This year at the Wisconsin State Fair, you can buy a Bugged Out Frozen Cheesecake On-a-Stick. This ridiculous food features a chocolate shell with a caramel and ant filling, and crunchy worm and cricket sprinkles. On a stick, of course.
I would not eat this, because I don't like bugs, and there are plenty of other tasty things available at the fair, but I think it's incredible that vendors keep coming up with new, attention-grabbing things to try at the State Fair.
This year is the 175th Anniversary of the Wisconsin State Fair. It opened in 1851 as a cattle show on the banks of the Rock River in Janesville, and now, while the agricultural parts are still there, it's arguably more known for the crazy foods like the bugs on a stick.
Of course I wanted to know: how did we get from fairs being a simple agricultural exposition to them being a spectacle of rides, games, and, of course, wild foods on a stick?
A Guy, Two Sheep, and a Tree
In May of 1808, a retired businessman named Elkanah Watson tied two Merino sheep under the big elm in the public square in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and invited people to come look at them.
That's it. That's the whole event. Two sheep and a tree. And that's the origin of every county fair and every state fair in America. This is a fact - it's sourced from the Smithsonian!
This wasn't just the local town fool doing something crazy; Elkanah had a real reason behind what he was doing. The 1807 Embargo Act had choked off farm exports and British cloth imports, and New England needed better sheep so the country could make its own wool. But Watson hit the problem every ag school has hit since: you cannot lecture a farmer into changing what he does.
You can, however, let him beat his neighbor in front of the whole county.
So in 1811, Watson and his neighbors formed the Berkshire Agricultural Society and put up $70 in prize money for the best oxen, cattle, swine, and sheep. They didn't just judge the animals; they also threw a parade at noon! Oxen, a band, stagecoaches loaded with American-made goods, English craftsmen running a weaving loom in the street- it all paraded down the street, drawing attention and making a total spectacle.
Watson had a word for it. He called it "éclat" — "a sensational, dazzling display" — and he understood it as the whole mechanism thatm made this thing work. The spectacle wasn't decoration on top of the serious business. It was how you got the serious business in front of people who'd never have shown up otherwise.
He knew he'd nailed it, too — he called that 1811 fair "splendid, novel, and imposing, beyond anything of the kind ever exhibited in America." By 1813 the purse was $400, and they were closing the fair with a ball to pull the young people in. By 1819 most New England counties had a society of their own.
Enter Wisconsin
New York held the first true state fair in Syracuse in 1841, and the concept rolled west fast — Michigan 1849, Ohio 1850, Wisconsin 1851, just three years after statehood. In fact, the first Wisconsin State Fair, held in Janesville, was the largest gathering at any Wisconsin event to that point.
Surprisingly to me, the Walworth County Fair debuted before the Wisconsin State Fair. Our agricultural society wrote its constitution April 28, 1842, and the earliest recorded county fair here happened October 16, 1850, in East Troy. The surviving record of that fair is a list of who won: 35 first premiums, 17 seconds, three thirds. That's the whole fair. No food, no rides, no band. Just winners.
The Midway Arrives
In 1893, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the serious exhibits sat in the White City portion of the event, and the amusements got walled off onto a mile-long strip of parkland called the Midway Plaisance — the first Ferris wheel, the games, the sideshows, the food stands.
This attempted quarantine of fun failed spectacularly. The fun part was so much more popular that the word "midway" became the American word for the fun part of the fair. Traveling showmen brought the concept everywhere: there were 17 traveling carnival companies in 1902, and more than 300 by 1936, with county fairgrounds as their bread and butter.
The Corn Dog
Early fair eating was sit-down eating centered around dinner tents, church suppers, and oyster stands. At the Walworth County Fair, the churches still have their halls.
This was nice, but sit-down dinners take up time that could otherwise be spent on rides, games, and all of the other fair fun. Food had to become mobile, and two families have claims to solving that problem by inventing the most iconic food on a stick of them all: the corn dog.
Out in Oregon, George and Versa Boyington ran a hot dog stand at Rockaway Beach. A rainy weekend ruined all their buns, so George started batter-coating hot dogs on sticks instead. They trademarked the Pronto Pup in 1942 and franchised it, and their batter is less sweet than cornbread batter — still the real difference between a Pronto Pup and a corn dog. It hit the Minnesota State Fair in 1947 and never left.
