AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The fair is a food event with a livestock show attached, and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying or has never been. Here is what was eaten.

The midway classics. The mini-donut trailer has been at this fair since 1974 and is operated by the same family in the third generation. It opens at noon and there is a line at noon. Corn dogs, cheese curds, and a lemonade stand where the man squeezes the lemons in front of you and charges accordingly. The cotton candy is the same pink it has always been. The Zipper is not food but featured in this week’s eating in ways covered elsewhere.

The local booths, which are the real reason to come early. The First Lutheran pie booth: forty-one pies a day, sold by the slice, gone by two every day, staffed by the Ladies’ Aid working two-hour shifts from a schedule Irene Bergum makes in June. The Lions’ burger stand, which has used the same seasoning since 1979 and will not discuss it. The 4-H malt stand, which is run by the kids themselves, which means the malts are inconsistent in a way people find charming and which teaches eleven teenagers a year how to make change. The Legion’s Saturday pancake feed, 6 to 10 a.m., $8, which is how the town gets its parade seats.

And the newcomer. Mateo and Sofia Martinez ran a stand by the beer garden all five days, their first county fair, and sold out every day — Thursday by eight, Friday by eight-thirty, Saturday by seven, Sunday, in the rain, by four. The line at 6 p.m. Saturday ran past the beer garden fence, which is this fair’s equivalent of the boat trailers. “We came for one day,” Mateo Martinez said Sunday, loading the truck in the rain. “Verna asked on Wednesday if we could do five. We did five.”

The chips remained for everyone. The salsa class in open-class canning was withheld for want of a qualifying entry, which is either a scheduling coincidence or the funniest thing the horticulture hall has ever done, and the superintendent declines to say which.