I heard a brief interview on the radio with independent documentary filmmaker, Aaron Woolf. He directed Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball, and the United States, and Dying to Leave: The Global Face of Human Trafficking and Smuggling. His latest film is King Corn.
King Corn is a film about this ubiquitous king of crops that ends up in everything from apples to antifreeze, body lotion to batteries, margarine to magazines.
The crop has come a long way in 6,000 years ago from Mesoamerica to your kitchen. It is grown on every continent (except Antarctica) and in the U.S. it gets 93 million acres of land. Do we really eat that much corn? Well, yes – if you count all the corn that goes to high-fructose sweetener and to grain to feed cows that we will eat.
In the 2007 film, we follow two college buddies, Curt and Ian, to Greene, Iowa (home of their great-grandfathers) and watch them spend a year planting and harvesting one acre of corn.
The project is small time in the corn world, but they learn about subsidies, surpluses, and the nutritional aspects the industry of an industry that’s growing in proportion to America’s bellies.
Maybe you don’t think of farming as industry, but corn has certainly helped to eliminate the family farm with industrial farms. As with other industries, decisions about what crops to grow and how they are grown are often based more on economic considerations than their effects on the environment or consumer health.
There’s more on the film at kingcorn.net and pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn
What actually interested me more in the interview I listened to with Woolf was his store Urban Rustic, a grocery store in Brooklyn, NYC.
The store’s mission is to raise awareness about where our food comes from – and to sell groceries.
Here, things come mainly from local farmers, butchers, cheesemakers, and other producers. It’s got a general general store look but with a juice-and-coffee bar and an elevated dining area.
Everything sold has a story about where it came from and how it was produced.
One lesson learned and told in the interview is that some things turn out to be counter-intuitive. For example, the kiwi from New Zealnad might actually have a smaller “carbon footprint” than the tomato from southern New Jersey due to modern transportation systems.
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anticipates that in 2012 a “change in the nature of consciousness” will occur assisted by indigenous insights and psychedelic drug use.
I was telling my friend Scott about this and he really wants to visit such a place. The closest to me is the same place I had gone for those classes: the Montclair Friends Meeting House on 289 Park Street in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.
I grew up in New Jersey. I grew up in town that was originally part of Clinton Township and included parts of today’s Maplewood, Newark and South Orange.
After the 1967 Newark riots, there was a fast exodus of families who thought they were living in a suburban town and discovered they were part of the Newark sprawl in the most densely populated part of the United States.
