Yale Alumni Magazine: Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney go from school to farm to school to address childhood obesity

It’s one thing to make a documentary about food policy and the politics of obesity. It’s another thing to become part of the solution.

Curt Ellis ’02 and Ian Cheney ’02, ’03MEM, accomplished the first part with their 2007 film, King Corn, in which they grew a single acre of corn to explore the absurd economics of US agriculture. Now they are trying to accomplish the latter withFoodCorps, a nonprofit that works with schoolkids across the country to grow—and, they hope, eat—healthy foods.

“When Ian and I packed up the old Dodge and drove away from our cornfield in Iowa, I remember feeling a pit in my stomach,” Ellis recalls via an e-mail message from FoodCorps cofounder and communications director Jerusha Klemperer. “We’d made a film about the problems in food and agriculture in America—but we hadn’t done much to help those problems get better.”

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