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Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
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Jewish World Review
Fair or not: Country living is far from Little House
By
Jim Mullen
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If you tried to figure out what farm life is like judging by what you see at the state fair, you'd get the impression that today's farmer spends his entire day driving in demolition derbies, eating fried dough, racing tractors, playing cow-plop bingo, eating deep-fried Twinkies, eyeballing teenage girls wearing low-rise jeans and wrapping pizza slices in bacon. How much more down-home can you get?
It's like opening the front door of "Little House on the Prairie" and finding out Ozzy Osbourne moved in and redecorated. Oh, there are still farm things at the fair: rabbits the size of Volkswagens, cows the size of SUVs and pigs the size of sofas. If there's a difference between a blue-ribbon cow and the first runner-up, I couldn't spot it. It must be something she did during the talent competition.
As everywhere, gangs have infiltrated the fair. Their hoodlum symbols were everywhere a green four-leaf clover with an "H" on each leaf. Instead of guns and knives, they carry pitchforks and cattle prods and speak in their own coded language: "Second cutting," "freshening," "walking fence," "milk house," "dry barn," "tedders," "spreaders" and "loaders" are just some of the words they use to communicate with their brethren.
In the big-dairy states, there is usually a butter sculpture. It is typically a tribute to some famous work of art, with life-sized figures carved entirely out of butter and displayed in a massive glass-walled refrigerator. One year I saw a butter Mount Rushmore and Rodin's "The Thinker." No doubt he was thinking about how clogged his veins were. Next year's sculpture will be a butter statue of a man lying on the floor clutching his chest in agony.
The aisles of the fair sheds are full of home-canned products that have won blue ribbons pickled cauliflower, canned string beans, beautiful beets, tasty-looking corn salsa, tomato sauce, imaginative combinations of garden vegetables all showing the care and deep appreciation home canners have for food. Of course, there is no place at the fair where you can actually eat any of that food. Unless you want those beets stuffed into the center of a ball of ground beef wrapped in bacon and cheese, fried and lovingly crammed onto a stick.
The big crowds at the fair are not watching cows and pigs, the big crowds are where the food vendors are, or they're out on the midway trying to win prizes by whacking moles, or riding the Vomit Comet and watching tractor pulls. The cows and the goats may be the excuse to come to the fair, but the real living spectacle at the fair are the humans in attendance.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jim Mullen is the author of "It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life" and "Baby's First Tattoo."
Previously:
A parable for the ages
Top 100 Cable news stories of the century
Green dumb
A developing story
Thinking outside the lunch box
What's good for the goose is good for the scanner
Newspapers will survive, but network TV?
A really big show of generation gaps
When pigs flu
The reports of our decline have been greatly exaggerated
Mergers and admonitions
Invest in gold: little, yellow, different
Stuck in Folsom Penthouse
Collecting karma
Setting loose the creative juice
It's all in the numbers
You're damaging your brain with practical skills
The real rat pack
The unspeakable luxury of the Park-O-Matic
Gross-ery shopping
© 2009, NEA
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