When you’re 40 feet in the air above the North Carolina State Fair, with your feet dangling over unsuspecting humans, food trucks, and whirling rides below, it’s not a great time to suddenly remember that you’re afraid of heights.
Especially not when you have a spoon in one hand and a cup of Lebanese-style ice cream in the other — creamy, gooey-stretchy, and topped with pistachios and extra-stiff cotton candy. As my stomach gave a warning lurch, I closed my eyes, clung to the thin metal bar that stood between me and potential disaster below, and reluctantly put my spoon back in the cup. I’d have to wait for the State Fair Flyer to deliver me back to terra firma before I risked another bite.
A fairgrounds regular might have known better. But that’s why I was there — I’m the furthest thing from being an NC State Fair veteran. In more than 30 years covering food events all over the state, I’ve judged countless contests — barbecue to biscuits to municipal drinking water. I’ve picked grapes at the Biltmore Estate winery and apples on hilltops all over western North Carolina. I’ve coaxed soft-shell crabs out of their shells on the coast and watched milk turn into cheese pretty much everywhere there are pastures.
But eat my way through the State Fair? Not once. It wasn’t my territory. I spent my work decades at The Charlotte Observer, nearly 170 miles from the State Fairgrounds. My compatriot Andrea Weigl, over at The News & Observer in Raleigh, got the yearly assignment to revel in funnel cakes and deep-fried monstrosities…