Pickle Pizza
When I was assigned the pickle trend beat at the State Fair this year, I took it seriously. I’m a pickle guy—that’s why I volunteered—so I compiled a list of pickle-ish things to track down at the Fair on my first chance to go, which would be that first Saturday. But as my family entered the swine barn end of the Fairgrounds that morning, I was immediately confronted by the throwback insanity of the Fair’s food lines. Oh, we are back, baby!
But I realized this wasn’t going to be a calm cross-off-the-checklist day, this was going to be a fit-in-where-we-get-in day, and that meant visiting pickle places with curiously short lines. Like the Pickle Barrel Sirloin Tips stand, where I was immediately informed that the Pickle Barrel hasn’t actually offered pickles for generations, probably since the last time pickles were having a cultural moment. A friendly Pickle Barrel nepo baby explained that it was his grandfather who realized that with the kind of volume they were dealing with, their pickle sales were cutting into their sirloin tip sales, so in order to maximize profit, they decided to completely drop them from their menu, if not from their big sign (the power of the pickle!).
Monroe eating a pickle
And the lines for everything else were truly insane, especially for the stands participating in this year’s pickle craze—the pickle pizza line alone threatened to cut my entire fair experience in half. In order to fend off despair, to feel like I was at least moving my story down the field incrementally, I bought a big pickle from the Perfect Pickle to share with my 18-month-old son. And the way he viciously crunched into it was shocking, and, of course, adorable. He can be sensitive about sour foods—scrunching up his little face when he tries pineapple, etc.—but he was clearly enraptured by the mild, salty sourness of the big pickle. This is the push-pull the pickle holds on the palate—desire overcoming revulsion in a weird dance that ends up determining your individual taste level. Will he be a pickle person? Is he already? So apart from this primal insight, I was forced to bag it and regroup.
The rest of my week was packed with writing and reporting, but I planned to return to the Fair on Wednesday in order to re-interview this rapper, Yung Gravy, who’s become a phenomenon by repackaging old and new soul hits—like Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”—and rapping funny lyrics about hitting on your mom over them. Critics hate him, but I don’t think that’s as interesting as wondering how he’s convinced so many people to love him, so I interviewed him for the September issue of the magazine last month (on newsstands now!), and I planned to meet up with him to make a short video to promote our print Q&A, right before his afternoon soundcheck ahead of his big Grandstand show that night. I did have another commitment that evening: I was planning on attending the premiere of Dan Buettner’s new Netflix show, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, a new four-episode documentary distilling Buettner’s lifelong investigation into why people in certain areas of the world have a greater chance to outlive people in other parts of the world. But I figured after the premiere, I could rush back to the Fair that night to catch Gravy’s set and maybe even knock a couple more pickle things off my list on the way out.
Pickle Paleta
So when I came back Wednesday afternoon, it was during that turnover time when the daytime people are leaving and the nighttime people are arriving, and the lines were much more reasonable. I bought the new pickle fries at Mike’s Hamburgers (thumbs up), and the fill pickle cheese curd tacos at Richie’s Cheese Curd Tacos (thumbs down) and the La Michocana Rose pickle paleta at Hamline Dining Hall (thumbs up), and I even ran my iPhone’s stopwatch while I stood in line for the pickle pizza at Rick’s Pizza (18:37, not bad—and even more tolerable because I unintentionally timed it to coincide with the daily Fair parade). Honestly, I was pickled out after that first dill pickle cheese curd taco, though the pickle paleta revived me enough to keep on task. But then I had to dash backstage at the Grandstand to create some Yung Gravy content, making it out in time to rush over to join my wife at St. Anthony Main’s theater to walk the blue carpet before Buettner’s Blue Zones premiere.
I have to admit to some gustatory whiplash here—so quickly transitioning from the State Fair to this premiere for Buettner’s documentary on longevity, and then back to the State Fair. Buettner’s a very healthy dude, obviously. At the age of 63, he still looks like a tanned, J.Crew catalog model, but the spread at his event wasn’t all twigs and leaves: there was wine and beer with some batched cocktails, along with spiced nuts and glazed tofu skewers, and wholegrain marinated mushroom sandwiches. Honestly, it was exactly the change of pace my insides needed after all the fried pickle stuff in the afternoon.
Then we all went into the theater to watch the show, and pretty early on, there was a segment where Buettner explains that the Food and Drug Administration recommends that Americans eat 2,000 calories a day, but on average, we end up consuming 3600 calories a day. So he interviewed Marion Nestle, a professor of food studies and public health at New York University, to ask her why we’re overeating so much that 73% of us are obese and overweight. Nestle brought it all back to Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford, whose goal was to produce more food in order to feed the entire world. And he was successful—Butz goosed farmers into growing more food, and so much food that from the years 1980 to 2000, the number of calories in the food supply went up from 3,200 per person per day to 4,000. And as Nestle points out, “the food industry had to sell that!” So in an environment where there’s 4,000 calories a day, you have to get people to eat more in general. Which brings me to my own sour-ass point: Getting us to eat more stuff is the entire purpose of the Minnesota State Fair.
For more than 160 years, the State Fair has been a massive convention of industrial food technology, food marketing, and yes, an incubator of food fads, like this year’s run on pickle foods. By the time I got back to the Fair to see Yung Gravy rickrolling 9,000 kids with his hit “Betty (Get Money)” his interpolation of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” it was hard not to feel kind of like the latest rube trying to play a clearly fixed game of chance on the Midway.
But by the next morning, I didn’t want to come off like the Star Tribune, who called Gravy’s set “the dumbest Grandstand performance I’ve had to review since G-Eazy.” Or the Pioneer Press, who wrote, "In some ways, Yung Gravy came off as an unintentional parody of hip-hop." I didn’t want to be another salty critic pointing out that SoundCloud rap like Gravy’s isn’t that nutritious for you, and your calories would be better spent listening to Pearl Jam or something, because who wants to be a sourpuss, right? Especially when everybody else at the circus is having the time of their lives. But a sour pickle on the other, hand: well, everybody knows a pickle that’s been sliced and dredged in batter before being deep fried, or a pickle that’s been sliced to top a rich, cheesy pizza, is going to be delicious, because the sourness of the pickle cuts against the sweetness of the crust and the creaminess of the fat. It’s crunchy and salty and sweet, and the sourness actually helps you to consume more stuff. But we shouldn’t think of this as some conspiracy, that we’re all being tricked into listening to Rick Astley and to eat fried foods without realizing it. We should just realize that SoundCloud rap and fried foods are fun, and that the reason that there’s a pickle fad this year is because the food industry has to keep thinking of novel way to get us to eat more. We just have to realize that we can’t possibly listen to Yung Gravy or eat fried pickles all the time, only sometimes, a few times a year maybe, you know, as a treat. So don’t let the pickle craze sour you on the Fair; instead let its sourness brace you: let all these pickles wake you up.
