King Corn: Process-Driven Nostalgia

 

By concentrating on one element of Michael Pollan’s work explored in Food, Inc., corn production, and adding humor to the chilling information it conveys, King Corn provides a more engaging process-driven narrative that attempts to reveal why corn now comprises such a large percentage of the American diet. Dennis Harvey’s Variety review provides a positive perspective of the film, asserting that Cheney and Ellis’s “low-key antics, their affectionate regard for the small-town milieu, some delightful stop-motion animation and an excellent rootsy soundtrack by the WoWz all make "King Corn" go down easy, even if you might regard your burger, fries and Coke with suspicion afterward.” 

Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post agrees, asserting that the film is “gorgeously filmed in digital video and Super-8, using clever stop-motion corn kernel animation and a lyrical score by the "anti-folk" band the WoWz.” According to Hornaday, too, with help from its “engaging guides,” Cheney and Ellis, "King Corn takes what could be a tiresome agri-civics lesson and delivers a lively, funny, sad and even poetic treatise on the reality behind America's cherished self-image as the breadbasket of the world.” Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com also highlights the lessons of King Corn but concludes, “This information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors.”

Through their naïve attempts to grow corn in Greene, Iowa, their ancestral home, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis do reveal the extent to which corn has entered the American diet, so much so that, when tested, their bodies chemistries both include more than fifty percent corn. To expose how corn has become an ingredient in nearly every food source found in the supermarket, Cheney and Ellis plant, grow, and harvest one acre of corn. During the process, the two learn not only about the corn-growing process, but also about the farm subsidies that support the corn industry, especially since changes in subsidy legislation during the Nixon administration. 

Like Food, Inc., King Corn relies on nostalgia as a rhetorical tool, contrasting the industrialized corn production expected today—with powerful fertilizer, government aid, and genetically modified seed to support it—with traditional farming techniques practiced in the same area when their great-grandparents farmed the land. By primarily maintaining this focus on corn production and its entrance into the American diet through high fructose corn syrup and other corn-based ingredients found in almost every food item in the supermarket and the fast food restaurant, the film successfully demonstrates the power of corn.

Food Inc. as Rhetorical Adaptation

 

Food, Inc. stands up as an adaptation of Pollan’s nonfiction book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, even following a similar narrative structure that begins with an interrogation of industrial farming and its relation to corn, that then moves nostalgically to the pastoral alternative where cattle feed on field grass instead of feedlot corn. Pollan’s work, however, offers an extensive bibliography of resources to support his claims. In Food, Inc., however, broad-based evidence is replaced with single case support, so individual examples are meant to support assertions about both the control of the market and the negative consequences of such vertical integration.

The film’s expose of the chicken industry is a case in point. In this segment, the narrator asserts that Tyson isn’t “producing chicken; it is producing food and is mechanized so chickens are grown to be almost the same size.” He explains that Tyson produces “lots of food on little land for the least money.” Then an example of a Tyson farm in McLean, Kentucky is used to support this claim. The conditions in the henhouse seem to make the case against four companies controlling 80% of the market. According to this chicken farm owner, mass production leads to dust and feces, as well as chickens with bones and internal organs that grow so fast the chickens are unable to stand. To protect herself from these conditions, the farm owner wears a mask while applying antibiotics to their feed. Yet, according to the owner, “bacteria work up resistance, so it’s not working.” She claims undocumented workers work at plants and attend work even if they are sick, as well. According to the narrator, the Perdue Chicken Company also keeps chicken farmers under their thumbs, but we do not see an example of a Perdue farm because the company will not allow the filmmakers to document workers on the farm. Instead, this one example of a Tyson chicken farm gone wrong is used to illustrate a problem with much broader consequences. 

Food, Inc. also includes individual examples of cattle production and corn production before offering an alternative—organically grown foods that are meant to help viewers reminisce nostalgically about a pastoral past now out of our grasp. Again the film provides an individual example to support its assertion that growing and consuming food in traditional ways is a viable solution to factory farming. Joel Salata’s Polyface Farms is shown in stark contrast to the factory farms like Tyson Foods and Smithfield. On the Polyface Farm, cattle eat grass instead of a feedlot diet of corn, dead cows, chickens, and manure, Salata explains. Manure fertilizes the grasses, he explains. According to Salata, “they hit the bulls-eye at the wrong target—plant, fertilize and harvest corn with satellites when they should be asking if we should feed them corn at all.” 

 After highlighting problems with genetically-altered corn and soybeans like Roundup Ready, the film ends with a series of solutions to the industrial food problem: Respecting the season, buying organic and non genetically-modified foods from local farmers and farmers’ markets, growing one’s own food, and allowing food stamps at farmers’ markets are just a few. But the film’s message is almost lost in the voiceover narration and over-reliance on individual examples to substantiate claims. Although Food, Inc. does provide a plethora of information about industrialized farming and argues from a clear position, its message is weakened by both its nostalgic vision and by the rhetorical strategies the filmmakers choose to employ.

