Insert Festival [Here]

Academy Girl and I went downtown for the 10th Annual LA Tofu Festival this weekend. Was it a hit? You betcha! From the hills of Burbank to the citrus groves of Anaheim, people all over the Southland are passing gas in record numbers! Each and every toot whispers softly…

tofu

As we went to buy our tickets, a gentleman offered us two for free. “I bought too many,” he said. “Have fun!” I couldn’t help but wonder if the man had simply gotten over excited in the frenzy at the ticket booth, or if two members of his party actually backed out of the Tofu Festival at the last minute. If this was the case… what better engagement had they found?

Fresh off the luck of free admission, we hit the scrip booth for the food merchants. Apparently to stave off the roaming gangs of flip-flop wearing thugs, no money changes hands once inside the Festival. With Burning Man in two weeks, tofu hippies will beg, rob and steal for gas money so it’s best to keep the cash in one place.

Paying for anything in scrip is a wonderful idea. By the time you’re roaming the food booths and gotten a wristband at the beer garden you’ve completely forgotten that you ever paid cash for these little tickets. While cash folds neatly into a wallet, scrip tickets are linked end to end, dangling out of pockets, strangling necks and chaining kids to their parents. Carrying scrip makes you feel rich… and you can’t wait to unload it.

“Four tickets for a teriyaki skewer?! That’s like free!” Having completely forgotten the ticket to dollar ratio, paying one ticket for a can of coke had me wishing I’d brought a suitcase to fill. “Two tickets for a tofu strawberry brulet with wine sauce? Do you think an armload of them will make it to the car?”

Tonight, as my body reels from the effects of an entire day of tofu, it suddenly strikes me as odd that there is a festival centered around something like bean curd. Then again, growing up in Kentucky, I remember quite well being subjected to the Sorghum Festival of Hawesville.

What is sorghum, you ask? Imagine boiling the bitterest of dark chocolates with a quart of low grade crude oil and you’ve got an inkling of what sorghum tastes like. This poor man’s maple syrup is put on pancakes and biscuits.

Mmm-mm yuck!

Suddenly curious, I set out to learn what other strange foods are celebrated. A quick internet search reveals a Rutabaga Festival, Watercress Festival, Yam Festival, and evidence but no link to a Chickpea Festival. It would seem that the more peculiar the food, the more zealous the eating contests and three-legged races.

We could have it way worse. We could be celebrating Melon Day in Turkmenistan under the iron-fisted rule of President Saparmurad Niyazov. The Turkmens deserve a melon ball now and then, given their dictator has renamed all the months of the year after himself and members of his family.

As I consider the very lunacy of celebrating things like brussel sprouts and jicama, further thought has it all make sense. No matter where you are in the world, people will arrange a festival around anything if it means setting up a beer garden and letting old women sell baby's breath and arts & crafts to each other.

Hmm… Kale Fest in Germany, 2007.