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On Monday, a photo of the Illinois State Fair Butter Cow — that is, a cow presented as “sculpted out of butter” — went viral after the shocking revelation that it’s a wire-and-steel-mesh frame sculpted in the likeness of a cow that has simply been covered in slabs of yellow spread.
I got serious beef with this, but I will admit that I accidentally shared this image with the caption that it’s from the Iowa State Fair, which has been in the news a lot lately with the GOP presidential primary and the fact that the two overlap. I was wrong. My apologies, Iowa. To err is bovine.
But I will not apologize for The Truth being accidentally revealed about the butter cow at the Iowa State Fair, which, it turns out, is also a wire-and-steel-mesh frame covered in “600 lbs. of low moisture, pure cream Iowa butter,” according to the Iowa State Fair website!
So, what is going on here? Is nothing sacred? Apparently, most of us have just been walking around under the assumption that when our fellow Americans tell us they carved a statue of a cow out of butter, by god, they’re telling us the truth. We salute the flag, and we give thanks for bovine providence.
Well, no more. I have looked into all these claims of “butter cows” to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s udderly shameless.
First, I looked into the scope of state fairs. Three states (Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire) have no singular state fairs but rather various agricultural fairs, which was the original purpose of the state fair, anyway, so I’m counting these. Rhode Island does not have an event of these sizes, per se, but does host smaller fairs.
Interestingly, Massachusetts annually hosts The Big E (Eastern States Exposition) in Springfield, which is intended to be more of a regional fair for the New England states, including the four aforementioned. So, based on how you look at it, you could say every state has a state-fair-of-sorts.
The District of Columbia—which should absolutely be a state if we lived in a just world—also hosts a state fair annually.
Additionally, while the U.S. territories—American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands—do not have “state fairs” in the sense of large primarily-livestock-and-agricultural gatherings, they do each have commensurate, popular fairs and/or festivals.
For example, Puerto Rico hosts the San Sebastian Street Festival in Old San Juan, the U.S. Virgin Islands host Carnival, and Guam hosts the Guam Micronesia Island Fair.
Also: the Navajo Nation annually hosts the Navajo Nation Fair in Arizona, drawing more than 100,000 visitors in 2016, larger than some state fairs.
All told, there are close to a hundred big fairs of various varieties in the United States, and many states have multiple fairs beyond their primary state fair. Pennsylvania, alone, has five. Talk about really milking this concept.
But there are only four state fairs that regularly feature a butter cow sculpture: Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Although Iowa’s butter cow sculpture is probably the most legen-dairy, Ohio was the first to do it in 1903, eight years before Iowa.
All four use a similar process: a frame of various materials, mostly wire-and-steel mesh, covered in layers of sculpted butter. Of course, the more you think about it, the more this makes sense. We’re usually talking 600-800 lbs. of butter with the frame, alone, so a solid butter heffer would probably be cowed by the laws of physics.
The Minnesota State Fair, in my humble opinion, is where things get a lot more interesting. They annually crown the “Princess Kay of the Milky Way” among ten young women finalists, each of whom has a likeness of their head sculpted, one per day, by famed butter sculptor Lisa Christensen.
Christensen is said to be the only butter sculptor whom regularly works with live models, and the process usually takes between six and eight hours. The sculpted heads are displayed in a walk-in, refrigerated area over the duration of the fair.
The winning young woman is crowned Princess Kay the day before the beginning of the fair, and she receives a scholarship and serves as the ambassador for the Minnesota dairy industry for a one-year term. Shout-out to incumbent Rachel Rynda, whose term cow-incidentally ends this evening when the 70th Princess Kay of the Milky Way is due to be crowned.
There are no frames or any other non-butter materials used by Christensen when carving these likenesses, just ~90 pounds of butter and pure instinct. Even the thought of using a frame probably makes her curdle.
All that said, as much as I joke, carving the likeness of a cow’s body shell takes remarkable talent, even if it is margarinally less than the full-butter cow most of us perceived.
And to be fair, none of these sculptors claim to be shaping livestock fully out of butter. All are quite transparent about their process. So, don’t have a cow about it.
I say “well done” to all you sculptors out there; when it comes to these cows, you butter believe I affirm all of them.
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Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but it’s also how my bills! So, please do kindly consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $250.
An Investigation Into Butter Cows