Staying in Hardin Country Iowa, our group has had plenty of exposure to the conventional style of agriculture with its large tractors and specialized equipment.  But with our visit to the Wallace Center Farm in Orient, we got a taste of a different kind of agriculture.  After a delicious lunch prepared with organic ingredients grown on the farm itself, we headed to the fields where we were met by Mosa Shayan, who was our guide into the world of small-scale organic farming.  The Wallace Center embodies a sustainable model in which the farm grows it own crops and uses them in the small restaurant located at the same location.  Later that evening we watched the popular documentary Food Inc. of which I had seen parts before but never the entire movie.  From the parts of the movie I had seen before, I thought it was mostly about the agriculture industry’s mistreatment of animals, but I came to realize that the documentary’s theme is much broader than that.  The main aspect from the film that I took away was our country’s addiction to corn and how it is somewhat disorienting the way that our agricultural system works.  When almost ninety percent of the products found in an average grocery store either contain some sort of corn product or require corn-based feeds to produce them it raises concern about the degree to which this overwhelming dependency has grown.  Corn is an extremely useful plant and can be used for a wide variety of purposes, most importantly to produce our meat and to sweeten our food and drinks.  These two uses for corn have made the food in United States more abundant and more affordable.  These seem like great outcomes and for the most part they are, but the main side affect of this type of a food system is a growing rate of obesity, which in turn leads to a nation with increased risk for heart disease and diabetes.  Foods that can be cheaply produced due to the abundance of corn and its uses are unhealthy processed and fast foods.  The money that many Americans save on their food is lost by our nation’s health care system.  The group affected most by cheap, unhealthy food is the lower class that has less to spend on their diets and therefore rely the fast and processed foods because they can buy more with what they have.  The movie calls for somewhat of reconstruction of our food system in which we can make healthier food more available to everyone.