Food, Inc.: An Expert’s Pastoral Fantasy

Following a pattern similar to Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the Talking-Heads documentary Food, Inc. attempts to illustrate how the American supermarket reflects both the changes in our food and our nostalgia for a pristine agrarian past when, at least in what the narrator claims is “a pastoral fantasy,” the fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy we eat came directly from the family farm. Images of farmers and farms are used to sell a multitude of supermarket products, 47,000 in an average grocery store, according to the narrator. In a store where tomatoes are sold year-round, and meat and poultry are sold without bones, however, according to this narrator, a “deliberate veil” has been constructed between food and its source, the narrator explains. 

In reality, food is produced in a factory, not on a farm, the film claims, so that “now food is coming from enormous assembly lines where both animals and workers are abused.” With help from contrasting images of these factory farms, interviews, and voiceover narration, Food, Inc. attempts to show how corporations control food from seed to supermarket. The film’s assertions are weakened, however, not only because of an over-reliance on the authority of a narrator, but also because the film argues its points from single examples, moving from the whole to the particular with a clear point of view that remains unsubstantiated.  

Many critics, however, regard the information the film attempts to convey, in general as “important.” For example, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly argues that the film is “one that nourishes your knowledge of how the world works.” And John Anderson of Variety asserts that Food, Inc. “does for the supermarket what Jaws did for the beach—marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat agri-business, corporatized meat and the greedy manipulations of both genetics and the law.” According to Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com, “the food-activism movement in 2009 is roughly where the environmental movement was in 1970…. Food, Inc. is meant to be an opening salvo that gets people’s attention, not the battle that wins the war.” 

Yet other critics find the film derivative rather than breaking new ground. Kyle Smith of the New York Post, for example, asserts, “The film offers very little that food radicals don’t already know. Journalists Eric Schlosser… and Michael Pollan serve as the packhorses, turning up to say things on camera they’ve been saying in print for years.” Smith also argues that charges made in the film remain unsubstantiated. Instead, we assert that the film does attempt to support its “charges,” but relies too heavily on individual examples to make its case. 

As an illustration, the film begins with a more generalized image of a factory and a businessman in a wheat field meant to reinforce the connection between farming and factories, as a narrator explains, “They don’t want this story told.” According to images and narration, however, industrial food production’s cause is connected to one company, the McDonald Brothers, who now control our food system, from beef, potatoes, and pork, to tomatoes and apples. From here the film highlights example areas of food production controlled by McDonalds, from chicken and beef production to the corn production that sustains them both.

The Limits of Nostalgia in Food Documentaries

 

Most food documentaries draw on an expository Talking-Heads approach and a rhetorical form that argues through a nostalgic vision of the pre-industrial farming period. The environmental nostalgia evoked by We Feed the World and King Corn, for example, may be limited, however, because the past evoked by a nostalgic view is not only unobtainable, but also cast in an unrealistic innocence. The reality of the past is lost in its present-day nostalgic translation, even when, as in King Corn, emotional appeals draw on both personal and universal ecological historical memories. 

Nostalgia has been critiqued, reified, and recovered in the past few decades, with a resurgence of research in memory studies complicating negative views of nostalgia built on postmodern views. Postmodern responses to nostalgia critique its move toward essentialism. In her 1988 article, “Nostalgia: A Polemic,” Kathleen Stewart engages postmodern cultural critics’ views that see nostalgia as a social disease. According to Stewart, “Nostalgia, like the economy it runs with, is everywhere. But it is a cultural practice, not a given content; its forms, meanings, and effects shift with the context—it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present” (227). Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jonathan Culler, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, and Raymond Williams, Stewart elucidates why nostalgia is such a powerful rhetorical tool, as well: Stewart argues that “on one ‘level’ there is no longer any place for anyone to stand and nostalgia takes on the generalized function to provide some kind (any kind) of cultural form” (227, emphasis Stewart’s). 

According to Stewart, nostalgia serves as a powerful rhetorical tool that placates and paralyzes the disenfranchised: “Nostalgia is an essential, narrative, function of language that orders events temporally and dramatizes them in the mode of ‘that’s what happened,’ that ‘could happen,’ that ‘threaten to erupt at any moment’” (227). Stewart sees the seductive nature of nostalgia in a postmodern culture not only as culturally situated but also as reductively negative, resulting in what she calls mirages—either a “grand hotel” of affluence or a “country cottage” of romantic simplicity. For Stewart, then, nostalgia is a negative consequence of attempting to replace postmodern relativism with an essential past based in recovery of an essential “self.” 

More recent work, especially in anthropology and cultural studies complicates visions of nostalgia as inherently and inescapably bad. Ethel Pinheiro and Cristiane Rose Duarte, for example, argue that nostalgia may itself prove not only a way to learn from the past but to recuperate real community in the Largo da Carioca. And Sean Scanlan, in his Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies introduction asserts, “postmodernism’s negative critique only partially illuminates its various links to memory, history, affect, media and the marketplace, only partially accounts for nostalgia’s continuing power.” Yet other cultural critics in the journal condemn the use of nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy because it “abused individual and collective memory and … problematized the relations between producers and consumers.” Although King Corn most effectively invokes nostalgia by drawing on both the personal memories Cheney and Ellis recover on the family farm and the collective memories of the ubiquitous family farm and farmer, King Corn, Food, Inc., and We Feed the World essentialize a pastoral past as a solution to factory farming, a solution doomed to failure because it rests on the limits of environmental nostalgia.