(Roughly) Daily

Vice President Teddy Roosevelt uttered that famous line at the Minnesota State Fair in 1901 (a few days before William McKinley was assasinated and Roosevelt became President). While TR was talking about foreign policy, he might well have been describing the fair-goers… at least as they have evolved. There are very few comestibles that one cannot purchase at the fair, chocolate-dipped and/or fried, on a stick.

Fairs have long been a hotbed of culinary creation. To take just one example, the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis introduced the hamburger, the hot dog, peanut butter, iced tea, the club sandwich, cotton candy, and the ice cream cone, among other delights.

Innovation lives on. In advance of this year’s event (August 21-September 1), the Minnesota State Fair is previewing some of the new foods that will be on offer to the roughly 2 million visitors it will host. For example…

And so, so much more.

Via the always enlightening Web Curios, where Matt Muir observes: “On the one hand, food discourse is some of the worst discourse; on the other, it’s impossible not to gawp every year at the astonishing things that North Americans seem able and willing to do with saturated fats and a deepfryer, and to speculate and the deep and significant character flaws that this sort of approach to ‘sustenance’ connotes. THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH “a 4 oz. hamburger patty with cheese, pickles and special sauce, sandwiched between two deep-fried peanut butter & grape jelly Uncrustables” [pictured at the top] IS A DESCRIPTION OF A REASONABLE FOODSTUFF! (also, can we just take a moment to consider what has happened to a society in which pre-made crustless sandwiches are a thing? O THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE!)… Would you want to drink this ‘mocktail’? [here] A “Dirty NoTini (lemon, dill pickling spices & olive brine)”? I posit that you would in fact not. ONE OF THESE ‘DISHES’ [here] IS LITERALLY ‘PASTRY SCRAPS WITH SUGAR AND CINNAMON SERVED WITH A SUGAR-BASED DIPPING SAUCE’ FFS! There’s not enough Ozempic in the world, honestly.”

Yeah… but I have to say, the Tandori Chicken Quesdilla sounds pretty good to me…

Browse the entire array of dishes debuting at the Minnesota State Fair: “New Foods for 2025.”

Special bonus: not related (it’s a pointer to– and comment on– a piece in Lit Hub), but also from Web Curios:

Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet Stoned?: To be clear, per Betteridge’s Law [see here], the answer to this is very clearly ‘no, of course he fcuking didn’t, IF HE EVEN WROTE HAMLET IN THE FIRST PLACE (lol)’, but I am including this because the thinness of the argument here presented made me laugh quite a lot – the entire piece hangs on two lines drawn from Sonnet 76, subjected to the following RIGOROUS ANALYSIS: “Many scholars believe the ‘noted weed’ in which the author finds ‘invention’ is a reference to cannabis and its ability to stimulate creativity. Some also think the phrase ‘every word doth almost tell my name’ is a sly reference to the fact that ‘shake’ (as in Shakespeare) is another word for cannabis—specifically, the scraps left over after cannabis buds have been plucked and packaged.” I don’t think Shakespeare was baked, no, but I have my doubts about the author of this piece, bless them.

*Theodore Roosevelt

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As we taste, we might recall that today celbrates an indisputable delicacy; it is National Peach Ice Cream Day.

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