It’s a delightful quirk of human nature, the desire to turn just about any activity into a contest.
So it is that people train in hopes of eating more hot dogs, pies, ears of corn and other comestibles than their rivals. People compete to see who can dance the longest before falling down, do without sleep the longest, make the ugliest face, throw a frying pan the farthest or carry their wives through a mudhole faster than any other husband.
There are contests to complete a trail in record time or in extraordinary fashion. Bagging all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers, a contest which has many variants, is a Granite State standard. We’re waiting to hear about the first person who did it while playing an accordion. But such competitions are for the skilled and the fit, which rules out most people.
For a contest everyone of every age can do, we suggest fair-bagging.
The oldest of the state’s agricultural fairs have been held for nearly a century and a half, with the Rochester and Deerfield fairs arguably the state’s oldest gatherings.
The fairs, including the upcoming Hopkinton State Fair, have struggled financially in the internet age. Fair-bagging, and the growing focus on locally grown, farm-to-table fare, could help to preserve a venerable New England tradition. Fairs, whose history dates back to biblical times, are an opportunity to chat with people who wear bib overalls as practical work clothes and not a fashion statement.
They offer the chance, with the added bait of midway carnival rides and thrill-a-minute entertainment, to get children to lift their faces from their screens and see what food looks, feels and smells like before it’s wrapped in plastic. They’ll get to see pumpkins that weigh more than some cars and get the dose of reality that comes with watching a sow suckle a dozen or more piglets.
Fair-bagging contestants should train by eating small quantities of fried dough on a regular basis, lest they be felled by a single serving of fair fare.
The first fair held in America, according to the International Association of Fairs and Expositions, was organized by Elkanah Watson, a farmer who came to be known as the father of the nation’s agricultural fairs, in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1811. Some 2,000 are now held annually.
The fairs offer entertainment that would be hard to find anywhere else. The Hopkinton Fair’s demolition derby is better than any video game. Fairs offer weight pulls by horses, oxen, trucks, tractors and riding lawnmowers, an alpaca obstacle course, woodsmen’s contests, sheepdog herding and sheep shearing, livestock judging, blue-ribbon pickles, a school bus derby and car soccer.
New Hampshire’s fair season started more than a month ago but there’s still time to bag quite a few and complete the list next year. New Hampshire Magazine (nhmagazine.com/nhfairs) is among the organizations that list fair schedules, so start your fair-bagging next week at the Lancaster Fair, which opens Thursday, Aug. 29. You have just a week to train. Good luck.