It’s a miracle. A recipe combines boring flour, bitter cocoa, and something called baking soda, with an egg just like the ones we had for breakfast, a few other banal things, and the juice of a couple of lemons. Yet when all is said and done, from these base ingredients a seven-year-old has made chocolate cupcakes with pink lemonade icing. The baker is beaming, feeling as if she’s accomplished a feat to rival Saint Honoré transforming a wooden baker’s peel into a blackberry tree.
Her plan was hatched a year ago at the county fair after touring the dairy barn and eating ice cream. The family had ventured into the Home Arts Building at the fairgrounds seeking the Sacrament of Air Conditioning. The space was like an old fashion museum, exhibits on stacked from just above the floor to a shelf so high that little kids needed a boost. My daughter had stared up and down the rows upon rows of pies (blueberry, apple, sweet potato, lemon meringue, chocolate cream, pecan), cakes (pound, yellow, carrot, princess, hummingbird, red velvet), and cupcakes beyond number.
She happened upon a row that she recognized instantly as the work of other children. There were cakes decorated like unicorns. There was a rabbit with coconut fur. Her eyes had widened at all of the pink. And there were ribbons. Blue ones for first place. Red ones for second. Something called “Honorable Mention”. Those got white ribbons, but still. She resolved that she had to enter something next year and planned and practiced.
Over the months that followed, I talked recipes and ingredients with her.
We considered what flavors went well together, but she made all of the decisions. We talked about what each of the ingredients was for, where it came from, and how it was made. We discussed how we could use raspberry preserve instead of food coloring to get the pink color she wanted for the icing. I reorganized the recipe she had selected into a sequence that would be easier to follow, and inserted reminders like, “If you forget which one the teaspoon is, ask Dad to remind you” and “Turn off the stand mixer” every time that step was called for. But, she followed every instruction, measured and mixed everything, and even cut and juiced the lemons.
The last hurdle to entering the cupcakes is the fair catalog, 234 pages describing rules for entering everything from goats to gateaux. It’s biblical in its scope, its use of language, its seemingly intentionally arcane litanies of musts and must-nots. Much like the Bible, the fair catalog’s cultural context is lost to me, and I read carefully, reason, and finally take a leap of faith that I have understood. At last, I feel reasonably confident in my exegesis, and with much consultation with my wife conclude that we must arrange exactly six of her completed cupcakes on a sheet of white cardboard for entry along with a copy of her recipe, though not on a three by five card. It is not ours to question the fair.
The Rite of the Cupcake reveals that while it’s not immediately obvious, the county fair is all about food and where it comes from. The blinking lights, whirling things, hawkers hawking, and fried everything of the midway would eclipse what’s on the other half of the fairgrounds if you didn’t know to look for it. Comparatively subdued, the eastern half of the fairgrounds contains a neat series of raised barns, pavilions, and exhibit halls.
You can wander through and watch someone feeding his cows. You see hogs next to a hand-painted diagram that labels where the items you find in the grocery store appear on the animal. A 12-year-old girl will happily explain to you how to milk a goat and how and why the milk is pasteurized, and elsewhere, another will talk matter-of-factly about the egg business or the husbandry of rabbits.
In this pen, there are Shropshire sheep, and in that one, Hampshires. There are others in covers, which still somehow look funny to me every time. In a pen adjacent to the doorway, there are rubber boots, a pitchfork, and three folding chairs, each occupied by a person in blue jeans sweating and resting. For the benefit of kids who think food comes from boxes in the kitchen, or perhaps from the excessively air-conditioned aisles of a grocery store, this stall might as well be labeled, “Farmers”.
The kinds of midsize and small farms these producers represent are important.
Continuing the tradition and business of agriculture at this scale increases resilience in the food system. Having more suppliers in the system works against monopoly and monocropping, and can fill gaps when some suppliers fail. Maintaining farms close to the places where people live in large numbers helps meet needs for green space, which offer psychological and health benefits to people. Integrating farms into the local landscape also creates a green infrastructure to manage stormwater, reducing the potential for flooding in and around urban areas. At the same time, local farms improve peoples’ connection with food, offering opportunities to interact directly with the producer, pick their own fruit, and eat varieties of produce suited to local tastes or the expertise of growers.
Times are tough for many small and midsize farms.
Farm revenues began rising in 2009 and peaked in 2013, then fell sharply for years. Revenues have stagnated at about the same levels as the early-to-mid-2000s. Half a dozen companies control the majority of crop inputs – seed, fertilizers, and pesticides – and four companies control a majority of the meatpacking industry.
Consumers have several options to support local farms. For more than two decades, community supported agriculture groups have enabled consumers to buy shares of local produce. Options are becoming increasingly flexible, with some CSA groups offering partial shares and allowing for add-ons like late fall produce. Likewise, farmers markets provide seasonal produce in an increasing number of communities, with some markets branching into value-added products, like locally produced craft beer or spirits. While dairies don’t yet have a national aggregator, there are many local dairies, like Maryland’s South Mountain Creamery, that offer weekly deliveries of milk, cream, and even ice cream.
A few days later, my family heads back to the fairgrounds. The midway is long gone, having packed itself up overnight and gone to the next fair. We make our way to the exhibit halls to pick up entries and ribbons. My daughter tries to hide her glee about her blue ribbon, though every single fair volunteer we encounter offers genuinely excited congratulations. At our last stop to sign for our ribbons, the woman at the table effusively invites my daughter to enter again next year and hands us the last hardcopy of the fair catalog.
She’s thinking about making something with local berries, but she has a year to work out the details.
Photo Credit: Brittney Burnett/Unsplash