If I ever stumbled onto a friend who happened to be a documentary filmmaker, I know exactly what I’d pitch to him. The evils of corn! I hate corn so much. I’m a hypocrite in the sense that I’ll eat the stuff, but for me it represents the source of suffering of millions!
The movie would be a mix of Super Size Me with a hint of a Michael Moore anti-Bush stance. But then corn is so bad, it spreads out into a discussion of poverty in North America as well as third-world African countries.
Do you know why at the end of August, you can get a dozen corn cobs for less than a dollar? Corn farmers sell their corn harvests for just a few dollars. Pennies a husk. And as demand for corn goes down, these poor farmers, rather than growing other agriculture, grow more corn! And get paid less for it. Of course what happens, is famers get less money each year for growing more corn.
The environmental effects of corn are just as bad. Once you grow corn on a plot of land, that land is pretty much not good for growing anything else, unless you pay the cash to prepare the soil for other crops. But corn will grow almost everywhere, even if no one wants to eat it.
So what happens, is a huge surplus in corn! You can buy a cob for a dime. But still, no one’s interested, since there aren’t any real nutrients in corn. All fibre! If you wondered why there are corn bits in the porcelain throne, it isn’t because the kernels thought turd was a cob and hopped on for the ride. It’s because you stomach can’t digest what’s in corn.
What do they do with all that corn? Well, a lot of it goes into corn starch, corn syrup and livestock feed. So cola and candy all of a sudden becomes dirt cheap to produce. Chicken and cows can be pumped full of food to make them bigger for less cost. All of a sudden, McDonalds can afford to sell you a Big Mac combo for less than four dollars, and still manage to pull out a huge profit out of it. We get a Fast Food Nation.
Oh! But you still got more corn you say? Ship it overseas to developing nations, undercut the local farmers, run them out of business, and turn the poverished there into a community of glutonous bastards too! Hurrah!
Of course, this over farming of corn could be stopped, or at least reduced. If only the Bush administration would get off their ass about it, but that would piss off middle-America, their voting stronghorse.
Man… sometimes when people bring up corn… I just don’t know how to stop talking. I really want to write a thesis one day with a super corny title… I’ll be brainstorming for a while. Too much to work with. I’ll pull it out and put something together.
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I’m so close… it’s going to take an all nighter to be ready for the last exam of the term, but it hardly matters any more. In just 24 hours, these four months of my life will be a chapter of my life I can close forever. I’m serious though… girls are trouble! Sometimes it’s the fun trouble, but the rest of the time, I can just feel them laughing at me for nudging me around all over the place. Quit it… I bruise easily. And these bruises don’t match my outfit.
