The focus on healthy and fresh foods is injecting renewed enthusiasm into old-fashioned state fairs.
At the Colorado State Fair, which begins an 11-day run today in Pueblo, contestants in bread-baking and vegetable-canning competitions are getting younger.
“A lot of baby boomers are finally believing the doctor who says, ‘You are what you eat.’ So there is this interest in organic food or more locally grown,” said Jim Tucker, president and chief executive of the 1,300-member International Association of Fairs and Expositions. “The closer you are to the place where your food is grown, the better you feel about it, the safer you feel about it. We hear all this stuff about imported food, and everybody is a little scared about that”
Today, only 2 percent of Americans live on farms, but the nation’s appetite for homegrown fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry is on the rise. The number of farmers’ markets in Colorado, for instance, increased from 54 in 2002 to nearly 90 this year.
And the fair is drawing a younger audience.
“In past years, I saw a little bit older crowd, but it seems to be more and more of a younger crowd. It seems to have changed in the last three years,” said Chris Wiseman, general manager for the state fair. “It’s people in their 40s and 50s, and in the past it’s been people in their 60s and 70s.”
Mothers, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, also have a heightened awareness about feeding their children fresh foods.
Ruth Stauffer, a mother of nine children ages 5 to 23, lives on a 120-acre farm in Boone, east of Pueblo, and has always baked her own breads and pies.
She said she has noticed a “little bit of a resurgence” in people eating more natural foods, but “every now and then we sort of get depressed that it’s a dying art, but there are pockets here and there.”
The family has entered pickles, ketchup, salsa, peach nectar, jams and jellies and dried foods, including homemade jerky, in fair contests.
“It is healthier for you,” Stauffer said. “I raised my kids to always be involved in the kitchen. Even my boys, they are some of my best bakers.
“Everyone loves to eat homemade food, and the fair is a chance to see what other people are doing. If you hang around the judging or even afterwards, if you talk to some of the people who win, it is wonderful to pick their brains – ‘Well, how did you do that?’ You get a lot of ideas and a lot of wisdom,” Stauffer said.
Nearly 1,500 youths have entered the 4-H horse shows, and 1,288 youths have entered the livestock competitions – numbers that are on par with last year, according to the fair.
While the mission of the 135-year-old fair has always been to showcase commerce and industry, fairs have always had to mix circus-style shenanigans with some of the more educational offerings.
In the 1930s, because of a surplus of locomotives nationally, several state fairs built rail strips in front of their grandstands, placed locomotives at opposite ends of the track, loaded them with dynamite and smashed them into one another.
No one worried about litigation back then.
This year’s state fair will feature platform divers who will plunge at speeds of 65 mph into a 10-foot-deep pool. Tigers will romp and stomp on a stage, and artists will sculpt Alice in Wonderland out of 30 tons of sand. The fair has a new fishing hole for youths, a comedic hypnotist and a band that plays music on old saws and trash cans.
Attendance at last year’s fair was 452,017, down from 462,240 in 2005, the year the fair went to 11 days instead of 17 days. State fair officials blamed last year’s decline in attendance on bad weather.
“The goal is to always beat the year before,” said fair spokeswoman Michelle Wiseman. “We just want to make it as good a value as possible for families to come in and have a good time and enjoy. Agriculture is still our mission. More and more people are urban. Having these free attractions, the concerts, the carnivals, brings people in who might not otherwise be exposed to Colorado agriculture.”
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
