County fair

[altivo]

Another county fair, since we live right on the edge between two counties. Boone County has a much larger fair because until recently it was still a much more rural area. The fairgrounds are owned and operated by The Grange and have been in the same place forever or nearly so. They have a huge horse show that runs all week, focused on draft horses and ponies, no ordinary sized horses at all. Saturday is the big day for horses because that's when they show all the hitch teams, big and little. It's great fun to watch but this year we couldn't go until Sunday.

I counted in the three "commercial" buildings just to see. There were no less than four chiropractors pushing their services. More politicians and religious groups than I wanted to bother counting, and other than that the usual hucksters selling "magic non-stick" pots, storm windows, and all kinds of quack gadgets to "purify" your water or air or whatever. Time was when there'd be a dozen sellers of cheap toys, embroidered goods, and printed t-shirts and sweatshirts, but not any more. Many, especially the real estate dealers, were trying to coax people to give their name, address, and number to be entered into a drawing for $50 or $100 in "free" gasoline. This seems like a new angle. At one time they might have offered a pair of tickets to a ball game, or a paid weekend at some hotel in Chicago, but now they think that free fuel is going to be a big draw. Sign of the times, I suppose.

The horses were beautiful, as always, at least the ones that were still there. Many had already pulled out, the competitions being over for this year. We noticed more wool sheep breeds than in the past, which I liked. In the rabbit barn there were some English Angoras, first time I've seen those since ten years ago. There were also an increased number of English Lops, the rabbits with ears so big they ought to be able to fly. (Instead, they probably trip over their own ears all the time.) Gary was looking for runner ducks to buy, and at least got a possible lead on some.

Boone normally has had four times the amount of needlework and related crafts as are found in McHenry, but their entries are dwindling too. They did have lots of vegetables and fruits, but the baking and canning seemed reduced from past years as well.

One other thing I was acutely aware of: it's true. Americans are getting morbidly fat. I've never seen so many hugely fat people in my life. I'm no little wisp myself, but I'm talking about folks who make me look like Twiggy. I can still wear normal clothing, where these people must have to shop at specialized places to get size 60 waistlines and 4XL t-shirts. You can guess where I saw the most of them too. They were all lined up to buy things like huge gooey cinnamon buns, cream puffs, greasy donuts, and so forth. Gaaah. At this rate I predict the question of social security and medicare will become moot as the average lifespan decreases significantly from heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed the fair despite the modern trappings encroaching on the traditional stuff.
The Sycamore show is next weekend, but so is my cousin's wedding. If I do go, I'd have to leave by one pm, as the wedding is late-afternoon. I'm wondering if it's worth the tight scheduling.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask you about Sycamore. I'd like to go, but Gary can't go until Sunday. If you do go on Saturday, I'd meet you there, but if not, I'll wait and go on Sunday I guess. I didn't realize it ran for four days.

Two weeks from today is the big horse parade in Clinton Wisconsin. We missed that last year because the weather was really bad, so I hope to make it this year.

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Sunday. Let me see if I have anything planned for that day.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sunday's a tough choice. I was wrong. The Clinton parade (all horse units) takes place on Sunday at 1 pm. Obviously, can't do both, I'll have to choose.

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Well, Saturday will have to be a quick visit. I'll leave Sunday to the Clinton parade. Unfortunately, the long range forcast predicts rain on both weekend days.
We'll have to wait a few days to make a decision.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear you had a good time and saw a lot of beautiful horses. If only I had been there.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That would have been fun. Of course, as the saying goes, "If wishes were horses then zebras could fly" or something like that. ;p

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I know... it is a shame MTG card "Enchant Creature: Fly" doesn't work in real life.

It has a flying zebra in it btw. ;)

Hee!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

As you probably guessed, I'm utterly unfamiliar with current gaming stuff (who has time for it?) but I'd like to see that image. I'll have to snoop around for it some time.

One thing for sure. Flying zebras would look much better to me than flying pigs or flying monkeys. ;p

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I just read an interesting tidbit in the New Scientist a few days ago concerning obesity:

United weights of America

If current trends were to continue unchecked, all American adults would be overweight or obese by 2048, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. By 2030, half could be be [sic] clinically obese (Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/oby.2008.351).

