KING CORN

more (real food)

But, luckily movie nights do have something to do with lazy, warm summer evenings. 

In this engaging movie, two best friends from college travel to Iowa where they grow one acre of corn, with the help of Iowa farmers growing a whole load more than that.  It's their story, told inventively, and the story of our food supply.  Without being preachy at all, we get to hear all about what Michael Pollan exposes in The Omnivore's Dilemma, that we're mostly growing a monocrop--corn--that's not even edible but is used for all the "foods" we've filled our supermarkets with--soda and other products that are mostly made from high fructose corn syrup and the like.  Then there's the meat counter where all the cows have been fed, you guessed it, corn, which is terrible for their poor stomachs.

These guys follow the complicated route of corn from its origins in Mexico to our America in the present, showing how we now grow billions of bushels of it industrially in Iowa.  And, they make the whole ride really, really fun.  And, it just might turn you into one of us who scours the ingredients on food labels, trying to figure out what xanthan gum is and proud of ourselves for knowing it's just a fancy name for corn.

Watch an interview from ZapRoot with the guys behind the movie here.