All’s Fair

In this special edition of The Heavy Table’s newsletter, we dig into the spirit of the Minnesota State Fair and what makes it worthy of so much ink.

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I’ve been writing about food and drink at the Minnesota State Fair for about 16 years now. Beyond the general stress associated with five hours of marching and eating followed by the act of writing and editing about 10,000 words of copy and many dozen photos, I’ve never taken it very seriously.

In a world where journalists document food insecurity, and pandemics, and climate change, and terrorism, and war, and, and, and... State Fair food really doesn’t rate, and so I’ve never really given it much thought after the Fair’s opening day.

But as a lifelong serial quitter - always happy to throw aside whatever no longer works, sometimes with little justification - I would’ve found a way to ditch the Fair a long time ago if it really didn’t matter. I’ve always been able to silence the nagging voice in the back of my head asking: “If the Fair is really so silly, why don’t you bail on it?” The question I’m asking this year is: Well... why don’t we?

As long as there have been people, there have been celebrations. Take Rome [1], for example: The ability of the wealthy and the powerful to throw a really good public party was one of the key ways that they stayed wealthy and powerful. Chariot races, triumphs, gladiatorial games, public feasts - all ways that money and energy passed from the haves to the have-nots right back up to the haves again.

Weirdly trivial yet also essential. If you can’t stop quotidian life once in a while and celebrate, what’s the point of living? If you can’t party with your neighbors and fellow citizens, where are you really from, and how can you really claim to be at home?

Part of the reason that the State Fair matters - and part of the reason people get so passionate about loving it, or hating it, or stressing over the details of it - is that it’s a forum where we can all stand together as equals, step out of the day-to-day flow, and try to agree on some of the really important things in life: Music. Togetherness. Art. Nearly barfing after eating too many robot-made mini-donuts. Political discourse. Glowing necklaces made from non-compostable plastic. Toy throwing stars, also plastic. The crucial role of agriculture. Beer flavored like Oreo-esque but non-trademark-protected cookies.

The State Fair represents - and I would argue, absolutely should represent - the best that we have to offer one another. When you look at stuff like the absolutely vibrant crop art tradition or the incredible melting pot of diversity on display in the Fair’s various foods and musical acts, you’re getting some of that vital joy.

And when you look at stuff like the general lack of shade or water, the uncontrolled skyrocketing prices of everything, the Australian Nightmare Potato, or the Falcon Heights bandits charging 25 freaking dollars to park on the street, you’re getting the real world elbowing its way into what could be a utopian celebration of what makes Minnesota great. Why not just break the passenger-side window and go through the glove compartment, Falcon Heights? We can’t stop you! Help yourself! You’ve earned it!

We don’t have billionaires like Carnegie or Rockefeller or Augustus or Crassus anymore, horrible men who built mansions and temples to their own glory with one hand while picking up the enormous tab of keeping the masses entertained and cladding cities in marble with the other. Instead we’ve got extractive tech barons and world-class grifters inserting themselves between people and what people need (food, health care, water, information, energy), grinding out as much profit as humanly possible by making those exchanges as unpleasant as possible.

Is our future a trip through a giant misting fan to a shaded bench to a moving display of publicly sourced art? Or is it a dehumanizing, angry, noisy honking 45-minute commute followed by a walk through sun-beaten streets with thousands of other people interrupted only by opportunities to spend 2x or 3x or 4x what’s reasonable for the food and water that we need to get through the day?

At the Minnesota State Fair you can have it all - you can live the dream of creative expression and mutual care, and the nightmare of extractive greed and selfishness. It’s all on display! It’s all available, to be enjoyed or experienced in excruciating measure!

The process of sorting out what is what - what is reasonable, what is fair, what is joyous, what is crass, what is beautiful, what is nourishing, what is junk, what is innovative, what is exploitative, what is fun, what is tedious - that’s a process that engages the brain and the heart and the human soul.

You start to look at all the variables, and the mind boggles. For a person who wants to figure out how the world works, and how it could work a little bit better, the Fair is a worthy adversary.

And that’s why we do it. — James Norton

[1] WRITER’S NOTE: A few years back, it was discovered that most men think about ancient Rome on a weekly if not daily basis. This led to a new kind of question people would ask each other: “What’s your Roman Empire?”, meaning: “What’s the thing you sort of obsessively noodle about?” For me, my Roman Empire is the Roman Empire. Well, the Roman Republic and the old Roman Empire, but not the latter days (the Eastern/Western split.)

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