Rather alarming when you think about it. Nationmaster also shows the USA ranking at the top when it comes to obesity, BTW, although there's a couple of others not far behind.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's a self-limiting problem. People are going to start dropping dead. Since health care is so difficult to access here except for those who are fairly wealthy, it's inevitable.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. Those who are morbidly obese might die as a result, yes - but you won't die immediately just because your BMI goes above 30.

Granted, obesity will still have an adverse effect on your health, but even if you're going to die from a heart attack at 60 due to being fat rather than living till 80, this still won't be enough to really make much of a difference as far as the problem of obesity in general is concerned.

Of course, once life expectancy starts to go down, there'll probably be some alarm bells going off somewhere, and there'll be campaigns etc. to get people to eat healthier and exercise more, though.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There was a similar campaign back in the 1960s. It failed. That one took the regimental approach though and tried to enforce exercise in schools through calisthenics and such, and giving awards for whoever could do the most pushups and such. I'm not surprised it was a failure.

More than exercise, nutrition is the issue here. Because America is literally run by large corporate interests, fighting the fast food and convenience food giants is going to be very, very difficult. Education about nutrition was once part of the school curriculum, but now it is nearly lost. The crazy fad diets and millions of lemmings who try to follow them prove how little Americans know about diet and nutrition. When the fad was "low fat" then "low in fat" labels sprang up on ridiculous things like bags of sugar. When it moved to "low cholesterol" things got worse, and you saw "zero cholesterol" on bottles of olive oil and corn oil. Then we got to carbohydrates and those were the bad thing so the "zero carbs" exploders appeared again on things like vegetable oil, butter, and cheese. Now it's "trans fats" that everyone is afraid of, so the box of breakfast cereal that's loaded with salt and sugar has a big label proclaiming "Now! Zero trans fats." Of course it never had any trans fats in it anyway. The reason this uncontrolled and ridiculous marketing works is that most Americans don't really even know what a carbohydrate or a trans fat is anyway, and have no idea which foods or ingredients might contain either one.

I keep seeing proof of amazing ignorance of food that crosses generations even into people older than myself. A few months ago there was a husband wandering around in the produce section of the market looking lost. Finally he asked the clerk who was putting out vegetables which variety of apples would be good for pies. The clerk was a woman my age. To my utter astonishment, she shrugged and said "I have no idea, I don't cook."

Just Saturday at the market a similar incident. A man was standing in front of the shelves with flour on them. He got down on his knees to peer at labels. Finally he asked a woman passing by (she was probably at least 60 years old by my estimate) what the difference was between "cake flour" and "all purpose flour" or if they were the same. Her response was a shrug and "I dunno, I don't bake." I didn't get involved in the apple incident because the truth is, you can't buy good pie apples at a supermarket here any more. But this time I had to intervene. I explained the difference in one sentence: "Cake flour is ground twice as fine as all purpose." And I showed him where it was. It usually comes in a box here rather than a sack, so he hadn't noticed it.

These incidents show how far removed Americans have become from their diet. One thing is that men are particularly ignorant because "cooking is women's work" and the second is that even women now proudly proclaim that they don't know anything about cooking where at one time they would have been embarrassed to admit it.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Well, I think the thing with fat/cholesterol/carbohydrates/trans fat/$LATEST_FAD is not so much that people aren't aware of what these things really are or whether products did or did not already use to not contain any but rather that people are too inclined to follow these fads at all - that anytime there's someone promising them an easy miracle solution, they believe it.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they believe it because they WANT to, and that this is very much not limited to food, either.

However, it certainly is quite prominent with food, and I do think that the whole "I don't cook/bake" thing is really just another facet of the same sort of instant gratification culture as well. After all, these people probably reason, why bake bread or cake or whatever when you can just buy it in a supermarket without investing any time? Why cook when you can just pop a premade meal into the microwave? And so on.