Meanwhile, down in Dallas, two brothers out of vaudeville named Neil and Carl Fletcher took a food booth at Fair Park in 1938. In 1942, they rolled out a cornmeal-battered hot dog — fried instead of baked, which was the whole innovation, and sold it for fifteen cents. Hilariously, nobody wanted it, and they had to halve them and give away samples until people eventually came around to buying this thing.
They called this thing the corny dog, but before they settled on that name, they tried some other names. The K-9. The Brown Bomber. The French Fried Hot Dog.
I'm grateful corny dog / corn dog is the name that stuck.
The Stick Wars
Corn dogs are great, but they're just one food on a stick among many. It seems like each year there is an arms race of who can make the craziest food.
As I looked into who was responsible for this situation, it appears there is one major villain in this story: Minnesota.
Minnesota keeps impeccable records, so we're able to have a precise timeline of their aggression:
- The pickle on a stick in 1971.
- Cheese on a stick in 1974.
- Corn on a stick in 1985.
- Pork chop on a stick in 1987.
Like many villains, it was a slow start - just four new foods in 16 years - but emboldened by these small successes, the vendors at the Minnesota State Fair went all in in the nineties:
- Walleye on a stick in 1992.
- Belgian waffle on a stick in 1993.
- Pizza on a stick in 1999.
- And the list goes on.
By 2000, there were 28 foods on a stick; by 2007, a whopping 56. Today the fair has stopped counting (they probably don't want to be held accountable for their crimes against good taste), and they officially say that there are "over 80" foods on a stick.
The Wisconsin State Fair runs the Sporkies, a contest for innovative fair foods, and this year the Fair features 80 new food items — including a finalist called the Cream City Cone, a pretzel cone loaded with bratwurst, onions, mushrooms, cheddar and a breaded cheese curd.
These foods are impractical showstoppers, but I don't blame the vendors. It's not about selling the food, it's about marketing.
In the industry, it's called earned media, aka showing up on the 5:00 news. It's cheaper to get a news van to show up than to buy a commercial, and a person holding something absurd on a stick is a great look on TV. That's one of the great lessons of food in America: it's almost always marketing.
Our Adventure at the Walworth County Fair
We partnered with the Walworth County Fair on a brat booth for a while. Nobody there was doing brats, and the fair could use the revenue, so it seemed obvious. Sales came in way below what we expected.
Here's what we figured out. People have their paths. People have their traditions. They walk the same loop they've walked since they were nine, and they buy the same four things they always buy. You could put the best bratwurst in Wisconsin thirty feet off that path, and they'll look at it, say "oh, that's cool, I'll get that next time," and keep walking.
The only way to break a tradition is to put something in front of somebody so ridiculous they can't not stop. An aardvark on a stick. Crusted jellyfish on a stick. Cheesecake with ants in it.
Which is exactly what Watson figured out in 1811 with the band and the parade and the spectacle. The razzmatazz is what makes the fair work!
The View from LGCM
At Lake Geneva Country Meats, we process 4H and FFA auction animals from 4 different county fairs.
If you're not familiar with the process, young people who are in 4-H clubs and FFA chapters raise animals to maturity with the point of selling them at auction. They learn the techniques to raise quality animals, understand the work that goes into this process, and hopefully get rewarded with money at the end to make the long hours worth it.
At the auction, buyers bid well over market on purpose, because the point is to back the kid. When you win an animal, you can choose to resell the animal at market and recoup some of your cost, donate the meat to the buyer's dinner, or keep it and send it to a processor, which is where we come in.
You get an animal, but what you also get is watching a nine-year-old who raised a pig for a year work out what the auction actually means. It's a curious mixture of pride and sadness as you see the circle of life work itself out in a hot auction barn.
We're happy to support these auctions and help keep this tradition alive. Without processors like us and our compatriots, this system wouldn't be possible.
If you'd like to learn more about the process of buying an animal at a County Fair and having us process it - just give our Front Office team a call, and they'll be happy to talk you through everything.
Enjoy The Fair
The Wisconsin State Fair runs August 6–16 in West Allis. Kenosha County goes August 19–23 in Wilmot. And the 177th Walworth County Fair takes place in Elkhorn over Labor Day weekend.
Go and eat the ridiculous thing on the stick. Go enjoy the Midway - or avoid the spinny puke machines like the plague - whichever you prefer. Check out the animal auctions, take in a vendor's pitch, and just have a little old-fashioned American fun.
All of these things are part of the grand American tradition, and I hope this year, when you go to take part, you'll appreciate having a little bit of the backstory behind the fun.
Cheers!
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