Interview: Aaron Woolf, director of King Corn
The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, April 12, 2007 Link
Fields Of Green, Plates Of Beige
Corn products put the color in what Aaron Woolf calls “the big bad beige foods”—soda and chicken nuggets, for example. For their documentary King Corn, screening this weekend at the Wisconsin Film Festival, Woolf and friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis grew an acre of corn in Iowa, then tracked the product as it turned into some of the worst foods Americans eat, whether in the form of livestock feed or food coloring. Woolf spoke to The A.V. Club about the challenges and shocks of corn-centric filmmaking.
The A.V. Club: You moved from Baltimore to Iowa for college. What did you think of the cornfields then?
Aaron Woolf: I thought that those fields were so beautiful and otherworldly. To go from no knowledge of that landscape and that world to being awed and wowed by it, and then 10 years later to go back—we’ve denuded the prairie and created this very frightening landscape. It’s a massive swing in how you perceive those fields.
AVC: It must be hard to talk to a wider audience about all these ingredients that sound like gibberish on a food label, not to mention that it all connects back to corn.
AW: Oh my God, can you imagine? It was my job to go out and try to raise the money initially, and I went back to some of the people that had funded some of my previous stuff, and said, “Oh, there’s this incredible story, and we’re gonna make a film about agricultural subsidies and corn,” and you’d just watch their faces glaze over.
AVC: Do you find yourself trying to avoid foods that contain corn?
AW: Curt and Ian are always eating fast food throughout the film, I think partly to say that one of the great ironies is that you move to an area like the Iowa countryside, where so much of America’s food is grown, and it’s very hard to find anything to eat. You can’t eat any of the food grown in the fields, ’cause it’s all inedible until it’s processed, and the food in the restaurants is usually some re-packaged version of the commodity crops. It didn’t really change the way we ate too much, because that’s all we could eat. I think one of the scariest things that’s happening right now is that we’re growing into this two-food society. People who live on the coasts or in university towns have access to these co-ops and natural food markets and farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs, and people who don’t don’t get fresh produce. They get all sorts of processed foods, and I think that’s the real tragedy.
AVC: So there’s no hope for a corn-free-food movement?
AW: Well, one of the things I also hope people take away from this film is that corn is not bad. Some corn does some things very well. It’s just that we shouldn’t be encouraging the over-production of corn year after year by subsidizing it this way, because that’s what makes the fast food so cheap. If a Happy Meal cost $4 or $5, then people might think, oh, I’ll get some broccoli tonight instead of eating McDonald’s.
The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, April 12, 2007 Link
Fields Of Green, Plates Of Beige
Corn products put the color in what Aaron Woolf calls “the big bad beige foods”—soda and chicken nuggets, for example. For their documentary King Corn, screening this weekend at the Wisconsin Film Festival, Woolf and friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis grew an acre of corn in Iowa, then tracked the product as it turned into some of the worst foods Americans eat, whether in the form of livestock feed or food coloring. Woolf spoke to The A.V. Club about the challenges and shocks of corn-centric filmmaking.
The A.V. Club: You moved from Baltimore to Iowa for college. What did you think of the cornfields then?
Aaron Woolf: I thought that those fields were so beautiful and otherworldly. To go from no knowledge of that landscape and that world to being awed and wowed by it, and then 10 years later to go back—we’ve denuded the prairie and created this very frightening landscape. It’s a massive swing in how you perceive those fields.
AVC: It must be hard to talk to a wider audience about all these ingredients that sound like gibberish on a food label, not to mention that it all connects back to corn.
AW: Oh my God, can you imagine? It was my job to go out and try to raise the money initially, and I went back to some of the people that had funded some of my previous stuff, and said, “Oh, there’s this incredible story, and we’re gonna make a film about agricultural subsidies and corn,” and you’d just watch their faces glaze over.
AVC: Do you find yourself trying to avoid foods that contain corn?
AW: Curt and Ian are always eating fast food throughout the film, I think partly to say that one of the great ironies is that you move to an area like the Iowa countryside, where so much of America’s food is grown, and it’s very hard to find anything to eat. You can’t eat any of the food grown in the fields, ’cause it’s all inedible until it’s processed, and the food in the restaurants is usually some re-packaged version of the commodity crops. It didn’t really change the way we ate too much, because that’s all we could eat. I think one of the scariest things that’s happening right now is that we’re growing into this two-food society. People who live on the coasts or in university towns have access to these co-ops and natural food markets and farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs, and people who don’t don’t get fresh produce. They get all sorts of processed foods, and I think that’s the real tragedy.
AVC: So there’s no hope for a corn-free-food movement?
AW: Well, one of the things I also hope people take away from this film is that corn is not bad. Some corn does some things very well. It’s just that we shouldn’t be encouraging the over-production of corn year after year by subsidizing it this way, because that’s what makes the fast food so cheap. If a Happy Meal cost $4 or $5, then people might think, oh, I’ll get some broccoli tonight instead of eating McDonald’s.
posted by Scott at 9:24 AM
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