Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 9 of 9: The Year in Everything Else

cheese sculpture behind glass in temperature-controlled enclosure. Imagery includes cows, baseball, and self-portrait of the artist.

The annual cheese sculpture from Sarah Kaufmann, “the Cheese Lady” — another 1500 pounds of temporary art, later donated to charity.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and it all comes down to this: all the other pics fit to print. Obviously we had to lead off with the cheese sculpture.

Next up: the entrants in the annual CANstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Oh No, We Overordered Mushroom Soup Again”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.

Rather than the fair’s official theme of The Year of Baseball, the CANstruction competitors celebrated the Harvest Pavilion’s headline exhibit, “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. So this year, the cans are all about the movies!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 8: Morning Midway Meandering

Purple caterpillar roller coaster for kids on green track, no people around.

Possibly the world’s fastest caterpillar, relatively speaking.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

When I was a kid, the Midway was the only part of the fair that mattered. The food was a nice change of pace, but was more of a necessity than a highlight, at least until I discovered elephant ears. The adults wanted to see the exhibits and didn’t care if I was bored stiff. I liked animals, but our family never adapted to toxic barn stench. Sometimes the special events and scheduled entertainment were okay, but I didn’t scour their schedule for appointments and never attended a concert there until I was 29. No, far as I was concerned, the Midway was the be-all-end-all of the State Fair experience — the rides, the games, the fun houses, and especially the video arcade they added in the mid-’80s.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 7: The Year in Antiques

A booze flask, a moonshine jar, and a Mortimer Snerd whiskey bottle.

BOOZE! Now that I have your attention, here’s a trio of old-time containers, including one based on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s other dummy, Mortimer Snerd.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

One of the fair’s regular features is the antiques competition, chiefly displayed on the second floor of the Indiana Arts Building. No one’s ever posted the rules, criteria, rankings, or anything expository beyond signage implying, “Here are some antiques not for sale.” Contestants bring in ancient items they unearthed somewhere, a secret council convenes far from inquisitive eyes, prize ribbons are placed next to some of them, yadda yadda yadda, they’re at your Indiana State Fair.

Amid the quilts and ’50s baby dolls and blue-and-white dishware, a few items with historical value and/or pop culture cachet will catch our attention, especially comic books published before I was born. We congratulate the winners of this year’s Antiques We Noticed Most Contest!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 6: The Year in Art

red dragon sculpture with at least a five-foot wingspan.

Red dragon!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Anne and I are at that age when we’re more interested in visiting the exhibit halls than in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and 4-H instructional posters have been offered up for the various competitions. The State Fair holds its massive celebrations on behalf of our farmers, but Indiana has no shortage of artists, either. Whether adults or kids, the illustrators, sculptors, clothing designers, doll-makers and other artisans come from all demographics, work in multiple media, and bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own influences and home lives. They each contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State creative legacy.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 5: The Year in Lego

Lego Thomas the Tank Engine bursting through an occupied Lego living room.

Lego Thomas the Tank Engine recreates the classic moment from Thomas Comes to Breakfast that taught us why nobody invites trains over for pancakes.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Lego is a frequent sight at our State Fair. 4-H kids and competitors in other art contests routinely turn in works of Lego as their favorite sculpting medium. Some submissions are store-bought kits; some are original creations. There’s nothing emphatically Hoosier about them. To my knowledge we have no Lego factory and no Legoland theme park. Indiana was not a beachhead for Danish explorers. Not even the old Lego Indiana Jones set have anything to do with Indiana per se, much as we might wish to contrive otherwise. But at our State Fair there’s always room for Lego.

This year we attended the fair so late into its run — the last day was this past Sunday — that the rest of this miniseries is now a retrospective instead of a concurrent update. Figuring in advance that that’d happen, I tried to convince myself to take fewer photos so I could wrap up our short-term State Fair memories as quickly as possible and I could get back to all the other pending posts I’ve been procrastinating. I even thought to myself going in, “You do not have to snap pics of every Lego ever.” Here we wound up anyway, having once again accumulated enough Lego works for a standalone gallery. Behold the power of bright building blocks!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 4: The Year in Cakes

Giant cake shaped like a small burger, fries, hot dog, chocolate ice cream bar, and caramel apple all stacked on one massive burger.

No, this isn’t a Taste of the Fair dish or a Man v. Food eating challenge. This is a single cake.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…such as cakes! Back in 2019 we discovered for the first time in our entire fair-attending lives that the main 4-H Building wasn’t their only exhibit hall. Next door Centennial Hall was formerly a dormitory — and is still inaccurately and unhelpfully labeled as such — and contained entire competitive categories that we’d never seen before. The cakes in particular were awesome sights to behold.

