King Corn as Weakened Rhetorical Documentary

 

What weakens King Corn’s argument is its reliance on the logical fallacy of causal oversimplification. As with Michael Pollan's Food, Inc., Cheney and Ellis place blame for this corn epidemic on the policies of one man, Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon because he released farmers from decades of production controls and encouraged them to plant “fence row to fence row” to meet the global demand for their corn, soybean, and wheat crops, especially. In an interview with the then 96-year-old Butz in his nursing home apartment, Cheney and Ellis wanted to challenge the modern food system his policies had helped create and policies that led to food subsidies for corn equaling $51 billion between 1995 and 2005. 

When Ian Cheney broaches the subject, asserting, “We've heard from some people that they think there is too much food,” however, Butz counters with his own unchanged perspective on his policy: "Well it's the basis of our affluence now, the fact that we spend less on food. It's America's best-kept secret. We feed ourselves with approximately 16 or 17% of our take home pay. That's marvelous, that's a very small chunk to feed ourselves. And that includes all the meals we eat at restaurants, all the fancy doodads we get in our food system. I don't see much room for improvement there, which means we'll spend our surplus cash on something else." 

Butz argues that cheap food eased hunger and increased disposable income, so everyone, for example, could afford a car. After the interview, Curt Ellis concludes that “Earl Butz was a product of his time” (“Meeting King Corn”) because he finished college in the middle of the Great Depression when scarcity was the norm, but he continues to blame Butz for the consequences of cheap corn, cheap soy, and cheap food, including Type II diabetes and obesity. 

But it was the 1996 farm bill that, according to David Moberg, “ended the old policy of managing both prices and production through a system of loans, target prices and stored surpluses” and “provided subsidy payments to farmers that were ‘decoupled’ from production.” And those subsidies continued after 2002, when prices crashed and subsidies became seen as a political necessity. Blame for the turn to high fructose corn syrup also does not land solely on Earl Butz’s shoulders, since the move occurred in 1980 after sugar tariff and quota policies failed during the Carter administration. Ethanol, an area of corn production overlooked by the film, became a centerpiece of the Carter administration, as well, as an alternative energy solution to ongoing oil embargo problems. King Corn entertains and partially enlightens the issues surrounding corn production, but it falls short because, like Food, Inc., it draws too much on nostalgia, and its argument is oversimplified.