I had a similar experience myself in Wales, too, BTW - I wanted to buy some fresh yeast for baking bread at a local Tesco supermarket there, but couldn't find any, so I asked a clerk. She was quite helpful, but couldn't find any, either, so she asked another, who also didn't know, so they asked *yet* another one, who finally steered us into the baking aisle and pointed us to the dried yeast. Which I had already come across myself earlier but which I had passed on as I would've preferred to get the fresh kind.

I didn't say that and instead just thanked them, concluding they likely didn't have any fresh yeast at all, but still... it was somewhat surprising that noone there seemed to even know what fresh yeast was.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how common it is in the UK (which is another reason why I didn't say anything); certainly, in your examples, I would've been able to help neither of these folks (in particular, I wouldn't have known the difference between cake and all-purpose flour, either - I'm more used to the German flour type system, myself. *s*

Anyhow, I think there's no shame in general in not knowing how to bake, or how to cook, or how to spin or knit or whatever, although I'd expect a clerk in a grocery store to be a bit more knowledgeable when it comes to food, at least. c.c And of course, generally speaking, I'd also be happy if people wouldn't just fall for every single self-proclaimed miracle messias all the time.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You're right that there's a certain "religious mania" connected with the crazy diet fads. But it only takes the smallest comprehension of nutrition to resist that craziness, so I still conclude that people really don't know what carbohydrates, fats and proteins are. Certainly they don't know what their actual needs are, or which foods contain what. The number of younger people today who proudly proclaim that they "don't eat vegetables" is just incomprehensible to me. They are living off fat and starch, of course they get very heavy very fast.

Naturally European countries have a different way of describing flour grades and other such things. Nor was I that surprised that a man in his thirties wouldn't know anything about flour, really. What appalls me is that a woman had no idea either, and a woman old enough to have grown up, been educated, and lived in an era when ALL women were expected to learn basic cooking skills. My own mother, who always said she was a "mediocre cook," certainly knew basic details like that.

As for the produce clerk, I consider it her job to know the items she is selling. There's something really amiss there. As it happens, they keep a big reference book in a looseleaf binder there in the department, with pictures of all the varieties of fruits and vegetables and a little about how to use them, often with a simple recipe shown. She didn't even refer the customer to that for help. On the other hand, a couple of the men who work in that department are actually quite knowledgeable and probably could have helped the poor guy.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Mmmhmm. Yeah, I can't disagree with any of that.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Twenty years ago, when we still lived in Chicago and used to shop at a different chain of supermarkets, you'd never have heard that in the produce department. Fruits and vegetables were still weighed and packaged to order in that department. You selected what you wanted, and took it to the person at the scales, who weighed it, put it into a paper or plastic sack, and marked the price on it for the cashier. The people who did that task had to know every fruit and vegetable in the department, and what the current price was. They had a little booklet they could look things up in, but I never saw one do it. They were specialists in what they sold, and proud of what they knew. I got all kinds of good pointers from them on things like how to tell if a melon is ripe enough, or how to pick the best peaches or avocadoes. And they were right, too.

Now we get someone whose job it is just to keep the shelves full, with only the vaguest awareness of the actual products they are handling. The weighing is done at the cash register by an automated machine, and every apple or tomato has a stupid little sticker on it with a code number the cashier keys into the scales to get the price out. So the cashier doesn't even have to know the difference between head lettuce and cabbage, and more and more I find he or she really doesn't know it. They have become automatons who take no real interest in their work and are lost if the little sticker has fallen off the plums. I've had real problems with items that are a bit exotic in the US diet, such as fresh fennel or shallots. True, they will ask me what the thing is so they can look up the code number in their little book, but the book may list "fennel" as "anise" (which it is not) or "cilantro" as "coriander" and we reach an impasse until a manager can be called over to solve the problem.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* The times, they are a-changing... and not always for the better, either. :/

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Perhaps its just as well. *shrugs*

Hay Fatso!

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Whinnyhi.

I heard that Disneyland, Annaheim, had to close down the It's a Small World ride because the boats were sinking under the weight of the riders. It is not just the adults you know, I see very fat kids all the time and the parents think they are in good weight and health. Geez, wake up, people.