Then the State Fair went on hiatus in 2020, because 2020. Without that annual reinforcement of the lesson we’d learned, we totally forgot about Centennial Hall until this year. We were only pointed toward it because the contents of the main 4-H Building were restructured, rearranged, and/or relocated elsewhere. For some reason the entire second floor appeared to have been converted into an indoor driving range for 4-H golfers. Thankfully we were redirected to Centennial Hall and discovered the joy of 4-H cakes all over again — the results of hours of effort, imagination and concentration on the part of whoever was blessed with these amazing colossal talents. A shame we couldn’t eat any of their works, merely behold them. Call it the Great Hoosier Bake-Off.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 3: The Year of America’s 250th

White cake with icing picture of bald eagle wearing sunglasses and a US flag bandanna on its head. Next to it is written "'Merica" in red icing.

Meet the radical new Sam the Eagle from Mark Millar’s Ultimate Muppets reboot.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and one splashy theme recurred throughout the various exhibits of arts, crafts, cookery, and antiquing across all participating buildings: the 250th anniversary of July 4th, 1776, generally considered the date of birth of the United States of America. Granted, not all citizens observed the only semiquincetennial party our nation will ever have, particularly among a statistically significant percentage of the terminally online. No, America isn’t perfect and never will be, which is kind of the point, no matter who’s in charge. If you only love people, places, or things that are perfect, then how many absolutely perfect people, places, or things do you genuinely love? If you count more than one, you’ve gotten it wrong.

As it happens, our road trip this year began over the Independence Day weekend and showed us evidence of folks proud to celebrate offline, about which I’ll get to post about here someday when I get caught up on sharing our travelogues, Lord willing. Anne, for one, was excited to see America cross that milestone without preemption by the Second Coming, collapsing under a giant meteor, or being conquered by a conspiratorial Canada/Mexico tag-team invasion. She braked at every roadside attraction that acknowledged its happening and was overjoyed to see that same enthusiasm here at the fair.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 2: The Year in VHS

Simulated video rental store with shelves devoted to the 1990s Disney VHS releases in the white cases. Movie candy lines the bottom shelf.

Remember when Disney released its movies on home video in those oversized white cases that were incompatible with VHS racks?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and once again the most interesting exhibit was hosted in the Harvest Pavilion: “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. Same as last year’s tribute to LP cover art, the curators started with a simple premise — in this case, “Remember movies on videotape? Those were awesome!” — and didn’t tailor everything to Indiana specifically, so much as it hearkened toward ye olde American entertainment monoculture. They assembled a collection of simulated video-rental store shelves, videotape boxes, movie posters, painted recreations of posters and iconic images, a few educational sections about filmmaking, and so on. Their contributors offered some offbeat choices, so it wasn’t all just Spielberg and Star Wars.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour, Worst to Best

Me holding a snack shaped like a corn dog with green sauce drizzled on it. I seem unimpressed.

Ceci n’est pas une corn dog.

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.

Most years, we’re all about the food. Each time our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same tenderloin again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly.

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Indiana Comic Convention 2026 Photos, Part 3 of 3: Con Life Before and After Nicolas Cage

Artists sitting on floor, working on complicated chalk art of an Alien Queen, Ripley and Newt.

The latest live-drawing work-in-progress from The Chalk Girl, as of Sunday afternoon.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the twelfth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis — a fun opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, avoid AI “art”, and scratch their heads at the inexplicable comeback of the 19th-century rubber-duck fad.

Rather than dump all our pics into a single omnibus entry, we’re mercifully splitting them into a trilogy of galleries…

…concluding with anything and everything involving neither celebrities nor cosplay. Meeting Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage may have been the sensational headline news, but he’s not all we saw during our two days onsite.

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Indiana Comic Convention 2026 Photos, Part 2 of 3: Nicolas Cage and Friends!

Us doing jazz hands with Nicolas Cage, who seems a bit too stricken by something to smile.

Our next guest needs no introduction! About that expression, though…

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the twelfth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis — a fun opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, avoid AI “art”, and scratch their heads at the inexplicable comeback of the 19th-century rubber-duck fad.

Rather than dump all our pics into a single omnibus entry, we’re mercifully splitting them into a trilogy of galleries…

Rare are the opportunities when a Midwest comic-con signs a guest who’s such a significant household name that local news outlets treat it as a major headline event. Usually our cons are relegated to a Thursday morning sidebar to the effect of, “Looking for something to do this weekend? Lee Greenwood will be performing at the Fieldhouse, here’s a list of fifteen different farmers’ markets, our state parks are still pretty, and Hoosier Comic Expo is bringing in three Yellow Rangers, a canceled stand-up comic, and…uh, sorry, those are the only names we recognize and our Google’s broken.” Not so this time: ICC waited till a mere week before showtime to announce they’d scored Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage’s Very First Appearance at an American Convention. This became a BIG DEAL. For once our journalists had something to write about besides sports.

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Indiana Comic Convention 2026 Photos, Part 1 of 3: Very Tiny Cosplay Sampler!

three cosplayers, refer to caption

The Nightmare Before Christmas role call: Sally! Jack Skellington! Oogie Boogie!

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the twelfth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis, and by “scenic” I mean “overcrowded with more construction equipment than a Tonka Truck factory”. ICC 2026 was a fun opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, avoid AI “art”, and scratch their heads at the inexplicable comeback of the 19th-century rubber-duck fad. The showrunners added still more square footage to their dominion, on track to match Gen Con’s imperial sprawl if they can keep up the pace for another 20-30 years or so. Apart from a few bottlenecked aisles, geek life had ample elbow room to thrive and sometimes enjoy breathing space in these hallowed halls of pop-culture commerce.

Rather than dump all our pics into a single omnibus entry, we’re mercifully splitting them into a trilogy of galleries. Up first: mandatory cosplay pics! We regret ours is such a measly collection, but: (a) we spent a lot of time in lines; (b) we tend to gravitate toward characters we recognize, and our recognition rate drops as the youngsters insist on liking different shows and comics than we do; and (c) everyone walks so fast and we’re old and tired and it’s all hot and it hurts an’ stuff. Even if we don’t capture them all on our own devices, we really do appreciate the cosplayers who brighten everyone’s experience.

The jazz-hands photo ops and other sights will be shared in the other chapters. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a sliver of an iota of a fraction of the total costumed wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy! Corrections are humbly welcomed for any we didn’t recognize or might’ve misidentified!

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54-14 or Write: Another Back-to-Back Blog Anniversary and Birthday

me doing jazz hands in front of a giant replica of Derpy the magic blue cat from "KPop Demon Hunters".

Derpy and Derpy, coming this fall to The CW! Taken the previous weekend at PopCon Indy 2026.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two such occasions fall three weeks apart each year, often but not always receiving separate entries of incredulous self-congratulation. In this attention-deficit we once again offer two for the bandwidth of one, a pretty sweet deal in any economy, not just this one.

I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore because social-media angst is the sole reading matter of choice among today’s average digital participant. The best part about entertaining myself here in my own little hermit shack is that I own the place and I don’t have to worry about moderators editing or deleting my posts, which is nice.

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PopCon Indy 2026 Photos, Part 1 of 2: Tiny Cosplay Gallery!

John Jones cosplayer with accurate detective clothing and very specific sunglasses, carrying cardboard replica of psychedelic Absolute Martian Manhunter

Detective John Jones and the psychedelic alien in his head from DC Comics’ deeply trippy Absolute Martian Manhunter.

This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the latest edition of PopCon Indy, an entertainment convention locally owned and run here in our own hometown of Indianapolis. Their inaugural 2014 shindig (under the original moniker “Indy PopCon”) was a massive undertaking and a phenomenal experience, where we met actors from some of our favorite works and were pretty impressed at a first-time comic-con being so well-run. And we do love the convenience of events practically in our backyard so we can save on hotel costs and park for free at my workplace if the weather’s nice.

We also attended the next two years’ shows, but began feeling out-of-place as the guest lists began targeting much younger geek demographics — fewer actors under 50, far more anime voice actors, YouTubers, and other influencers and fields outside our Gen-X spheres. We can’t blame them for giving the people what they want, especially after 2015’s special guest Markiplier brought in, by my conservative estimate, 630 million fans dying to meet him and willing to wait the rest of their lives in line if necessary. Some of them may still be there to this day, perhaps a bit miffed that he took such a long break to go film Iron Lung for a while before he resumed signing. His lines were quite the rodeo to witness from the outside, but it wasn’t our rodeo.

IPC 2016 held a few highlights for us, such as the only YouTuber I’ve ever wanted to meet, one of the most awkward comics panels I’ve ever asked a question in, and the height of Deadpool variant cosplay mania. But we bowed out for a while after that. It’s not them, it’s us. (Well, mostly us. It also didn’t help that sometimes their biggest guests were actors we’d already met at other cons.) But hey! Ten years later, here we are again! We only attended Saturday, but we accomplished our modest goals, such as “have a blast”.

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Happy Free Comic Book Day 2026 and/or Comics Giveaway Day 2026!

Twelve free comics, details below.

Once again putting the “fun” back in “Reading is fundamental!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the first Saturday of every May is Free Comic Book Day, an annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, blood-soaked horror, all-ages cartoon characters, licensed merchandise, or what-have-you. It’s one of the best holidays ever for hobbyists like me who’ve been comics readers since the days when drugstores sold them for thirty-five cents each and comic-book movies were made on a budget of about $35 each.

