Documentary investigates the rule of 'King Corn'

King Corn (10 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch. 11) uses a shambling, shaggy style to answer a serious question: Why is our food system so out of whack?

The substance of this documentary will be familiar to readers of Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which examined how industrial agriculture has transformed not just the lives of farmers and animals, but the basic building blocks of our diet. Corn has indeed conquered the American diet, but the mountains of corn that farmers produce (which are subsidized by the government) are a mixed blessing. Food is cheaper, but we are fatter, and when it comes to animals, according to this non-shrill film, 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in America are fed to cattle.

Yet filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are seen eating juicy burgers in the film. They don’t disdain our fast-food culture — they just want to understand what’s behind it, and they do a good job of explaining that in this hour-long documentary. King Corn may be a little slack and self-conscious in places, but it’s also fair, thorough and quite literally down to earth.

In essence, Cheney and Ellis set out to do what Pollan did: tell the story of how our diet has changed since the ’70s by meeting the people who grow our food. They talked to farmers and cattle ranchers in Iowa and Colorado, and the duo also interviewed cogent and concise food experts, including Pollan. But the King Corn duo went the extra mile, or the extra acre — they went to Iowa to farm corn.

In college, they discovered that they both had relatives who came from the tiny town of Greene, Iowa. After college, they spent almost a year there, where they leased one acre from a local farmer and grew corn. They follow the progress of their crop closely (and when they get their subsidy checks, they regret not planting more corn). But the filmmakers also use homemade charts and lighthearted animated sequences to talk about how government policies altered farming in the ’70s, and how corn harvests have shot up and prices have fallen since then. In their tiny kitchen, they even attempt to make high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener that has become ubiquitous.

King Corn isn’t just a cogent, low-key examination of where our food comes from and how that has changed in the past 30 years. The film is, in part, a tribute to life in towns such as Greene. Cheney and Ellis note that the cost of food has dropped sharply since their relatives lived there, but they also appear to mourn the passing of a rural way of life that has been disappearing with the advent of ever-larger farms.

Farming itself doesn’t turn out to be a transformative experience – as they note in the narration, “Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience. Then again, [thanks to machinery] it took only 18 minutes.”

But a website for King Corn shows that the filmmakers were deeply affected by their experiences. According to the Independent Lens site for the film, the director of the documentary, Aaron Woolf, now runs a “know-where-your-food-comes-from” grocery store in Brooklyn.