Packing Them In at the New State Fair

They introduced a fat-free corn dog at the Iowa State Fair the other day.

This is well nigh sacrilege.

True, most folks understand nothing’s sacred at the fair these days. The grandstand hosts not just Reba McEntire, but Def Leppard. The butter sculpture is not just the traditional cow, but “The Last Supper.” There’s still a Ferris wheel on the midway, of course, but there’s also a 16-story thrill ride that spins the strong of stomach around at 60 miles per hour--for $25 a whirl.

All that is understandable, but the demise of grease on a stick?

Times are apparently changing. Not just in Iowa, but at fairs across the nation. Some are even serving up tofu stir-fry and microbrews along with their funnel cakes and lemonade. They’re also adding such eclectic attractions as drag-racing skunks, cricket-spitting contests, celebrity look-alike potato chips and virtual reality car races.

Anything to make their point: Fairs are not just for farmers. They’re for fun.

“Fairs are faced with a lot of challenges these days, because there’s so much competition. People have so many choices for entertainment,” said Jill Schaller, marketing director for the Ohio State Fair. “We try to be a little bit of everything to everybody.”

The strategy appears to be working. As they stretch to appeal to an increasingly urban and suburban audience, state and county fairs have drawn bigger and bigger crowds in recent years. The granddaddy of the state fests, the Texas State Fair in Dallas, has attracted 3.4 million to 3.6 million visitors a year since 1995. Minnesota sold nearly 1.7 million tickets last year, a record.

Attendance Rising Around the Country

Same story at the California State Fair in Sacramento, which runs through Sept. 6 and features such draws as a live shark show and a lumberjack obstacle course. Attendance has been climbing steadily, peaking last year at more than 909,000.

All told, state and county fairs draw as many visitors each year as U.S. amusement parks, according to Carla Corbin, a landscape professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies fairs. And although most fairs are run by nonprofit boards, they do provide an economic bounce to their regions. Iowa’s fair, for instance, which attracted 970,000 visitors this year, or more than one-third the state’s population, is credited with injecting $60 million into the local economy.

“People think that because the family farm has dwindled, the fair is an exercise in nostalgia. They think it’s dying out, but that’s not the case,” Corbin said.

Fair aficionados are proud of recent efforts to diversify, but they insist that an old-fashioned emphasis on agriculture is still the key to a good fair’s success.

Old-timers may--and do--grumble that fairs have diluted their agricultural mission, that the dairy barn is too hard to find, that there are not enough acres devoted to farm machinery. “They’re losing their heritage, and that’s kind of sad,” said Lillian Colton, 87, who has been visiting the Minnesota State Fair for eight decades.

Yet organizers insist that these days, even the wacky exhibits that give the fair its cornball flavor tend to have an agricultural twist: Entomologists use cockroach “tractor pull” races to talk about pests. “Moo barns” let kids try milking techniques. Rooster crowing contests teach . . . well, stop by one and you’ll hear enough shrill cock-a-doodle-dooing to make you appreciate your clock radio alarm.

Thanks in part to this snazzier packaging--the farm as entertainment, not as a smelly relic of the past--fair-goers seem to be ever more interested in agriculture.

And there’s this undisputed fact as well: Farm life is increasingly a crowd-drawing novelty.

“There’s no grandfather’s farm to go to anymore, so the agricultural aspect of fairs, whether it’s livestock, vegetables or crops, continues to increase in popularity,” said Lewis Miller, director of the International Assn. of Fairs and Expositions in Springfield, Mo.

Indeed, most kids these days are more familiar with zebras at the zoo than with pigs and chickens. So they find these most mundane of barnyard animals fascinating. Fourteen-year-old Britton Fields, for instance, came to the sprawling state fair in central Missouri mainly to gorge on pork burgers and carnival rides. But he ended up a fan of the agricultural pavilions at the fair, which just concluded another strong year. “It’s cool watching the animals,” he said. “It’s not like you see them around every day.”

This view of agriculture as an attraction in its own right, much like the grandstand or the Ferris wheel, marks a shift in the mission of state fairs.

From their origin in the early 1800s, fairs were forums for farmers to swap ideas and learn new techniques. They boasted their share of frivolity, of course. (Women riding horses astride, instead of sidesaddle, provided the ultimate racy entertainment. And talk about trendy food: One fair in the 1920s served ostrich-egg omelettes.) But the main point was for farmers to get together to talk shop.

Today, in contrast, “the fair is still farm stuff, but it’s not for the farmer,” said Derek Nelson, author of a new coffee-table book called “The American State Fair.” Instead, most of the “farm stuff” (aside from livestock contests, which remain serious business) is designed for city slickers who want to learn about their agrarian past.

A Dose of Real Life Down on the Farm

The Indiana State Fair, for instance, puts several pregnant cows on display so folks can watch them give birth. When one goes into labor, word spreads quickly; a crowd of several thousand can gather within minutes to watch the delivery.

“I just have to stop and pinch myself to see all these people waiting for a cow to have a calf,” said Rich Knebel, the dairy farmer who manages the display.

Because it’s real life, it’s not always pretty: Some calves have been stillborn, right there in front of the crowd. But that’s part of the state fair’s appeal. The manure really smells. The cows really bellow. “That’s what’s so neat about fairs,” said Jeff Fites, a promoter at the Indiana State Fair. “It’s not animatronics. It’s the real thing.”

Not that everyone is drawn to the real thing.

“I’m not into animals,” Shelley Phillips, a first-time visitor to the Missouri fair, said with an emphatic shudder. “I don’t want them licking my hand.”

For her, and the many like her, fairs offer plenty of non-ag displays, from $32,000 trailer homes to the latest in concrete patios. There may be a diaper-decorating contest, or life-sized dinosaur sculptures. A presentation on how to assemble photo albums. Or, in Iowa, a chance to join in the world’s largest chicken dance. (“Get ready to squawk, waddle and flap your wings.”)

Fairs offer a bizarre hodgepodge: part infomercial, part carnival, part block party. Just listen for an afternoon to the public address system at the Missouri State Fair. Now the announcer is hawking a sleep-easy mattress. Now he’s urging one and all to hustle on down to the pig races. Now he’s telling a kid named Michael to call his grandma, quick. Now he’s swearing up and down that Buddy the five-legged cow is no hoax: “A $10,000 cash prize if he’s not alive.”

At once hokey, earnest and delightfully corny, the fair “is a release from everything you ever do in everyday life,” said Tom Turpin, an Indiana State Fair-goer for 29 years and counting. “There are very few places where you can take the whole family to have fun and just be yourself. Eat cotton candy, get stung by a yellow jacket and enjoy it.”

By proud fair tradition, a big part of the escapism is gluttony. At last year’s Indiana State Fair, visitors consumed 14,000 pounds of pork chops and 56,000 rib-eye steaks. And at the Iowa State Fair, baking contest categories are heavy on the lard. (Zucchini Bread with Lard. Oatmeal Cookies with Lard. Gingersnaps with Lard. Chocolate Cake with Lard. And so on.)

Perhaps the best example of the fair food spirit, however, is the Minnesota State Fair’s official motto: “Corndogus Eternus.”

Even in this age of change, you can bet it doesn’t refer to fat-free.