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Q&A: "We Wanted to Know How a Corn Cob Gets into a Pepsi"

Interview with Curtis Ellis, documentary filmmaker

SAN DIEGO, California, Apr 9 2008 (IPS) - Browsing through the aisles of the local supermarket, few consumers fully grasp the role corn plays in their daily lives.

Corn, it turns out, stands at the top of the food pyramid aside from its status as a vegetable. U.S. farmers grow mountains of the high-yield crop as a base ingredient for thousands of everyday products that enter the food system in the form of additives, sweeteners and preservatives. In goods ranging from corn-fed beef to toothpaste, corn is at the core of a highly mechanised and efficient agricultural system that&#39s been dubbed "factory food" by health and environmental activists.

To some outside observers, the United States&#39 food system is a marvel of the developed world. Food is abundant, cheap, and easy to obtain. Yet there is a downside to such abundance. U.S. consumers seem to be waddling towards a future comprised of expanding waistlines and a myriad of obesity-related illnesses – brought about by too much of an apparent good thing, a steady supply of readily available processed food.

Curious about their role in the food chain, fresh-faced Yale University graduates Curtis Ellis and Ian Cheney left the U.S. east coast for Greene, Iowa. There, they planted, fertilised and harvested an acre of corn, in a process that took them on a journey through the U.S. food-industrial complex.

The resulting film, titled "King Corn", is a wry and often startling look at how corn is grown in the U.S. heartland. First-time farmers/filmmakers Ellis and Cheney serve as winning guides to life in small-town U.S.A. As earnest, even naïve observers, unafraid to ask probing questions about corn production, they reveal the ways in which farming, farm communities, and the public are affected by food policies, as corn moves from Midwest fields to factories and supermarkets.

IPS correspondent Enrique Gili spoke to Curt Ellis from his home in Oregon. He is currently a fellow in the Food and Society programme administered by the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute in Columbia, Missouri. King Corn will air on the U.S. public station PBS Apr. 15 as part of the Independent Lens documentary series, and will be screened in communities around the country.

IPS: The movie begins with an unresolved cliffhanger, when samples are taken of your hair for telltale signs about your diet and what your body is excreting.

CE: Yeah, I feel like we owe viewers an explanation. We started the movie with a lab experiment and never really got back to it. Corn, it turns out, is major part of our diet, without us knowing it in the form of corn-fed chicken, beef, and corn-sweetened soda. It&#39s in thousands and thousands of foods we eat all the time. Fifty percent of my diet was corn-based. Ian&#39s was 58 percent – he must have been doing some late-night snacking.

IPS: That&#39s a surprising number. Is that what set you off into the hinterlands looking for answers?

CE: Starting in college Ian and I have always been interested in food issues. The goal was to go somewhere to find out more about our food system and the manner in which it&#39s grown. We wanted to know how a corn cob gets into a Pepsi.

IPS: And so you wind up in Green, Iowa, population 1,015. What did the locals make of it?

CE: I think we were the smallest family farm in Iowa that year. People didn&#39t quite know what to make of it. There aren&#39t young farmers in Greene, Iowa these days. Most people were very interested in the fact that we wanted to know where our food is coming from. People don&#39t ask that question that often, it just sort of magically shows up on our plates.

IPS: It was sort of mesmerising watching the corn emerging from the bare earth to become endless ears on the horizon. What was that like for you?

CE: By the time it was August, to see corn stalks nine feet high and beautiful -we felt proud. But when we tasted our corn it was like chalk, and we realised what we had grown was an industrial material. We weren&#39t growing sweet corn but a genetically modified corn called Liberty link.

IPS: It seemed as though farmers are being taken out of the equation of farming. You guys seemed to have a lot of down time between fertilising the field and harvesting.

CE: We leased one acre from a farmer growing more than 2,000 acres of corn. It took us 18 minutes to plant our acre and 25 to harvest it. All told, it took two hours to grow 10,000 pounds of corn. It was an incredible accomplishment. Unfortunately, it was an industrial material destined for fast food.

IPS: One of the more ironic aspects of the film is that you were denied access to the corn rendering plant where the GMO Liberty corn was converted into corn syrup. The PR flack stated it was for your safety and for the security of the plant. What did you make of that?

CE: I don&#39t think there&#39s a genuine safety concern either for us – we&#39ve toured factories before – or for the security of the food – we grew it. However, the corn syrup industry knows it doesn&#39t stand to gain anything from more publicity. Consumers have a bad feeling about high fructose corn syrup, and seeing the factory where it comes from will only make people more aware of the fact that our food system has become industrialised to the point of being unappetizing. It&#39s not that they have anything to hide, but they certainly don&#39t have anything pretty to show.