King River

Note: this post is going to be a little… atypical. I’m blogging about this event because I feel so strongly about these issues; I personally think the subject matter is a “great story,” if not in the traditional sense of this blog.

A couple of weeks ago, the Coalition sponsored a showing of the documentary King Corn, and its companion, Big River, at the Tivoli Theater in St. Louis. I, along with two volunteers (one of whom is an AmeriCorps alumna who did stormwater education in Maine), manned the booth in the entry way and answered questions before and after the film from the nearly 100 attendees.

If you haven’t seen King Corn, I highly recommend it. I first saw this documentary as an undergraduate in an Environmental Sociology course, and it completely revolutionized the way I see the food system in the United States.

King Corn is the story of two friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, from Boston who travel to a small town in Iowa to grow an acre of corn. These recent graduates find out what it’s like to be a modern farmer as they follow the process of growing corn from planting to the various uses for this ubiquitous kernel.

What they found was that farming is heavily dependent not only on chemicals and machines, but on government subsidies—it would be impossible for smaller farmers, in particular, to turn a profit without aid from the Fed.

And yet, every year, literal mountains of corn are grown. After the Earl Butz changed the policy of the Federal government to start paying farmers to grow more corn in the 1970s, we had so much corn that we had to start finding more uses for it.

As it turns out, the vast majority of the corn grown in Iowa can’t be eaten; in fact, Ian and Curt discover that the corn they grow tastes oddly similar to sawdust. Most of the corn grown in Iowa becomes feed for confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Thus, when we eat most beef, pork, or poultry, we’re really eating corn.

Another significant portion of the corn grown around the country is intensely chemical process to extract sugar to make (not surprisingly) high fructose corn syrup. Found in everything from soda to candy bars, high fructose corn syrup is a less expensive—and less healthy—alternative to sugar. Lay a graph of the exponential increase of the production of high fructose corn syrup next the increase in obesity and diabetes, and things start to make a little more sense.

So how does this all relate to water, you ask? Excellent question. Here’s how:

When it rains, all of the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer not taken up by plants are washed into streams and rivers. Agriculture, as many of you in other parts of the state are aware, is a major source of pollution in our waterways—as well as a significant contributor to the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the subject of the follow up to King Corn—Big River—filmed by the same two friends during the floods in Iowa just a few years ago. They follow the stream that drained their acre all the way to the Mississippi, then paid a visit to the shrimp fishermen of New Orleans, whose industry has all but collapsed due to the irresponsible behavior of cities and farms upstream. Since no aquatic organisms can survive in the dead zone, many people can no longer make a living.

(Side note: Big River only begins to tell the polluted runoff story, and leaves out almost completely anything about problems stemming from urban areas. So if you’re looking to show people something that talks about stormwater issues as a whole, this is a good place to start—but not finish.)

What’s the point? Well, the point is that it’s all tied together—what we choose eat, how we choose to grow it, what happens to our health, and what happens to the environment. Because we grow so much corn, our food is cheaper, but we also pay a much bigger price in the degradation of our health and environment. King Corn, and now Big River, drove that home for me. Everyone who attended, my fellow volunteers included, felt a strong sense of urgency and desire to change the system after viewing these films. I highly recommend them both to anyone who eats food or drinks water in this country.