The Agony and Excess of the State Fair

Laughter, abundance, and the pickle dawg

During the month of August, I am devoting the newsletter to food. Butter cows, apples, and today, it’s the spicy pickle dawg. If you read this newsletter every week and forward it to your friends, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You will get access to the Flyover Politics Discord server, the Sunday links email, the Monday threads, and support original writing about the places our politics and personhood meet in red-state America.

This week, in the Monday discussion thread, people talked about how they feed themselves when they are alone and it was a thoughtful conversation that I’ll be thinking about for a long long time.

My favorite fair food is the spicy pickle dog from the Pickle Dawg truck. It’s a dill pickle covered in spicy cream cheese, wrapped in pastrami, covered in batter, and deep-fried.

The first bite is crisp, warm, crunchy and a little spicy. I look forward to it every year. 

When we talk about the foods of American fairs, we talk about excess and quantity. It’s novelty, nostalgia, and class, all deep-fried and put on a stick for our collective consumption. 

So many of the foods are designed to make us laugh, to invert expectations, like deep-fried butter, fried beer, and fried jelly beans. They also seem to mock us by deep-frying cultural stereotypes. This year, a new vendor at the Iowa state fair is selling the Iowa Twinkie, which is a jalapeno filled with pulled pork, corn and cream cheese, wrapped in bacon, smoked with sweet and sticky BBQ, then finished with ranch.

And while these foods can seem indulgent and exciting, they may also elicit disgust and disdain. I think that is on purpose. Fair foods bait you to try them with novelty, mocking you if you hate them. The foods almost invite you to moralize about nutritional value, fats and carbs and caloric consumption and in response, these foods laugh at you with their fried profligacy. They are not real foods in the sense that you would eat them every day. They are surreal foods — excessive, bizarre, and delightful, existing only in one world: the world of the fair.

Fair foods find their origins in the celebration of abundance that drove attendance to fairs around the turn of the 20th century. In her article “Eat Me at the Fair,” historian Francine Kirsch describes how food installations at fairs were in part an advertisement for a state to attract people to move there. Look at us, Iowa could declare with an attention-getting palace of corn. We are a land of growth. A land where you can harvest enough corn to build a kingdom. 

Kirsch writes, “If the food exhibits at later fairs were particularly lavish, their genesis can be seen in drawings made at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial.” Here in the Agricultural Building, Mary Todd Lincoln’s favorite confectioner Henry Maillard displayed a 15-foot-tall sugar spire covered with edible historical figures. At one booth, a mammoth grape vine from California grew toward the ceiling. The New Hampshire booth displayed stuffed hogs that when they were alive had weighed 1,307 and 1,253 pounds. And this was the same fair that launched the butter sculpture trend when Caroline Shawk Brooks delicately carved Iolanthe. (I wrote about this last week.)

Sleeping Iolanthe carved by Caroline Shawk Brooks in 1878. Source.

Taken together, these food exhibits “reflected America’s exuberance at its coming of age best,” Kirsch writes. “And that desire to have and be the biggest would truly take hold in more ways than food in the century to come.”

But were they only about size, scale, and excess, I don’t think state fair foods would have nearly the grip they do on our culture. They are also about humor and desire.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his writings on the carnival, described it as a space outside the everyday, one that is both temporary and freeing for lower classes often oppressed by the usual social order. Here, laughter is a key element, and built on the subversions of expectations. Whereas in the outside world, we are expected and cautioned to eat more salads, in the world of the fair that salad is on a stick. Cows are made of their own butter. It’s silly. It’s fun. 

And how often is food allowed to be fun? How often are we just allowed to eat and enjoy it and eat some more?

In a world of moralizing about food and diets and bodies, in the oppressive superego of keto, Weight Watchers and Noom, state-fair food is our culinary id — a grotesquely joyous display of all that is forbidden and still desired. Waffles and Snickers, battered and fried and put on a stick. Bacon dipped in chocolate. It’s fried and sugary and, unless it’s corn or coleslaw, there is rarely a vegetable to be found. 

While fair foods reinforce American identity, they also reveal that our identity is changing. 

In this world already turned on its head, it’s easy to introduce new foods and change the narrative about who and what America is. The safe space of the familiar fair combined with the gleeful embrace of novelty foods creates an environment rich for experimentation. 

Every year, new foods are introduced to the fair. This year, at the Iowa State fair, amid all the usual fried concoctions there are also shrimp poke bowls, Korean egg dogs, and banh mi. The Minnesota State Fair offers a variety of foods that fuse cultures and traditions, like a steamed bun with lutefisk and hoisin sauce, hot honey cheese sticks, and a dill pickle cheese curd taco.

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Other state fairs, too, are embracing and selling more diverse ranges of food, offering a safe environment for people to try new things and experience new flavors. 

Fair food is America inverted, a mirror image reflected back to itself in its greasy plenty, mass-produced and served up hot. 

Historically, it has been through food exhibitions that new foods have taken hold of the American imagination. Fairs are sites of cultural exchange and cultural flattening, a place where through humor, we negotiate who and what we are through what we eat. 

Further Reading:

• I’ve written about apples and the eternal work of food.

• Why casserole remains.

• Politics and corn dogs.

• IT’S CORN! A BIG LUMP OF KNOBS. IT HAS THE JUICE. (It’s about corn and our national identity.)

• And why I’m never cooking for a man again.

1. In last Friday’s email, I ran a poll to see which state had the best state fair, Iowa or Minnesota. And I am sorry to say, that after carefully examining each state fair’s list of new foods, Minnesota wins.