Minnesota State Fair by Diane

Sunday, August 25. After the pie competition at the Mill City Farmers Market and lunch with Jim Ennis from the Food Alliance, we headed off to the Minnesota State Fair. The fair has a section called Eco-Experience where nonprofit sustainable environmental type groups have booths – renewable energy, health and food, etc. Our host IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy) had a section there so we went down to speak with people for a little while and to hand out Eat Well Guide postcards.

After the work part was done, we were let loose on the fair. This was my first state fair ever, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it was huge. And I mean huge. And packed with thousands and thousands of people, many eating something on a stick. I actually wanted to go to see what was on a stick, and we weren’t disappointed. Spaghetti and meatball dinner on a stick (when I exclaimed aloud after seeing the sign, a couple walking by me said it was actually good – but I just couldn’t do it).

We ended up having cheese curds (with and without ketchup), even though they weren’t on a stick, as well as fried pickles, again, not on a stick. But we had a fried Twinkie on a stick (tastes like fried dough), though I should really say we had a bite of a Twinkie on a stick. It’s not good to eat too much Twinkie on a stick. We also had chocolate dipped key lime pie on a stick. Let’s just say I spit out my mouthful.

We didn’t see the fried fruit on a stick (which I was told about later) and we couldn’t stomach anything else fried, whether on a stick or not, so our culinary explorations stopped about there. Oh, right, but someone did have to get a cream puff and some cookies that about 1000 people were standing in line for.

We also toured through a couple of the animal barns, but they were too crowded to really see anything well. We also saw a 1200 pound boar, which was in a pen next to a hog that had just given birth and was in a farrowing crate. (There’s a photo here of the crate.) These crates have been outlawed in several states and there’s an effort to get them banned across the country. They’re used so the hog can’t move around and crush her piglets – that means that the animal stays in this crate – the sign I saw said for 21 days – and she can’t turn around and it didn’t even look like she could stand up comfortably. When you spend time on a farm where the hogs are raised on pasture, and you see them running around in the grass playing, and then you see this, you start to wonder what the definition of progress really is.

After all the fried food and farm animals, we basically had to call it a day. I would say if you’ve never been to a state fair and get the chance, you should definitely go. And maybe in a couple years we’ll start to see vendors at them that are selling sustainable food from small family farmers! (Which, by the way, at this year’s Farm Aid show, all the food sold to the crowd will be sustainable food from small family farmers in the Hudson Valley and surrounding area – I’m excited to go there just to eat!

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