is the Food Channel

take the popular program Road Tasted.  Typically 3 out of 4 food producers featured on each new regional show makes candy, cookies or ribs. All high fat junk food. Pandering to the lowest denominator is what you get in a bloated over indulgent society like America.

I am a fairly faithly attender of the Iowa State Fair.  My mom got 5th in the pro-am horseshoe contest this year!  

But back to food, I REALLY like corn dogs, but am also a veggie, so I took lots of time to seek out the veggie corn dog stand.  It is almost always in nearly the same spot.  I did search out the salad on a stick this year.  What a waste of money.  It is ridiculous, you might as well buy a tomato and a head of lettuce.  Not nearly as sensically delicious as fried oreos.  MMMMMM.  

I too has my first state fair experience a few weeks ago.  I moved to Indiana from Philadelphia and couldn't wait (to the groans of friends) to check out this state fair!  I saw a cow being born, learned some amazing things about agriculture and had deep fried veggies... and a deep fried oreo.  It was great!  And a million people came as well!

Lotti's suspicions of the "Iowa State University signs dispelling the obesity-high-fructose corn syrup link by pointing out that "High Fructose Corn Syrup has made sweet confections more readily available at a lower cost," are not unfounded, but there is more to this picture.

To be sure, Iowa State University (ISU) has historically led the way in developing much of the technology and knowledge embedded in the industrial food system that we are now trying to reform.  Nevertheless, ISU does not deserve the label of food system villain.  ISU students, researchers, and professors are not a homogeneous group of productionist agriculturalists looking to plant "fence row to fence row".  Many of us here at ISU are doing our fair share (and more) in the necessary work of reforming our food system.  From agronomy to sociology, ISU is advancing the leading edge of agricultural reform as rapidly as any other institution.  In fact, ISU is home to the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture, the only graduate program offering degreed in sustainable agriculture in the country.

Matthew Hoffman - Graduate student of rural sociology and sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University

Ok, so I know it's not a contest (well, maybe it is), but Minnesota State Fair this year = 1,693,533! (I know, you were there, too) -- but coming from the Northeast, this scale is really remarkable (The most hard core ag fairs like MOFGA's Common Ground = ~60,000, although to be fair, the Big-E got 1,227,889 last year, although that is all the NE states together.)

And the corn! Yes corn dogs (and presumably in the rest of the fried food?), but show corn, and how much of that 500 lbs of butter is really, at the end of the day, corn? Yes, this is a preoccupation of the Midwest, and a major difference with the Northeast. And yes, mostly straightforward big ag here, but with this many visitors already, there's a lot of room to cultivate engagement with progressive ag. (The eco-experience, Minnesota cooks, the great farmer trading cars -- and farmer playing cards, even!)

Matthew,

Thank you for pointing out the diversity of ISU's students, researchers, and profs. It often seems like ISU wears two hats -- the production ag hat (which is much more prevalent) and the smaller but present sust ag hat. That diversity in an academic institution is necessary but I wonder how much discussion and cross pollination there is between those two camps? When I was in undergrad, I can definitely say that I was the only person attending both the GM plant seminars and the agroecology conferences.

Valentine,

I think you hit it on the nail -- this is one of the places where we (the progressive ag types) should be looking to engage the conventional ag system. The Minnesota State Fair is already on that path, and I think that similar efforts at the Iowa State Fair would be great. While it is important to have separate progressive ag fairs (a la Slow Food nation), we must also engage the food system on its own terms, in its own arenas, if we are really going to make progressive ag more of a dominant player.