: King Corn is entertaining enough, but it's also a moral, crucially skeptical road trip down the food chain.
Fresh: A deceptively intelligent new entry in the regular-Joe documentary genre.
Customer Reviews
Great piece of the puzzle...
I've been really into learning more about what we eat as Americans ever since hearing a lecture on Minnesota Public Radio. As a student of economics and a gym junkie I have been really intrigued. I started by reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dillema" and then "In defense of Food". I joined an organic, local, CSA. Wanting to learn more I've also read "The end of Food" and "Fast Food Nation". I've also ventured out into documentaries starting with "Supersize Me". I find that King Corn is an insightful, reflective documentary that perfectly compliments what I have read so far. I would not necessisarily recommend it as your first voray into this topic, but it's a nice way to cap off many reads. It brings to your eyes what you've been learning about. Knowing the background already, seeing the reality in this documentary really brought home the things I had only been imagining in my head.
King Corn
I saw excerpts on C-Span and was impressed with the Director Aaron Woolf and his beliefs about respect and documentaries. Its a great story about growing an acre of corn in Iowa and its uses in our food and meat supply. Enlightening! Informative! If you care about your health and would like to know more how quality and quantity are affected by decision makers... put this on your list of documentaries to see.
we are what we eat
This movie is an intriguing look into our current food supply in its full cycle. Two young men from an urban city delve into the process of growing an acre of corn and what happens to it. It's well done from the standpoint that Ian and Curt know next to nothing about growing crops, so they are able to explain and relate this whole process extremely well to the audience. The real interesting question the documentary raises is at what expense are we as a nation and as human beings willing to pay for a cheap food versus our health. The narrators address the initial problems we will and are currently seeing in our population. We're very early in this experiment, as the changes in federal policy on growing corn and its subsidies drastically changed in the early 1970's. The result is tremendous yields of crops, drastically keeping food prices down, feeding our livestock and incorporating most of our processed foods with corn. Again, it's cheap food, but are we getting what we pay for?
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