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Erich G. Hodges
Dr. Don Payne
English 250 Honors
12 October 2008
Big Scale on a Small Scale
One acre of Iowan land produces 180 bushels of corn a year. This may not seem like a lot
of corn, but it can produce enough corn syrup to sweeten 57,000 sodas. Two men, Ian Cheney
and Curt Ellis, set out to plant an acre of corn in Iowa to see where it actually ended 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, time and time again director
Aaron Woolf chose to use images of corn that were of epic proportions, and then switched to
images of Ian and Curt’s little plot of land. By using this technique, Woolf enabled the viewers
of the film to grasp the concept that American consumers eat large amounts of corn. Vast
mountains of corn and aerial shots of the hundreds of thousands of acres of corn that the state of
Iowa grows appeared throughout the film. Conversely, several clips consisted of the image of Ian
and Curt’s single, solemn acre of farmland in the midst of all the other millions of corn plants.
The director even chose to illustrate how small farming developed into big business by using a
child’s miniature farm play set with a brown felt mat on a green table to represent the one acre of
land. Other images showed 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 elected to
use the “small, big, small” approach in a good number of these scenes, over and over again, to
stress the magnitude of corn each American ingests.
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The first noticeable images of food in the film show the amount of food that the twosome
eats while on the road. During the process of making the documentary, the friends began to take
note of what and how much they ate. This is the image of their extensive list of consumed
products in a minimal amount of time:
Ian and Curt’s brief, but large, food diary.
The director chose this picture to highlight the substances in their diet because many of them
corn as their primary ingredient. The eggs, for instance, may not seem like a corn product;
however, the feed that the chickens were fed was made up of corn. The concentrate 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, what the friends actually ended up eating was
the corn concentrate. This can be illustrated in many ways in the rest of their diet: the two
sausage patties, the glasses of blackberry juice containing high fructose corn syrup as a
sweetener, and even the seemingly healthful Gatorade. Mr. Woolf then elected to switch to a
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rather small image, to make the connection that what we eat is what we are. The tiny image
depicted human hair.
Dr. Steve Macko, of the University of Virginia, described to Curt and Ian that hair on the
human body is essentially a record of what a person consumes. He took samples of hair from
each of them and analyzed them to calculate exactly how much corn they were eating as typical
Americans. This is the choice shot of their hairs being prepared for testing. This scene stresses
that a part of humans reflects the selections in their
diets. After the isometric reading was completed, Dr.
Macko told the two friends that their entire bodies
were made of carbon, generated mostly from corn.
They responded, “Corn?” Then the images of large
quantities of food appeared on the screen, while Dr.
Macko explained how this could have occurred to
two normal people like them.
These large images are another linking
Curt and Ian’s hairs, which will be
tested for corn content, in the lab.
connection between corn and what Americans,as
consumers, are made of. Curt and Ian were walking around the store reading the labels of the
products, trying to determine which products have corn material in them. They arrived 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. This causes viewers to think about
their own food consumption when they see the products on the shelves. This facilitates the
viewers tying what they eat on a small scale to who they are on the big scale. Looking at all of
the things that contain corn leaves viewers in a state of thought, as thousands of products flash by
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their eyes. This leads the viewer to reflect upon which items he or she buys when going to the
grocery or convenience store.
With the expansive array of products containing corn, there is little way to exit the
megastore without having put things containing corn in one’s grocery cart or basket. These
images of Ian and Curt shopping aimlessly, reaffirming the concept that the amount of corn
Americans eat is enormous, have a stupendous effect on our economy.
Above: Ian and Curt reading the ingredient labels of everyday food products.
Below: One of the many large shots of aisles with a plethora of items containing corn
products.
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When it came to the economy of America and how dependent Americans are on corn,
Aaron Woolf again emphasized a repetitive pattern of engaging scenes that used alteration of
size. This time he used the “small, big, small” approach to show how much America “needs” to
feed itself in its current manner. This was done the first time when the barren corn field in the
tiny town of Greene, Iowa, was viewed behind the words “KING CORN.” This was the spot
where Ian and Curt set out to grow their acre of corn. In the background, one could see hundreds
of acres waiting to be planted next to their puny acre. The image’s size gives the impression that
the acre doesn’t amount to much compared to the scale of corn that everyone around them was
growing. Woolf’s whole point was to put this in perspective, so he used this small image and
related it to how it would fit in the big picture: the grain elevator.
Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis’s acre of land amongst the thousands of other acres in the tiny town
of Greene, IA.
In the dead of winter, the director chose to highlight the fact that corn producton in the
farmland area around Greene alone was so great, the corn elevator in the town was overflowing.
Corn spewed over into bunker silos wrapped in white plastic to protect it from the weather.
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This is the large shot of 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.
Sadly, so much corn was grown in Greene, there would be no way to track Curt and Ian’s corn
come fall. This drew the conclusion that their acre of corn was insignificant. Therefore, Greene’s
production was insignificant compared to the harvest from rest of Iowa and the Midwest. There
are many other larger farming communities all across the United States doing the same thing
Greene is, making mountains of corn for the American populous to consume. Corn surfaces in
everything, from toothpaste to hamburger meat. Woolf employed this image to portray corn on
the grandiose scale by which Americans use it each year. Then, he finished with a small picture
of just how much corn is produced from of one acre of farmland.
By utilizing the simplicity of one tiny acre in the middle of thousands of others that
produced corn, the director reinforced the notion that we are severely dependent on corn in our
diets. He did this by starting with that image of the barren land containing Curt and Ian’s midget
of an acre, moving to the scene with the enormous stockpile of corn, then returning to the same
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minute acre in the sea of
already harvested
farmland. Once Ian an
Curt harvested their corn,
all they ended up with
was a pickup-bed and a
little pull-along trailer full
of corn, totaling one
Curt and Ian walking away from their acre of corn they are about
to harvest.
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.
The method of showing images of different sizes in repeated patterns proved to be
extremely effective in illustrating how Americans have become inherently dependent on the corn
kernel. It may be a small thing by itself, but when it is added to the entire crop grown each year,
the corn kernel’s increasing dominance in how Americans live their everyday lives is clear.