Minnesota forever

A brief dispatch from a different time

Two summers ago I went to the Minnesota state fair and tried to write about it, and then I convinced myself it was too stupid to publish. But I just spent a week in Minnesota. It was cold and stressful and I was there for horrible reasons—the DHS occupation of the Twin Cities, federal agents killing two American citizens and rounding up thousands of immigrants, ongoing repression of protesters and observers—and the entire time I was there I kept thinking about my previous visits to Minnesota, the many people I love who live or are from there, the fair, and how things used to feel a little better, even if they weren’t exactly good.

Tomorrow I’m publishing an interview with someone who was detained by federal agents for protesting Alex Pretti’s killing. But for now, here’s a brief interlude from the horrors.

<3

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In late August I went to the Minnesota state fair. I wanted to write about it, but what is there to say? Something about Tim Walz; something about Minnesota nice. It was wholesome, almost aggressively so when compared to the trashy atmosphere of my beloved Florida state fair, and anyway I went with my boyfriend and his family and there’s nothing I hate more than reading the words “my boyfriend” in a piece of nonfiction writing.

I thought maybe the politics of it all would interest me but what I was really curious about was the food. At the fair I ate, in order: a pickle on a stick; cheese curds; hotdish on a stick¹; a cup of milk from the all-you-can-drink milk vendor; a cup of chocolate milk from the all-you-can-drink milk vendor; cheese curds (ranch flavored); chocolate chip cookies from Martha’s Cookies; a lemon-pickle popsicle from the Lutheran cafeteria; a sour beer from a local microbrewery; walleye cakes and some kind of dumpling situation, before a lumberjack show; a virgin Bloody Mary, which kind of changed my life because I always want a Bloody Mary but don’t always want alcohol; a sip of lemonade; and finally, a shave ice concoction with tajin and condensed milk and popping boba that, despite my best efforts, I was unable to finish.

my favorite state fair fare

I posted a picture of the milk on my Instagram story and two people sent me identical messages: is it raw tho. I had raw milk while visiting my friend Alina in northern Idaho a few weeks prior, and I ate big juicy shrimp Alina’s parent had poached for us and white Spanish anchovies from a tin I bought at the co-op which I ate on crackers with some labneh from the Mennonite bakery² and a chopped chicken salad from the co-op and a vegetarian burrito from the co-op that I ate on a lake, sitting at the front of a kayak while Alina sat in the back. The sweet potato cubes in the burrito were undercooked and kind of crunchy. The shrimp was perfect and we ate it outside and eventually hornets swarmed around it and I saw one rip a chunk of pink flesh off a shrimp and lost my appetite. The raw milk, unfortunately, was really good.

The milk at the Minnesota state fair was pasteurized. Late in the afternoon we went in the dairy building to see the butter sculptures, but the power went out and Rachel Visser of Hutchinson, the Princess Kay of the Milky Way, was exiting the refrigerated enclosure in which an artist had been carving her likeness into a block of butter. I kept falling victim to technical difficulties. The flight to Minneapolis was delayed by six hours, the first three of which were spent sitting on the tarmac. When they finally let us off the plane, I ran to the Delta lounge for chicken noodle soup and a martini.

1. There’s no way for me to write about this without sounding like some kind of anthropologist describing their time with an unfamiliar people, but it was like, alternating layers of meatballs and tater tots, battered and fried, with a side of gravy.

2. We went to the Mennonite bakery on my last day in Idaho and sat around for hours talking and eating and talking and eating. I was going to get an iced latte but my friend Libby, who is a midwife, told me you get free refills on hot coffee so I got one of those instead. When I went to put milk in it the lid on the carafe got stuck so I tilted it more than usual and suddenly a torrent of milk came out and spilled all over the counter and the floor. I cleaned it up before any of the Mennonites noticed. I couldn’t tell you if the milk was raw, but our meal was dairy-forward: a breakfast sandwich and a cinnamon roll and a creampuff and a slice of peach pie.