I found myself in Des Moines last Saturday (but I didn’t find myself in Des Moines; for that you have to go to Tibet or Paris or maybe West Allis), and I took advantage of an offer to visit the Iowa State Fair.
You may have been noticing the Iowa State Fair in the news as it is a mandatory stop for presidential candidates. The day I was there Bernie Sanders had delivered a speech to another big crowd, Donald Trump had given kids rides on his helicopter, and Hillary Clinton had sampled a pork chop on a stick. Later that day I visited that very same pork-chop-on-a-stick trailer!
Let’s start there. The pork-chop-on-a-stick is the flagship on-a-stick item that may be purchased at the fair. And it is very good. I was at first taken aback at the lack of condiments available. No barbecue or horseradish sauces were provided. But I guess the idea is that Iowa wants you to appreciate the chop itself in all its simple elegance. They’re probably right, and I’m sure Hillary agreed.
But that’s pretty much where it all begins and ends for Iowa fare at the Iowa State Fair. I couldn’t find any other uniquely Iowa items, on a stick or off. I couldn’t even find roasted corn! All of the other stuff is standard fair food you can get at any self-respecting Midwest county fair: fried Oreos and Twinkies and Snickers bars, fried cheese curds, saltwater taffy and the like.
And if your measure of a good fair is your fried options, consider this. While Iowa boasts some 50 or so things on a stick, Wisconsin has twice as many. If it can be fried and impaled, we have done it first here in the Badger State.
And Wisconsin’s homemade choices are spectacular. You can get about two dozen made-right-here items at the Wisconsin Products Pavilion alone!
Here is the lineup Dianne and I have followed at our fair visits for the last 30 years or so: the baked potato with butter, cheese and sour cream followed by the butterfly pork chop sandwich (with BBQ and horseradish sauce), followed by the rib-eye sandwich (with horseradish sauce only), followed by the roasted corn, followed by the cream puffs. We also pick up a dozen apple doughnuts, but we take those home. We don’t want to overdo it.
That’s another thing, now that you’ve got me going: overdoing it. Iowa makes a HUGE deal out of a life-size cow sculpted out of butter. I know that sounds impressive, and it’s a big draw. People get in line in a dimly lit building with no air conditioning to stand in front of a plate glass window and take selfies of themselves and the big butter cow.
But I was reminded of a similarly long line in a cool and clean and brightly lit building at the Wisconsin State Fair, where we go to get our cream puffs. This line is a model of efficiency. You glide through while watching your fresh cream puffs being constructed before your very eyes. If President Obama had gone to the people who organize the cream puff line at the Wisconsin State Fair to figure out how to roll out the health care exchanges a couple years ago, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.
I did have some fun with politics in Iowa. I stumbled upon the Iowa Republican Party booth, where they had a huge mural of all their 17 presidential candidates standing in an Iowa cornfield beneath the caption, “Field of Dreams.” You could get your picture taken with that as a backdrop. How could I refuse?
Because I was wearing a Wisconsin golf shirt and Wisconsin football hat, the Iowa Republican guy running the thing said, “Must be a Scott Walker guy!” Caught off guard and not wanting to be impolite, I just said, “Uh, no.” The guy looked quizzical, so in order not to blow my cover and to make the most mischief possible I blurted out, “Trump! I’m for Trump!” He nodded knowingly.
All of this would be fine except that Iowans are really snobby about their state fair. Some of it has to do with their inflated sense of importance due to the accident of the Iowa caucuses occurring approximately five years before the party nominating conventions, and some of it has to do with their fair getting mentioned in the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die.
You can’t walk for a block in Des Moines without somebody telling you that you have to see their fair before you die. Given the urgency of some of these pleadings, I started to wonder if I looked that bad. Were they really concerned that if I delayed much longer I’d depart from Iowa and this Earth without experiencing this must-see event?
In the end, I’d have to say that Iowa does, in fact, have a fine state fair, as does Minnesota, where they also oversell their local expo in a way that belies the whole Norwegian modesty thing they have going. Minnesotans are always bragging about their Scandinavian understatement. But neither matches the doings in West Allis.
Wisconsin has the finest state fair in the nation. See it before you die.
