Corn Taking Over

Monsanto's corn seed-- not really
what I thought corn seed would
look like?!

        The corn season is starting! Corn farmers are looking forward to a better crop after last years "yields were the smallest in 17 years because of the worst drought since the Dust Bowl years." Farmers are beginning to plant their seeds and believe what some are saying that this may be the Midwest's "biggest crop in decades." This will also profit Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, who is expected to sell a record amount of their corn seed. But why corn? What is all the hype about this plant? The corn that you and I eat, sweet corn, is not the same corn that takes up about 97.2 million acres of the United States. That corn goes by the name Number 2 Yellow Corn. It may look the same, but it is not something that anyone would want to eat off the grill on a summer's day. Number 2 Yellow Corn is what every corn supplement is made from (check out this list of Corn-derived ingredients). When I started to see these ingredients in foods that I frequently ate, I began to wonder, and began to notice it more and more.
       In researching my Junior Theme: Why is corn the largest subsidized crop in the United States?, I have come across some great, easy-to-talk-to people. After watching the movie King Corn, I interviewed the Director/writer, Aaron Woolf. After my extensive analysis and inquiries on corn and more corn, I wondered how he got involved in this industrialized crop. It wasn't ingredient labels he read that got him interested or the increasing use of high fructose corn syrup, but it was the previous movie he directed that intrigued him. In 2003, he directed and wrote Dying to Leave, a movie about human smuggling and human trafficking. He then went on to tell me that after traveling to about 13 countries around the world, going back and forth from the United States, he noticed how much fatter Americans were, as a whole, than all the other countries. After doing research, everything led back to corn. That is where he began his journey with making King Corn. We agreed that everything can somehow lead back to corn -- from the food you eat, the gas you pump into your car, and the place where your tax dollars are going.