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King Corn is a movie about “Two friends, one acre of corn and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.” Directors Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis were college buddies who decided to leave the city, move to farm in Iowa and grow corn, in order to find out about the crop that is used in everything we eat, from hamburgers, to soda, to donuts. 9 months (and 31,000 seeds, a 10,000-pound harvest of corn) later, the crop yield was so huge it would be able to yield 57,348 cans of soda, 3,894 corn-fed hamburgers, 2,301 pounds of bacon or 6,726 boxes of frosted corn flake. The two filmmakers put the corn into Cheney and Ellis used the corn to feed livestock, and turned the rest into ethanol and sweeteners, such as corn syrup. Curious about how much corn they were ingesting, Cheney and Ellis got their hair “corn tested” and discovered the food made up 58% and 53% of their diets.
