And a Grand Old Lady she is, probably because of all the foods that abound within the burgeoning fair. It’s the main reason I went this year! :)

To be more precise, I wanted to try the deep-fried butter being sold for the first time. Possibly the last. We’ll see where the coronary takes us. Yeah, you read that right: deep-fried butter. No tricky wording or false advertising here – you get four balls of chilled butter on the ends of toothpicks, coated in batter, plunged into hot oil for a few seconds, and drizzled with a variety of sweet sauces.

If your arteries don’t harden just looking at that then you’re not looking hard enough!

So what does deep-fried butter taste like? Fucking good.

The butter has a chance to fully melt into the surrounding batter by the time you eat it, so what you end up with is a buttery, ball-shaped puff of deep-fried batter. Yeah, not bad at all.

The chocolate covered bacon I can’t vouch for simply because I didn’t have any – maybe next year. Same goes for the deep-fried Mars / Twinkie bars; I have a lard limit and I still had to try Tiny Tom’s Donuts.

People are always a little shocked when I tell them I’ve never tried Tiny Tom’s – the place has been a CNE institution since anyone can remember and almost everyone has some sort of warm and fuzzy memory associated with the miniature treats.

And now I finally understand what makes them so popular.

The doughnut-making machines squirt little rings of batter into hot oil which is kept moving in an outward spiral. During their trip through the wash, the doughnuts have enough time to properly cook before plunking out onto a moving conveyor belt which ends right at the cash register. The bag they hand you has cooled just enough to keep you from getting scalded. Mmmm.

Funnel Cakes (first photo above), can be found just about anywhere there are carnies. They’re a nest of deep-fried dough covered with (one of more of), ice cream, preserved strawberries, icing sugar, apple goop, and honey. They’re called funnel cakes because the batter is squeezed into the hot oil out of a funnel.

Batter and hot oil; a certain theme begins to emerge after a while, doesn’t it? I believe you could deep-fry dog crap and still sell it on a stick. There’s something about the process that makes all food and food-like items good.

Of course, there are exceptions.

Note, however, that the blocks of ice cream must still be buttressed by waffles – another buttery batter. And if it’s absolutely necessary that oil / butter / fat and batter be kept out of the concoction, it should still have copious amounts of sugar.

Even simple things like popcorn are typically swimming in congealed cow fat … and to offset the lack of sugar, salt to wrest what little effort is left out of your overwrought taste buds.

One of the main reasons I find the CNE so quaint is that mixed among all these junky / junkie foods are antique delicacies that were probably the shit back when the Ex was still more or less an agricultural exhibition (with a fun fair attached).

I would expect to find old-timers lined up at these concession stands, folks for whom the penchant for liver ‘n onions has given way to dangerous culinary leanings these few days out of the year; yet it’s not unusual to find kids lined up for a smidgen of bratwurst or a slathering of Canadian back bacon.

These days, people I know who attend the CNE spend most of their time in the Food Building, a large honeycomb of food shops serving anything from Swiss Chalet to Khlav Khalash. It used to be about the rides and the farm animals, now it’s all about getting your gourmand on.

Gourmand is probably a strong word. It implies that there’s some sort of hoity-toity food snobbery going on, kinda hard to accomplish when you’re squatting down over any available hunk of grass to scarf down your meal. Gluttony is, perhaps, more accurate.

Plus, having food in your belly isn’t necessarily a fait accompli if one intends to engage in any other activity the CNE has to offer.

Continued in next part…

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I mean, what if that were my own potbellied pig out there?

Okay, so pig is the wrong word; let’s say gourmand. — Would I be able to eat him?

Look, have no illusions here; I’m fairly certain that Oliver would be feasting on my bloated corpse the moment I breathed my last. He might do so sadly, with a tear in his eye, but still manage to splatter bits of my entrails all over the kitchen floor. He is, after all, a meat eater. A very messy one. He’s just built that way.

So are we…kind of. We can do quite well on a non-meat diet and people have been proving that for quite some time. Let’s face it: meat eaters, of which I am one, really have no good excuse except maybe to say that it’s tasty.

I can’t rightly say don’t eat meat, just maybe not so much. And even less baby animals; that just doesn’t seem right, does it? While we’re at it, why not choose meat from an animal that has had a decent life? Of course you pay more for that, and that’s because it really should be a premium: Eat it less and savour it more. Veggies are, pound for pound, dirt cheap anyway, even if you buy organic which simply means your food’s been exposed to less crap. Save money, potentially more healthy, and happier creatures. I fail to see the downside.

Those who will tell you free-run, organic whatever tastes better are, for the most part, sadly deluded. The non-organic fruit tastes as good as the organic, the free-run don’t run on the butter better than the no-free-run — now three times fast.

There is this one milk that, to me, seems less gamey and more creamy than other local brands, but aside from that I wouldn’t recommend buying these things for improved flavour. Some, like fruit, will actually go bad quicker than the non-organic versions, but that’s probably because bacteria aren’t repelled by it.

Ultimately, it seems like it’s not a bad thing to be a bit more mindful of where our food comes from, even if just for ourselves. Making food more precious makes it taste better somehow, despite what I’ve just stated in the previous paragraph. It’s the difference between a single orange and a crate-full. You’ll never eat the whole crate before they rot so you can, nay must, be wasteful. You could fling armfulls at people for fun and still have a glass of freshly squeezed. A single orange, though, would be peeled so much more carefully, coquettishly even. And long after the orange was gone, the rending peel would remind your of the golden days of yesteryear, when you still had your orange.

I was going to start this paragraph with “But I digest…“, but after some reflection I came to the conclusion that I can’t stomach that kind of humour. I’ll just end by reminding you of that orange. Remember that orange? How it looked up at you with those sad, teary eyes? Remember?!

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