Saturday, October 3, 2009

Organic eats at the Common Ground Fair

A fabulous cocktail party Friday night (thanks David, Vanessa and Lauren!) delayed our departure last Saturday morning for the 33rd annual Common Ground Country Fair. But eventually Adam and I hit the road for Unity, a tiny college and farming town in the central part of the state.

The celebration of natural living always draws a big crowd, and the day we showed up so did 26,000 others. We all wanted to check out such things as the state's only organic farmers market, the renewable energy demonstrations and the angora bunnies and pygmy goats.

Without a doubt, the food court is the biggest attraction at the fair. The walkways along the concession booths were jam packed throughout our visit. By closing time many stands had run out of popular items.

The fair's vendors use local and organic ingredients whenever possible, and the emphasis is on freshly prepared whole foods. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free offerings abound, without forgetting fair staples including organic fried dough and locally grown french fried potatoes.

I snapped these photos of a few of the booths we sampled from:













Even with food everywhere and more than 700 talks and performances, my favorite thing about the fair continues to be finding myself surrounded by natural foodies as far as the eye can see.

8 comments:

Kate. said...

Wow, there really were a lot of people there on Saturday! I went on Sunday and while it was cold and misting, there wasn't many people there- no lines, no crowds, lots of delicious food for everyone. What a great event.

Meg Wolff said...

Being surrounded by natural foodies as far as the eye can see is amazing. My one year I went I was pleasantly surprised with the food. IT IS NOT FAIR FOOD by any stretch of the imagination. It is some of the most delicious food you can eat.

I went on a Friday. The word I used to describe it was Utopia. I had fun helping out in the common kitchen and I then got to eat with the "help."

I was pleasantly surprised at how handicapped ascessible the parking was (I was prepared for the worst!). It was excellent.

Meg Wolff said...

Miss your blogging, but enjoying your articles, Avery!

maybe said...

I'm appreciate your writing skill.Please keep on working hard.^^

Brandi said...

Just posted an Arbonne Giveaway on my blog!

Erin said...

Hi Avery,

I'm the Community Manager for Ruba (www.ruba.com), a relatively new travel guides and tour reviews site that launched in 2009. While our main focus is on travel, all of us at Ruba are big environmentalists and like to encourage others to be conscientious in their travels - which brings us to why I am reaching out to you.

I'd like to ask you for your thoughts on a blogger challenge we've recently launched to help offset the negative environmental impacts of travel by planting trees for badges placed on blogs. We're calling it the "Ponzi Tree Scheme" because we actually plant a tree not only for each badge placed on a bloggers' blog, but ALSO for each reader who sees that badge, clicks on it, and installs one on their own blog or site! Bloggers can watch their "returns" grow right there on their badge - it automatically updates based on the number of other bloggers who have come along after and planted their own trees. We'd love for you to check it out at: http://www.ruba.com/contest/ponzi and let us know what you think! If there's any way that you could put a badge up on your blog or in a blog post, we would of course be incredibly thankful.

If you have any questions about Ruba, the Ponzi Tree Scheme, or any other ways we could potentially work together, I would love to connect with you on it! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Erin

--
Erin Kiskis
Community Manager, Ruba
erin@ruba.com

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