King Corn (2007)

Ian Cheney: Self

Quotes 

• Ian Cheney : When my best friend Curtis and I graduated from college, we thought we were done with professors and were supposed to feel like we had our whole lives ahead of us.

  Curt Ellis : But we just heard some disconcerting news: some day, we were going to die - and maybe sooner than we thought. 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.

• Ian Cheney : [their 1 acre has been planted]  Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience. But then again, it only took us 18 minutes.

• 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. Or in our hair. 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.

• Ian Cheney : We've heard from some people that they think there is too much food.

  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.