Bear and I are on strict diets. Of course I just got out of the hospital and now have a Stent installed so the metal detectors will beep. But I did quit smoking (three weeks and going) and never again. What a stupid bad habit I wish I had quit aeons ago but oh well better now than never.

We went to the tractor show in Freeport, IL, two weekends ago and I got to drive a steam locomotive. The guys realized I knew how so gave me free rein. Keep an eye on the fire and on the water level and since the old Heisler had no air brakes, the valves and throttle. Was a blast and I am TEN AGAIN!

You are such a snot nose, Quickcasey. Grin.

Steed and Imperator

Re: Hay Fatso!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Is that really true about Disneyland? Sounds like something from the Onion. ;p

I blame it all on fast food, television, and frozen microwave dinners and snacks. People have no idea about nutrition, they've completely abandoned cooking from fresh ingredients, and they do nothing except lie around watching television (or the internet.) Of course they're getting fat. The problem is bad at age 40 and above, but it's horrendous in the 20s and 30s now. That movie Wall-E had it right.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Best diet: Only eat what you can cook yourself and DO IT. Not just buy an equivalent you can microwave from shops. ;)

Re: Hay Fatso!

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Agh. Forgot this again... I should really, really see that movie. :)

Re: Hay Fatso!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That would sure be an effective diet for some people. They'd lose a lot of weight until they learned to cook.

I'll go one farther. Only eat what you can grow yourself, and DO IT! No buying food from anywhere.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[schnee.livejournal.com]

That only really works when you live in a rural area, though.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. It's amazing how much you can get out of just a square meter of earth if you work at it. Even flower pots and trays on a windowsill can yield a huge variety of edible foods.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Certainly, but I doubt you can grow enough that way to never have to buy food from anyone or anywhere else. :P

Re: Hay Fatso!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well we're being hyperbolic here anyway. Your proposal that you only eat what you cook yourself is impossible for a lot of people too because they don't have adequate cooking facilities in their living space.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Mmm. May be, but for most people, it should be possible to do that, at least. :)

Re: Hay Fatso!

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

*folds arms* Indeed. I'm too opportunistic to pass up any chance to get free food anyhow. Besides, I have more a problem of keeping up my weight than anything else. Yesterday, I weighed in at 169 pounds... on a day when I'd eaten a surprising number of fruits and veggies, too... curious.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[alexsious.livejournal.com]

it is true that they closed the ride from the weight issue. i was just there on vacation.

I know that even at 20 I am falling prey to the fattening foods.

and yes, I believe Wall-E is probably right with the fat people.

Re: Hay Fatso!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Being aware of the problem early is a big step toward avoiding it. I know you're smart enough to take care of it. ;D

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

it sounds like you've got way too many fairs for them all to survive. Hehe as to the hugely obese, there are some people I've seen with definite problems due to genetics, but the vast majority just eat too much and do too little. I mean I'm not as svelt as I should be but damn there are some huge people out there O.O

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nearly every county has its own fair here. An average sized county is about 300 to 600 square miles, with a population anywhere from 250,000 to a million or so people, at least in this part of the state. That ought to be enough to support a five day fair once a year. They do get crowds of people turning out to visit, but the traditional exhibits are dwindling away and being replaced by hucksters and second-rate entertainment.

Travel is definitely off this summer. Figures for may and June show a very large drop in the number of miles driven and the amount of gasoline used when compared to last year, so events that are close to home seem likely to prosper if properly managed.

Declines in the baking, preserving, and home arts areas just seem to validate what I've been saying for a while: people are no longer cooking or sewing. They just buy prepared products and are completely out of touch with the processes that create them. Instead, they sit in front of the television for 40-50 hours a week and stuff their faces, getting fatter and fatter.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

We have a little market on Sunday not far away from where I live, there's this lovely old lady who still makes Jam and preserves and drives her old Peugeot every week ^.^ I buy Lemon butter from her occasionally, you have to be a bit wary though, I have bought one once from a market that had something undesirable growing in it.

Maybe with petrol prices people will stay at home and learn these lost arts again.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid they're more likely to stay at home and watch television until they become irritable and start knifing or shooting each other.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Well that should reduce the number of twits :) Plus as a bonus there'll be less on the roads.