King Corn – An Argument of Fact February 10, 2008

This past week I read and heard a lot about corn. From reading Michael Pollan’s works and watching King Corn to analyzing the foods that I ate daily for their corn-derived ingredients. Everything seemed to make sense – I am walking corn. No matter how much our society tries to get away from this very fact, as was brought up in discussion, corn has becoming too much a part of our culture, without us even realizing it. The film, King Corn, made its argument that corn production and distribution is detrimental both to consumers and producers through the use of many facts and documented experiences. Ch 7 of Everything’s an Argument on p. 178 reads, “Transmitting facts, it would seem, should be a dispassionate activity, free of the pressures and biases of argument. Yet facts become arguments when they’re controversial in themselves or when they’re used to educate people, challenging, or changing beliefs.” The film King Corn does just this. Although it is a fact that corn has dominated the food industry (this can be stated in other words), and we see this by simply reading about what we are eating, this fact becomes an argument when it challenges people’s values, the ethics and morals of eating. The fact cannot be changed (i.e. we consume this much corn a year in the form of_____), but the perceptions and actions towards the fact make it an argument. After making a claim, evidence is necessary to support the claim. In King Corn, evidence in the form of personal testimonies, laboratory values, and statistics from reliable sources was presented. The film was presented as a documentary, with the titles of speakers showing on the screen while they were interviewed. This adds ethos, credibility, to the film. The producers of King Corn also had to think about the way the evidence to strengthen their claim would be presented. They certainly used visuals when filming the mountains of corn and the hole on the cow’s stomach. Also, when drawing correlations between amount of corn produced and acres of land, for example, they used hand-made figures to illustrate the point. This draws the audiences attention, making the information easier to understand as well. The personalities and ethos of the Cheney and Ellis also added to the argument they were making. For example, the narrator said they had both recently graduated from Yale. Having Michael Pollan speak in the film also added to their credibility. It is interesting to note how an argument is made out of hard facts; something that you would think cannot be argued, can become an argument simply by making a claim, providing evidence, and presenting to the audience in a credible way.