King Corn

I chose to watch King Corn because it had been assigned to me earlier in the semester but I never got a chance to watch it and after the class discussion I decided to take the time to watch it all of the way through. King Corn tells the story of two young men, Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, who choose to leave the Boston and to move to a small town in Iowa in hopes of growing their own acre corn and learning why the growth of corn is having such an impact on society. The main point that these two men are trying to make is that the industrialization of corn is eliminating the small, family farms. They make the claim that this is a growing situation and are affecting the corn business as well as other small businesses and small family farms.  Because of this people who have spent their whole life on the farm are now being put out of work, they have to put aside a huge part of their life because their crop is no longer needed because people can get it from other places for less. While on this adventure they learn that while they live in a big city now, that their family’s came from small towns in Iowa. It is also explored about how we consume so much corn products, not just the corn on the cob but so many other things that contain corn products. This documentary uses interviews as a key rhetorical device, they use them to be able to back up information that they want to get across to the audience. One of the main things that caught my attention was at the beginning when they chose to move to Iowa, it shows that this issue was something they truly wanted to look more into if they were willing to leave Boston. I am convinced that small farms are being harmed due to the industrialization of corn, but that is where they leave it, there is no solution and I don’t think that was their goal. I think they just wanted to prove a point and to show how eventually this will be the case with all food products.