Daily Archive

I had a couple hours alone last night and indulged in one of my favorite pastimes: watching a documentary about food! Last night’s treat was King Corn, a documentary from 2007 about the meteoric rise of the corn crop in our country.

I want to encourage you to see this movie and visit the website for yourself. I got it on Nextflix streaming, but it was also available on DVD. It was only 90 minutes long and wasn’t a dull, dry documentary at all. The stop-motion animation and hand-drawn charts were amusingly and interestingly done to illustrate some of the more difficult concepts. The interviews were compelling, the film making lovely to watch, and (for you parents out there) there were only two mild swear words, both said off-camera and in a low voice. The education value was very high, and I imagine pre-teens through adults would enjoy this film. Although the filmmakers learned much in their journey, they were not at all heavy-handed in their treatment of the issues, and never got preachy about their subject. While there was certainly room for a lot of finger-pointing and frustration, there was a generous dose of grace offered to those who sought to free America from high-priced, hard-earned, scarce food. By examining both the history and the current issues surrounding their subject, the writers brought a welcome dose of balance.

One fact from the film shocked and frightened me to the point I can’t get it out of my head. When the film was made in 2007, one in eight persons in Brooklyn, NY had diabetes (diagnosed and undiagnosed.) One in eight. I had to pause the movie for a moment to wrap my head around that. That’s an epidemic on the scale of a Steven King horror novel, and the health implications are just as terrifying. Diabetes is a disease that eats you alive a bite at a time until you die. Swine flu panicked so many and is nowhere near that deadly. Why is there not more intervention? Why is HFCS still in our food supply, killing us slowly? The only answer I could think of was because HFCS is government subsidized. The government is paying subsidies to farmers to grow more corn that we can use, so much more that we are having to invent new uses for it, including some that are killing us off! Now, this is not news to me, but I had no grasp of the breadth of the problem. One in eight. Brooklyn can’t be the only city so affected, I suspect it is also true of large cities throughout our nation where income is low and soda is cheap.

When I stopped drinking soda I was up to about a two liters a day. That’s a little more than two quarts of liquid sugar poured into my body every 24 hours. That my pancreas didn’t just roll over and die is a miracle. I am so grateful for that miracle that I’m not going to bemoan how getting off the soda didn’t (for me) result in instant, drastic weight loss. I still have all my toes, my eyesight, I don’t have to inject myself with insulin or prick my fingers to test my blood. But I was certainly headed down that road. Seeing films like King Corn remind me when I’m tempted to pick up a Coke that I might as well be picking up a bottle of sulfuric acid and drinking that instead for all the good it will do my body.

And if my resolve ever flags again, King Corn will be in my first-aid kit.