Now, mounting pressure from both Europe’s farmers and global food aid organizations have caused the high courts of various EU countries to reconsider.

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But I didn’t just come here to bring you down. A new agricultural economics paper has given us some reason to hope, if we can organize our food industry to action.

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Most of their offerings are of the Doritos n’ gummi worms variety. You know, food that isn’t labeled with real words. It made me think of the changing landscape of discount organics and what it means for consumers.

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But according to a 2004 study in the International Journal of Obesity summarized in Bicycling Magazine, a class of pesticides called organochlorines actually slow down human metabolisms, making it harder for the body to use calories. Like many toxicants, organochlorines are bioaccumulaters, which means they are stored in the body rather than excreted efficiently. Most bioaccumulators are stored in the fat tissue of animals, including humans. Mercury is a good example of a bioaccumulator: tuna, swordfish and shark have high levels of mercury than sardines and shrimp because they are higher on the food chain and thus eat the mercury stored in the fatty tissue of prey fish, compounding toxicity. Similarly, organochlorines are stored in our fatty tissue.

But unlike heavy metals like mercury, organochlorines are actually excreted from tissue cells when a person burns calories (thermogenesis). At first, this sounds pretty good; obviously, the organochlorines are expelled from the body with a bit more efficiency than other bioaccumulators. The problem is, when we burn fat, the organochlorines are released into our bloodstream, where they are able to disrupt our mitochondria - the parts of our cells that generate energy. In doing so, they slow down each cell’s metabolic rate, which is another way of saying that they slow down a person’s entire metabolism.

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According to the Humane Society, 17% of the U.S. beef supply comes from spent dairy cows. These cows no longer produce financially viable quantities of milk and are sold at steep discount to slaughterhouses. In fact, prices for dairy cows can be as little as one-tenth the price of a well-fed beef steer on the meat market. This partially has to do with net meat gain: the dairy cow is bred for optimum lactation, not muscle mass. The price differential also has to do with condition: the dairy cows tend to be older and more feeble, depleted of calcium and afflicted with a multitude of bacterial infections, the result of sedentary, unifunctional lives.

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But just as our government rewards the profit-focused mentality of factory farmers with further tax breaks and incentives, it is now rewarding their disregard for the environment. Yielding to lobbyist pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reversing a 25 year old requirement that forces industrial farmers to report their toxic gas emissions levels.

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A downer cow is an animal that is too ill to stand up on its own. After the Mad Cow Disease scares of the late 1990s, Congress passed legislation that prohibited these animals from entering the food supply because of a slightly increased risk of spreading disease into the human population. But in September of 2007, Congress added a loophole to the measure, allowing downer cows into the food supply if a veterinarian deemed it safe. This measure was included to allow otherwise healthy animals with broken legs or torn ligaments into the food supply, but in fact opened the floodgates to profit-minded decisions in bovine health.

Much has been made of the fact that 30% of the shipment that included these particular downer cows filmed was destined for federally-run nutrition program, including the plates of low-income school children who take advantage of free lunch programs. For an in depth look at the socio-economic and children’s rights implications of this scandal, have a look at this excellent article over at The Ethicurean.

But beyond the incredibly important issue of the socio-economic food division, there are two major but separate complaints leveled against the USDA and their complicity in this incident: the issues of food safety and of animal welfare.

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King Corn focuses on co-producers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis as they move to Iowa, rent an plot of farmland, and attempt to grow an acre of corn using typical industrial methods: genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, powerful herbicides, and government subsidies. They show us exactly how industrial corn production works today, from seed to table, in the convoluted journey of a commodity. From Ian and Curt’s one acre, they harvest enough corn to make 57,348 sodas, 3,894 burgers, or 6,726 boxes of cornflakes. And yes, corn is a major ingredient in all of those foods.

The two major corn byproducts King Corn focuses on are high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and beef. The average American consumes 73.5 pounds of HFCS per year, mostly in the form of soda. Ian and Curt talk to a cab driver whose family is plagued by diabetes and who lost 100 pounds, just by cutting soda out of his diet. They also visit a beef feedlot: a large percentage of corn grown in the US goes to feed beef, even though cows’ bodies are not designed to eat corn and it can make them seriously sick and definitely uncomfortable. But, as the panoramic shot of a feedlot populated by 100,000 head of cattle shows, indigestion is the least of most cows’ worries — they barely have room to turn around on their way to the slaughterhouse.

Cheney and Ellis are fairly charming, but leave little impression on the viewers other than they seem like nice guys with whom to share a beer. The time spent on the backstory of their families’ connection to Iowa is unnecessary and detracts from more content Woolf could have included about the impact of corn: namely the environmental impacts of industrial corn production at the scale we’re at right now. Just when I felt the filmmakers were about to talk about the degradation of topsoil, the carbon impacts of CAFOs and corn-fed beef, or the externalities created from industrial agriculture, they skirted away and went in another direction. And although they do inform on the gross use of farm subsidies and how those subsides have changed over time, they neglect to mention the impact of government subsides to American corn farmers on corn farmers in other countries, namely our Mexican neighbors.

However, industrial agriculture is a wicked problem, and the filmmakers do note that they wanted to focus on the food system. In my mind, though, you can’t talk about the problems with the food system without talking about the condition of the land we use to grow our food. With the environment so prominent in current discourse, one would think they would have at least touched on that area.

Despite this, I was entertained and informed, and not just because I’m a born-and-raised Iowa Girl. The vast majority of Americans have no idea how their food is produced, and King Corn gives a general glimpse into what Old MacDonald’s farm has become. If you liked Super Size Me, Sicko, or The Future of Food, King Corn is a hybrid of the three, and well worth checking out. Just don’t expect green themes to be prevalent.