It is a documentary that starts out with two friends who just graduated college and are on a quest to grow one acre of corn in Iowa, the place where pretty much all the corn that America consumes comes from. No, this is not a boring movie, I promise. They explain the reason they are on this journey to learn about corn is to look into why people in our generation are the first with a shorter life expectancy than our parents, due to the way we eat. The film explains, from an amazingly objective, non-judgemental tone, how in our great grandparents time, farms were paid by the government to not overproduce crops – they were rewarded for growing less. Then, at a great turning point, this reversed, and the goverment began to reward the farmers for overproduction of corn. As a result, lots of small farms went under to the big corporations, who now produce only yellow corn intead of the hundreds of other more nutritional varieties that used to be grown, and the vast surplus of product created an industry for corn syrup, which now is in just about every packaged food product that exists across the country. Plus, the corn they are growing is a very low grade quality which the farmers themselves can't even eat because it tastes so bad before it's treated.
What I didn't realize either, is that another huge portion of this overproduced corn has replaced grass as food for the cattle that gets slaughtered for us to eat. So whenever you buy meat at the grocery store, or a hamburger just about anywhere, you're eating corn-fed beef. Cows aren't supposed to eat only grain, thus they get sick and have to be slaughtered quickly because they simply couldn't live that long on a grain diet. THUS we are eating this incredibly low quality of beef, more fat than ever before, becasue the cattle aren't walking around to graze.
So basically, we've traded in quality, nutritional food for cheaper food filled with empty calories that does not nourish the body. When we spend less of our time and income on our food we have more time and money for other things which sounds good, but when you look at the real price you're paying (your health and lifespan) it's scary. Diabetes is at an all time high, as well as obesity, and I don't ever think I made the connection to corn syrup before. It's a facinating history, one that I didn't know about America's farms. The whole movie deals with this heavy subject, but they do it with a lot of love and humor, which makes it easier to absorb.
Anyway, I had corn nightmares last night about the poor cows with stomachs full of chopped corn stalks and chaff, and I feel guilty about how much I like to eat meat. It's really bad for the environment because of how wasteful it is of resources to feed and water cattle; to ship them all over the country takes a lot of fuel and creates tons of pollution, plus the waste created by the slaughter houses is equal to that of entire cities of people. It's hard to justify it all for a yummy hamburger, so why is it so unbearable to think of giving that up?
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