I was listening to Kevin Smith’s SModcast during the week, and he was talking about a documentary called King Corn. It sounded interesting so I stuck it on the rental list.
We sat down to watch it last night, and I’m glad we did. It’s about how the American diet is now completely dominated by corn, and corn-fed meat. It follows two guys who return to their roots, and grow an acre field of corn, and look into where it goes.
It turns out the corn that is used for all this animal food and high fructose corn syrup has bugger all nutritional value (and tastes really bad), and as a result of this, the current generation of Americans have a lower life expectancy than their parents for the first time in recorded history.
I have no idea if the same can be said for us Europeans. We don’t have the same systems of government corn subsidies that make it a worth growing to the same extent that they do in the States, but I’m sure they are exporting the hell out of this stuff too.
Anyway. It was a very interesting documentary. Well worth spending 90mins of your life on.