Cotton is King...

If I had a dime for every time my government professor said these words, I would be a very wealthy person. If someone were to ask me what I learned the first semester in college, it would be: There was a time that cotton was king.

Well, times change and Sunday night I watched the latest Independent Lens installment. This week was a look at "King Corn". It may be one of the most entertaining films I've seen on Independent Lens. It was informative, funny and engrossing. I've been searching around the internet to see what was said about the film in its limited release. There are some, understandably, harsh words from people regarding the stats used/announced during the film. I have to say, it wasn't the stats that wowed me. It was just actually sitting and realizing how prevalent corn is in the food we consume (as well as the livestock). I guess I didn't really give it much thought. I thought the most valuable insights the film gives the viewer are the opinions of the farmers themselves. As usual, it all comes down to economics. However, when you have a farmer and his wife stating that they will not eat what they've sown...well, something's not quite right.

The basic premise of the film, from IMDb:

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm