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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