Hodges 1
Erich G. Hodges
Dr. Don Payne
English 250 Honors
23 October 2008
Big Scale on a Small Scale
One acre of Iowan land produces 180 bushels of corn a year, enough corn for syrup to
sweeten 57,000 sodas. Two men, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, wanted to find out what was in the
food they were eating and how it affected their quality of life. They understood that sugar from
corn in the American diet has increased, and so has the risk of the American population
developing diabetes. Curt and Ian knew the only way to fully comprehend the issue was to grow
some corn themselves and start from square one. Curt and Ian decided to plant an acre of corn in
Iowa to see where it would actually end up in the American food chain. One problem became
evident: the state of Iowa produces corn in such enormous quantities that there was no physical
way Ian and Curt could track their corn’s course into the American economy. In the documentary
film King Corn, director Aaron Woolf chooses time and time again to use images of corn of epic
proportions, and then switches to Ian and Curt’s little plot of land. Through this technique, Woolf
enables the viewers of the film to grasp the concept that American consumers devour large
amounts of corn. Vast mountains of corn appear throughout the film. Aerial shots depict multiple
thousands of acres of Iowa-grown corn. Conversely, several clips consist of the image of Ian and
Curt’s single, solemn acre of farmland surrounded by millions of corn plants. Other clips show
the two friends walking through a store, reading the labels of items throughout, only to discover
a majority of those products contain corn. Aaron Woolf continually uses the “small, big, small”
approach in a number of these scenes to stress the magnitude of corn each American ingests.
Hodges 2
The first noticeable images of food in the film show the amount of food the twosome eats
while on the road. While making the documentary, the friends begin to take note of what and
how much they eat. The pages below illustrate their extensive list of consumed products in a
minimal amount of time:
Ian and Curt’s brief, but large, food diary.
The director highlights the substances in Curt and Ian’s diet logged in the journal. Many
have corn as their primary ingredient. The eggs, for instance, may not seem like a corn product;
however, the feed that the chickens were fed consists of corn. The concentrated energy of corn
was transferred to the carbon of the egg by digestion of corn in the chicken. As humans, Ian and
Curt would eat the egg with the original corn carbon and metabolize its energy. Since the
chickens were most likely fed nothing but corn, the friends actually end up eating corn
concentrate. Corn products dominate their diet in many ways: the two sausage patties from hogs
fed with corn, the glasses of blackberry juice containing high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener,
and even the seemingly healthful Gatorade, which one usually associates with exercise,
Hodges 3
contained corn syrup. Mr. Woolf then elects to switch to a rather small image, to make the
connection that what we eat is what we are. The tiny image depicts a sample of human hair.
Dr. Steve Macko, of the University of Virginia, explains to Curt and Ian that hair on the
human body is essentially a record of what a person consumes. He takes samples of hair from
each of the friends and analyzes them to calculate exactly how much corn they eat as typical
Americans. To the left is the choice shot of their hairs being
prepared for testing. The scene stresses that parts of a human
are reflected in the selection of food in their diets. After the
isometric reading is complete, Dr. Macko tells the two friends
that their entire bodies are made of carbon, generated mostly
from corn. They respond, “Corn?” The screen then fills with
large quantities of food, while Dr. Macko elaborates on how
this could have occurred to two average American consumers.
Curt and Ian’s hairs, which will be
tested for corn content in the lab.
The large images are another link between corn and
what Americans, as consumers, are made of. Curt and Ian meander around the store and read the
product labels, in an attempt to determine which products have corn material. Curt and Ian arrive
at the startling realization that mostly all food stuffs besides unflavored water have corn in them.
Shots and clips of aisle upon aisle of food are repeatedly the focus, causing viewers to question
their own food consumption. The visual excess of corn products in the store facilitates the
viewers’ ability to tie what they eat on a small scale to who they are on the large scale. Looking
at all items containing corn leads viewers to compare what they eat on a daily basis to what they
see on the screen, as thousands of products flash by their eyes.
Hodges 4
Left: Ian and Curt reading the ingredient labels of everyday food products.
Right: One of the many large shots of aisles with a plethora of items containing corn products.
