ESCANABA — Somebody at the U.P. State Fair figured out portion control Tuesday, and in the finest tradition of human ingenuity, immediately figured out how to use it to eat more food.
Tuesday was Chewsday Tuesday at the U.P. State Fair, when participating vendors offered smaller portions, special prices and discounts through 4 p.m. The official explanation was that this allowed fairgoers to sample food from several vendors without committing to a full-size order at every stop. That’s perfectly reasonable, and it’s also a wonderful example of taking the phrase “eat less” and finding a loophole big enough to drive a livestock trailer through.
Because nobody goes to the U.P. State Fair looking for the Mediterranean diet. Nobody gets through the gate, smells hot oil coming from six directions and thinks, You know what would really complete this experience? A sensible cucumber. Fair food exists because somewhere along the line humanity discovered that you could take perfectly ordinary food, put it on a stick, drop it into something dangerously hot and charge seven bucks for it. We looked upon this creation, decided it was good, and then immediately asked whether anybody had tried doing it to an Oreo.
This year’s official Chewsday lineup gave fairgoers plenty of ways to test the theory. CK’s Mexican and More offered a $7 Nacho Supreme. Mhee’s Lumpia Lagoon took $3 off a Duo Crunch or Adobo Bowl. Girly Pop Delta had $5 Blue Lagoon Lemonades and Shark Attacks, Hungry Bear Popcorn offered $4 snack bags, Superior Lemonade had a $4 kids-pouch lemonade, and UP North Roast knocked a dollar off a drink for customers willing to walk up to another adult and say, apparently with a straight face, “It’s Chewsday!”
Even the dogs were involved. Canine Crumpets offered free dog-treat samples, meaning the fair accomplished something most restaurants haven’t: a tasting menu for every mammal in the family. The Daily Pasty cannot recommend sampling the dog treats yourself, but they were free, you’re an American and we’re certainly not your supervisor.
Then there was Sutton Concession, where the whole thing stopped being a food promotion and became a philosophical experiment.
Sutton offered a veggie plate for $5 — the responsible option, containing vegetables, presumably vitamins, fiber and all the things your doctor has been telling you to eat while you nod politely and wonder how long this appointment is going to take. On the very same official Chewsday menu were deep-fried Oreos. Also $5.
That’s magnificent, because the U.P. State Fair managed to reduce the entire human struggle between responsibility and pleasure to two five-dollar transactions. Here are vegetables. Here are Oreos that somebody covered in batter and dropped into boiling oil. Same price. You decide.
There was no nutritional lecture and nobody standing beside the concession trailer with a clipboard asking whether you’d consumed your recommended daily allowance of broccoli. You were an adult standing at the U.P. State Fair with five dollars in your hand, and the United States of America trusted you to handle this one on your own.
Sutton apparently wasn’t satisfied with testing the limits of free will, either. The Chewsday menu also included a $5 butterfly chip platter and an $8 steak-tip platter. So a sufficiently determined fairgoer could eat steak tips, chips and deep-fried Oreos, then look another human being directly in the eye and explain that they had spent the afternoon practicing portion control.
And technically, they wouldn’t be lying.
That’s the genius of Chewsday. The obstacle to eating five different fair foods has never been desire. Desire was doing just fine. The problem was physics. Human beings have a finite amount of internal cargo space, and buying a full-size order at the first concession stand can seriously interfere with plans to make several increasingly questionable decisions later in the afternoon.
Chewsday solves the engineering problem: smaller portions, lower prices and more stops. The U.P. State Fair has essentially invented the culinary version of bar hopping, except instead of waking up Wednesday morning wondering why your phone contains seventeen photographs of a parking meter, you’re wondering why your shirt smells like powdered sugar and fryer oil.
There was a genuinely thoughtful part of Tuesday’s schedule as well. The midway held sensory-friendly hours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., reducing lights and sounds so people with sensory sensitivities could enjoy the fair in a more comfortable environment. It gave families who might otherwise find the midway overwhelming a quieter four-hour window to take part in the fair.
But anyone concerned that Tuesday evening might become excessively sensible can relax.
The ATV Big Air Tour is scheduled for the grandstand tonight, where people will launch motorized vehicles through the air for the enjoyment of spectators who may have spent the afternoon consuming discounted steak tips and fried cookies.
Consider the sequence of events the fair assembled for a single Tuesday. We began with livestock. We spent the afternoon discovering how many different foods can occupy one human being if they’re sold in sufficiently small increments. And now we’re going to finish the evening watching somebody attempt to briefly convince an ATV that it is an airplane.
That’s not an itinerary.
That’s the Upper Peninsula.
Chewsday may be finished for another year, but the U.P. State Fair continues through Sunday, August 23. Somewhere on the fairgrounds Tuesday, though, a five-dollar plate of vegetables spent five hours sitting in direct economic competition with five-dollar deep-fried Oreos.
The Daily Pasty isn’t going to tell you which one you should have chosen. We’re journalists. We have standards.
But we’d be very interested to know how many people walked onto the fairgrounds Tuesday because they’d heard the broccoli was absolutely unbelievable this year.
