Film questions food costs
Low prices come with trade-offs to health, filmmakers say.
Maureen Groppe
Gannett News Service/News-Leader.com
From his Indiana nursing home, former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz lets the makers of the documentary “King Corn” in on “America’s best kept secret.”
Americans spend only between 16 percent and 17 percent of their take-home pay on food, Butz tells the camera.
“That’s marvelous,” said Butz, who transformed agriculture policy in the 1970s. “It’s the basis of our affluence now.”
But the filmmakers aren’t so sure. Recent college graduates Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who grew an acre of corn to follow it through the food chain, point out that their generation will have a shorter lifespan than their parents because of what they eat — much of it corn-fed meat, corn-based processed foods or those sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