With the expansive array of products comprised of corn, it is virtually impossible to exit
the megastore without having putting at least one thing containing corn in one’s grocery cart or
basket. Ian and Curt are shown here shopping aimlessly; the scene reaffirms the concept to the
viewers that Americans eat an enormous amount of corn. The sheer volume of corn that
Americans consume has a stupendous effect on our economy.
When it comes to America’s economy and how dependent Americans are on corn, Aaron
Woolf again emphasizes a repetitive pattern of engaging scenes that uses alternating sizes. He
now uses the “small, big, small” approach to show how much America “needs” to feed itself in
its current manner. This approach begins when the barren corn field in the tiny town of Greene,
Iowa, appears behind the words “KING CORN.” The spot where Ian and Curt set out to grow
their puny acre of corn is dwarfed by hundreds of acres waiting to be planted. The image’s size
gives the impression that the acre doesn’t amount to much compared to the scale of corn that
everyone else around them grows. Woolf’s focus puts size and scale in perspective. He uses a
small image and relates it to how it would fit in the big picture: the grain elevator.
Hodges 5
Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis’s acre of land amongst the thousands of other acres in tiny Greene, IA.
In the dead of winter, the director chooses to highlight the fact that corn production in the
farmland area around Greene alone was so great that the corn elevator overflowed, spewing over
into bunker silos wrapped in white plastic for protection from the weather. Sadly, so much corn
was grown in Greene that there would be no way to track Curt and Ian’s corn come fall,
rendering their acre of corn even more insignificant. In turn, Greene’s production was
insignificant compared to
the harvest from the rest of
Iowa and the Midwest,
where other larger farming
communities produce
mountains of corn for the
American populous to
Depicted here are the Greene elevator and bunker silos of excess corn. The Greene
elevator is the same elevator Curt and Ian’s corn would go into during the fall.
Hodges 6
consume. Corn surfaces in everything from toothpaste to hamburger meat. Woolf employs this
image to portray corn on a grandiose American scale, contrasting such volume with corn
produced from one acre of farmland.
By using the simplicity of one tiny acre in the middle of thousands of others that produce
corn, the director reinforces our severe dependence on corn in our diets. Woolf pictures the
barren land containing Curt and Ian’s midget of an acre, moving afterwards to the scene with the
enormous stockpile of corn. He then returns to the same minute acre in the sea of already
harvested farmland. Once Ian and Curt harvested their corn, all they ended up with was a pickup
bed and a little pull-along trailer full of corn, totaling one hundred and eighty two bushels. Their
results were a drop in the bucket, especially when one considers that America produced thirteen
billion bushels of corn that year.
In its waning minutes, the
documentary envelops a scene of
distress and despair when Curt
and Ian go back to their acre. The
farmer from whom they had
rented the acre was selling out to
Curt and Ian walking away from their acre of corn they are about to harvest.
a large, corporate farm. The
farmer couldn’t take the stress of doing lots of work for almost nothing in return. The land sale to
a commercial farm is the final instance in the film where the variation in size method is used. In
contrast to the success of corn production, lasting images of the farm at auction outline the fate
of today’s small farms: extinction.
The method of showing different-sized images in repeated patterns effectively illustrates
how Americans now depend on the corn kernel. A minuscule thing by itself, the corn kernel,
Hodges 7
when added to the annual crop, increasingly dominates the American diet. What other substances
may lurk beside corn on the nutrition label of the products we consume each day? The
unsuspecting shopper does not hesitate to fill his shopping cart with convenient, low priced,
unhealthy groceries. In our era, would a shopper need an advanced degree in chemistry to
decipher the listed ingredients on a grocery label? The fact that one in four Americans is at risk
for developing diabetes can, in part, be attributed to the dangerously high intake of corn sugars in
this country. If Americans would follow Curt and Ian’s example and pay closer attention to
specific sources of food, they could add years to their lives.
Hodges 8
Work Cited
King Corn: You Are What You Eat. Dir. Aaron Woolf. Including Curt Ellis, and Ian Cheney.
DVD. Mosaic Films Inc., 2006.