King Corn

Two college friends go back to Greene, the Iowa town their families came from, and decide to plant one acre of corn. The aim is simple: to see with their own hands how this one plant got inside everything America eats. They buy the seed, spread the fertiliser, apply for the government payments, and follow the harvest step by step to wherever it ends up. Aaron Woolf's documentary works through farm policy, subsidies and the spread of corn syrup starting from a single ordinary field. Michael Pollan turns up, and so does Earl Butz, the former secretary who reshaped agricultural policy in the seventies. The tone is playful and where it arrives is not: who decides what a country eats.