What I Learned This Week

Last week was a big week.  We joined the 21st century AND Netflix.  I know.  Are we seriously the LAST family in the modern world to get sucked in?  And I say sucked in because we have watched 3 movies in the last week.  That’s an amazing feat for us.  Generally we rent 2 or 3 movies a YEAR.

Our queue is suddenly full of documentaries, mostly involving the food industry.  I’m nothing if not predictable.  My husband has always been a sucker for a good documentary, and we are both very interested in the food industry and how it has evolved over the last 50 years, so we’ve finally found a genre of film we can agree on.

This weekend we watched King Corn — a documentary by two college graduates from the Boston area who moved to Iowa to plant an acre of corn and learn about the Iowa corn industry.  Here’s a great synopsis I grabbed from the website:

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.

Their film was inspired by Micheal Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which is on my bookshelf waiting to be devoured.

Suffice it to say, I learned a lot this week, just from watching this one film.  I knew that the government subsidizes farmers, but I didn’t really understand why until I watched this film.  I appreciated how the film makers were respectful and understanding of those they interviewed who were responsible for the changes in the farming practices over the past 50 years, even though they clearly disagreed.  It’s understandable, I suppose, why those from the Depression generation feel it’s been a success to create an overabundance of cheap food.

I have to say, I’ll never look at endless fields of corn the same way again.  Knowing that it’s a cheap, inedible commodity that is destined to be made into corn syrup to sweeten the gallons of soft drinks and fruit juices and the plethora of processed junk foods that are making our generation sick kind of ruins the glorious image the “amber waves of grain” once conjured up.

The other thing that I learned from the film that I found particularly distressing was how the family farm is slowly becoming extinct.  Or, at least, redefined.

Here are a few not-so-fun facts for you, courtesy of IMDB.com, and then it’s your turn to tell me what you learned this week.

NOT-SO-FUN FACTS:

Curt Ellis: The first time in American history, our generation was at risk of having a shorter life-span than our parents. And it was because of what we ate.

Michael Pollan: If you’re standing in a field in Iowa, there’s an immense amount of food being grown, none of it edible. The commodity corn… nobody can eat it. It must be processed before we can eat it. It’s a raw material, it’s a feed-stock for all these other processes. And the irony is that an Iowa farmer can no longer feed himself.

Ian Cheney:  It was already clear that when the time came to say goodbye to the corn from our acre, we would never know exactly where it would end up. After the crop is delivered to the elevator, following corn into the food system becomes a game of probability. Of the 10,000 pounds of corn our acre is likely to produce, 32% will be either exported or turned into Ethanol. In neither case ending up in our food. But 490 pounds will become sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup. And more than half our crop, a full 5,500 pounds, will be feed to animals to become meat.

Loren Cordain: The meat that we eat in this day and age is produced in a feed lot. It’s grain-fed meat, and we produce a characteristically obese animal, animals whose muscle tissue looks more like fat tissue than it does lean meat in wild animals. And if you look at a T-bone steak from a grain-fed cow, it may have as much as 9 grams of saturated fat. Whereas a comparable steak from a grass-fed animal would have 1.3 grams of saturated fat.

Earl L. Butz: 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.

Clip: I’m growing crap

Food for thought, eh?  Oh I’m so punny today.

What did YOU learn this week?