My eyes were opened to the diverse uses of corn and the issues that this creates when I watched the independent film, "King Corn," by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis. These two friends have their hair analyzed and discover that on the typical american diet, they are replenishing their carbon supply with carbon from corn. This is because corn is present in almost every processed grocery item you can imagine, as well as it fuels America’s fast-food empire. High fructose corn syrup makes the sodas sweet, corn-fed beef makes the burgers fat, and corn oil crisps the fries. The boys then go to Iowa and grown an acre of corn and attempt to follow its fate as food. What they find is alternately hilarious and horrifying: genetically modified seeds and home- brewed corn syrup, a bumper crop of obesity and diabetes, and a government paying farmers to grow what’smaking us sick. At the base of it all, it seems that demand for fast cheap overproduction of unhealthy meat, sweeteners, and other products pushes the corn market.
