Echo and Erica, though goats, had a certain stylish insouciance. They spent their days in our Iowa City backyard, snacking on organic alfalfa and freshly milled goat granola. In the mornings, despite my determined efforts, they contributed no more than a modest splash of milk, and they steadfastly declined to improve their contrary comportment. Afternoons, the pair would step out of their shed, strike a distracted pose, and bellow, causing one neighbor to file suit and another to attempt to assassinate Erica. Not the sort of 4-H project to make it to the big time. So it wasn't until last summer (long past my girlish goat days) that I finally got to the Iowa State Fair, with its neon swirl of carny rides, its snappy tractors, and its corn dog overload, all under the beatific gaze of the Butter Cow.
  

The first Iowa State Fair, in 1854, scandalized thousands with women's horseback riding. Since then the event has gotten bigger—nearly 950,000 people milled around the massive fairgrounds, on the east side of Des Moines, last summer—and only a little snazzier. At the Iowa State Fair, you can watch toddlers in tutus shake their rumps to "Sugar, Sugar". You can lounge under a cloud of exhaust while guys in jumpsuits drive circles in the dirt. But all that, I soon learned, would be missing the point. The Iowa State Fair is not about entertainment. It's about competition. Here, once a year, just as crunch time in the agribiz ends, farmers dust off their feed caps, housewives close up their kitchens, salesmen flick on the call-forwarding, and they all head for the fairgrounds—where, in the name of fun, they do precisely what they did at home: Farmers compare crops, housewives compare jellies, business guys hawk cellular phones. The difference is that here, anyone can vie for a ribbon.

I get my first taste of the Fair at night, parking in a rutted field. As I walk toward the gates, I can see the double-barreled Ferris wheel arc across the sky through the steamy dark. Inside, I follow throngs of fairgoers (74,239 that day) roving the grounds in bleary, cheery hordes. At this hour, the Fair is carnival, festival, and feast. Grown-ups walk by clutching steins of beer and the bulky, two-handed, foil-wrapped sandwich extravaganzas called Gizmos and grinders. Kids lug turkey legs like massive meaty ice cream cones. Smoked off-site and crisped on grills all over the fairgrounds, the legs offer portability, a good pound of gnawing, and a certain retro appeal. "Like a caveman," says concessionaire Debbie Hardenbrook, as someone passes by holding one. (While she credits beef- and pork-shy health nuts for the booming turkey business, smoking insures that the legs taste an awful lot like Iowa's favorite dish: ham.) Debbie's fair-food lineage dates back to 1913, when her grandmother ran a dining hall in the Cattle Barn. "People don't go for full meals any more," she says. "They want something to grab and keep walking with."
  

Back in 1946, fresh out of the service, Carl Cardamon and a buddy set up a Carl & Ted's Dining Hall, offering Swiss steak, chicken and noodles, fish, and meat loaf—all at once, every meal. Today Carl hawks the Gizmo sandwich—a glorified sloppy Joe, similar to the tactlessly named Jennie's Original Guinea Grinder, the competing sandwich that has, for the past 24 years, been served about six feet away. "If you're sure of yourself and sure of your sandwich," sniffs Jennie's daughter, JoAnne Sample, "there's no competition."

Revelers on the fairgrounds cruise a kind of make-believe town that hasn't changed much since Phil Stong's 1932 novel State Fair (on which a musical and three movies have been based). Prize hogs fill the pungent Swine Barn; the pink-nosed Largest Horse ignores gapers outside the Horse Barn; row after row of shucked corn primps in the Agriculture Building. While the permanent architecture—graceful turn-of-the-century brick pavilions—is under landmark protection, the temporary structures have their own distinct style: Each plain white box food stand pops open, sprouting a neon pagoda here, a wooden clog there, and each posts a charmingly concise menu to match. At Florrie's Funnel Cakes, for instance, hungry fairgoers have a choice of "Funnel Cakes. Soft drinks. Coffee." Funnel cakes, a kind of fried dough with Pennsylvania Dutch roots, are made with a more free-spirited exuberance than their tidy doughnut cousins. A stream of sweet eggy batter plummets into the deep fryer in a wild tangle, guided only by a funnel and the whim of a teenage chef. "You make designs in it," explains lifelong funnel-cake expert Jada Blewer, 18. "Sometimes you'll put your initials in it."
  

But funnel cakes, Gizmos, and grinders are merely convenience foods. For 11 days of horseshoe-pitching, hog-calling, and tractor-pulling, you need a portable feast. This is where the Fair's most distinctive culinary contribution, the Stick, comes in: At the Iowa State Fair, you can have ice cream (dipped in chocolate, then nuts) on a stick. Pretzels on a stick. Caramel apples on a stick. Cheese, turkey, chicken, sausage, or bologna on a stick. Pickles on a stick. The Fair's true gastronomic claim to fame, though, is the corn dog—a dough-dipped crisp-fried hot dog on a stick. "The stick thing is just easiest," says corn dog heiress Helen Little, whose father, Melvin P. Little, brought the corn dog to the Iowa State Fair in 1956. As a teenager, Helen was pressed into shouting out its theme song: "Get your educated pronto pup! Rides a stick, swims in grease, and wears an overcoat. You bite it, it won't bite you!" (Barking is frowned upon at today's cleaned-up Fair.) The corn dog has become the very symbol of the Fair's pork-centered, corn-crusted, deep-fried soul. "Corn dog," says longtime fairgoer Arlene Eckhart, "is the Fair." Arlene comes here every year with her mother and three sisters. "We start eating when we get inside the gate, and we eat all the way through." Their matching T-shirts proclaim, "Breakfast, lunch, and dinner." With their bright red lipstick, black shorts, and bobby socks, they suggest some food-themed girl group.