Fair-ly Obvious
It’s no big secret that America has a problem with obesity. Living in the Southern California bubble, however, it can sometimes be easy to forget – it seems that every other corner has a health foods store or yoga studio (with the alternate corners hosting, of course, a Starbucks). Healthy lifestyle options abound, and with the influence of the film industry and media in general, it seems that most people around here make use of them. It’s easy to overlook the fact that not all of the country has the same mindset.
Orange County gets a gigantic dose of this ‘other’ mindset every July at the OC Fair. Though I’ve been in So Cal for several years now, I just made my first visit to the Fair this week. I was there primarily for a concert, but decided to have dinner while I was there. When in Rome , right?
Let me start with the main course. We visited a vendor named Juicy’s, where they promised “we wouldn’t leave hungry.” Indeed. Here’s a picture of the storefront and my $8 hot sausage:
That’s a full sized dinner plate it’s sitting on. At this booth, they also have hot dogs of the same dimensions, and a $10 corn dog made of TWO of these outsized sausages. Unreal. But the best was yet to come.
I had heard rumors about some of the dessert offerings at the Fair – not just your average cotton candy and caramel corn selections, apparently. Well, seeing is believing:
The delicacy on the left is a deep-fried Snickers bar. One bite of this diabetes-on-a-stick was enough to send you running for a water fountain. On the right, Kristy samples a serving of deep-fried Oreos. Yes, we have the technology to make junk food even junkier. But what I found next boggled the mind even further.
We, as a society, haven’t yet found the cure for cancer, but what we can do is deep fry soft drinks:
Ladies and gentlemen, deep-fried Coke. This concoction is somehow made by thickening cola syrup with waffle batter and dumping it in the fryer. I was astounded that it actually does taste like flat, chewy Coke.
Maybe I’ll see it offered at aid stations in an upcoming race.
