IN Minnesota this weekend, excitement will be at a fever pitch, with the Twin Cities about to host a large and historic gathering of campaigning politicians, who will engage in some colorful grandstanding, review the economy, agriculture and family values, and possibly debate a vital question: Should spaghetti and meatballs be served on a stick?
Interest Guide
Nelson has been staging Fourth of July concerts since 1973. This year it's in George, Wash.
It’s Minnesota State Fair time, and from last Thursday, the 21st, through Monday, which also happens to be the first day of the Republican National Convention, the imposing fairgrounds by the banks of the Mississippi will be the focal point for Minnesotans the world over (we get around). Any politico venturing over from the convention, or settling in this weekend for a preconvention look around, will find a truly patriotic sight. Some hundred thousand visitors a day will be making their annual pilgrimage to the fair’s vast barns, its grandstands and the midway with its rides and hokey freak shows — though, in one of the few major changes to the fair from when I was a child, the latter are now collected under a single sideshow tent called the World of Wonders Palace of Illusions.
Our visiting national politicos might also learn a thing about the fine fruits of compromise. The gorgeous State Fairgrounds were a result of a prolonged slugfest between Minneapolis and St. Paul — the greatest sibling rivals since Cain and Abel — who in 1885 finally resigned themselves to siting the annual Great Minnesota Get-Together on a county poor farm equidistant from the two downtowns.
And what a site. Minnesota’s fair is not a “ragtop jungle,” said Brienna Schuette, the Minnesota State Fair’s marketing and communications manager. “Our fairgrounds are urban, so we have hundreds of shade trees and permanent buildings of some historical significance. And while some fairs hire show herds to fill their barns” — citing diplomatic concerns, she declined to name any of these dissemblers — “we’ve kept it real. All our animals are brought in by farmers for the competitions.”
Architecturally, the place is stunning. Much of it consists of Art Deco and neo-Classical barns with sculptural reliefs and grandstands built during the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration to create work during the Depression.
You’d imagine that Minnesota fairgoers would be grateful to the government for all this largess, but no, they keep their politicians confined to plywood stands where they are forced to dole out cheese curds and buttermilk for attention.
The fair’s pedestals are generally reserved for local farm beauties willing to have their likenesses sculptured in 90-pound blocks of butter and for outstanding local artisans like the baking maestro Marjorie Johnson, poised once again to take on all comers, backed by the more than 2,550 ribbons she’s won to date.
The enduring grand scale of state fairs in general celebrates a phenomenon as American as cow-tipping: the development of a thriving agriculture across the whole continent without a landed gentry. Whereas European farm fairs are relatively intimate affairs featuring well-mannered folk arrayed in oiled Barbour coats, funny tartan hats and other aristocratic froofery, our state fairs are a chaotic collision of thousands of agribusinesses as different and individualistic as the entrepreneurs who run them.
In Minnesota, we celebrate all their displayed contraptions and beasts, along with the many who toil in the fields of the republic by serving the fruits of their labors on a stick.
Ah yes, food on a stick. No one I asked could tell me where that idea came from, but I’m guessing it’s an offshoot of a pervasive Midwestern belief that all party food tastes better on a toothpick. The Minnesota State Fair boasts some 60 different items — from corn on the cob to smoked walleye — balanced on the tip of a stick. One of the best recent additions to this proud culinary legacy must be spaghetti wrapped around a meatball, which, miracle of miracles, stays on the stick and, to use what in Minnesota passes for an effusive compliment, could taste worse.
Every year I find myself drawn back to the fair by some very deep roots. My great-grandfather came to Minnesota from the East over a century ago to write crop reports for the newspapers. His children, along with most of the rest of the country, became city folk. But four generations, including mine, have always felt compelled to attend the fair to see where our food comes from and to get in trouble in Ye Old Mill, which my father and his cousin once closed down for half an hour when they managed to build a dam of boats in the gently rushing waters.
My father, who lived all over the world, always had a soft spot for the fair, begging me and my family to come a day early for our annual Labor Day weekend on Lake Superior so that he could tug his grandchildren through the old barns while being counter-tugged toward the rides on the midway. Dad spent the last three years of his life in an Alzheimer’s unit, but even when he no longer knew who the current president was, he could pinpoint the place on the State Fairgrounds where his father, an amateur magician, had pickpocketed the mayor of St. Paul’s watch during an impromptu performance. My grandfather, not incidentally, was from Minneapolis.
For Dad, and now for many of us city folk who still feel the fair’s annual pull, there is an unspoken question: “Am I still engaged with the land that feeds me?” And perhaps because once a year we get a prolonged whiff of manure, or watch a pig being born in the Miracle of Birth Center or come face-to-face with the folks who raise and grow our food — even if more of them commute to second jobs and wear their John Deere hats backward — then maybe we are worthy of the bounty of our good earth and good country for yet another year.
Especially if that bounty is served on a stick.