Each year comic shops lure fans and curious onlookers inside their brick-and-mortar hideaways with a big batch of free new comics from all the major publishers and a bevy of smaller competitors deserving shelf space and consideration. I observe the holiday by getting up early, venturing to one or more comic shops as soon as they open for their occasion, picking up samples, and spending money on a few extra items as my way of thanking the proprietors for their service in the field of literacy.

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Beef & Boards & Blizzard

Beef & Boards up on a hill, with the first later of snow not yet suffocating their lawn.

Time stamp: Saturday, January 24th, 5:37 p.m. EST. We’d not yet gone fully antarctic.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: on too-rare occasion we’ll spend time out of the house with other Gen-X adults who aren’t related to us, and not just fellow geek strangers in comic-con lines, like that one morning when we learned “high tea” was a thing outside Victorian England and tried some in an elegant Beech Grove parlor.

Saturday night we tagged along with two of our tea-time companions for food ‘n’ art at Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre, an Indianapolis institution for live stage performance since 1973. My wife Anne and I were born, raised, and largely content here in Indy all life long, but neither of us had braked for Beef & Boards before. The four of us made plans months in advance and stuck to them, even when local and national news warned us The Snowstorm of the Century had been scheduled for this very same weekend. The theater understandably canceled their Sunday performances, but as for Saturday, they declared the show must go on.

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The Indiana Historical Society’s Festival of Trees 2025: Indoor Christmas Forest Fun

Pink and white Christmas tree with Ralphie ornaments and bunny ear topper. Next to it is a cardboard standee of Ralphie in bunny suit from "A Christmas Story".

I’d give it a major award if I could: Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre celebrates their upcoming performances of A Christmas Story: The Musical, December 5-27.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis hosts a special Christmas exhibit called the Festival of Trees, for which dozens of local businesses and charities festoon a tree (or sometimes alternative objects) with decorations befitting their interests, causes, products, and/or colors. For the fourth year in a row my coworkers and I took a lunchtime field trip to their museum and immersed ourselves in holiday spirit, local pride, and tree-trimming cuteness.

The participating companies and entities come and go. Some put up a tree each and every year without fail; newcomers will often join in the festivities alongside them. (Alas, this year saw no trees from past providers such as the Eiteljorg Museum, the Avon Chik-Fil-A, and our Indianapolis Colts despite going a strong 8-2 as of this writing.) Once again my wife Anne couldn’t tag along this day because she has her own employer and perks, so I took pics to share with her and with You, The Viewers at Home. Please enjoy this selection from this year’s assortment of 84 different displays.

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

balcony view of a movie screen down below. Onscreen is a pic of Emily Deschanel and two producers, encouraging viewers to become a Heartland member. Walls around screen are glowing green and have large icons of film reels.

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

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Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 3: The Year in Food, “Look But Don’t Taste” Division

Sculpture of Disney's Stitch made mostly of cans of StarKist Tuna.

Canned Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: the annual Canstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Soup on Clearance in Aisle 6”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.

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Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour

Small paper boat filled with exactly what the caption describes, but also traces of white icing mixed in.

Welcome to the Indiana State Fair! Have some Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cookie Butter Pretzel Bites!

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.

Most years, we’re all about the food. Each time our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same tenderloin again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly. This year’s Taste of the Fair dishes and drinks number 33 on their official map and 39 on the official site. As of this writing I’m unsure what the six unmapped vendors did to upset State Fair officials.

In all we tried eight Taste of the Fair items during our 7½-hour stay and walked off several of those cumulative calories around the fairgrounds and inside the exhibit halls, whose contents we’ll cover in subsequent chapters. I wish we could’ve tried more, but: (a) food in general was pricier than ever, apropos of the economy today; (b) Taste of the Fair items in particular seemed much more expensive, possibly under the assumption that all fair-food fans are wealthy influencers or are just plain irresponsible with their credit cards; (c) the older we get, the less we should be eating, and the less we can eat; and (d) some vendors now approach Taste of the Fair as a chance to create their own Man V. Food super-sized eating challenges suitable only for the mightiest wrestling champions, compiling sandwiches so large that, were I to try one, I wouldn’t be able to eat again for days. And this chapter would look pretty silly with only a single sandwich pic.

So we did what we could in a single day with the bodies allotted. In the past I’ve ranked our results as a gratuitous listicle, but I’m not in the mood to pit vendors against each other. Also included here are a few items Anne threw in that weren’t on that list. She’s willing to play along to an extent, but she has her own tastes and doesn’t share all my compulsions.

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