If you’re looking for something a little healthier, you can try Caprese Salad on a Stick, though I assume that in order to affix it to the stick they have to batter and deep-fry it.

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But the reason those of us outside the state pay attention to the Iowa State Fair is of course the fact that it comes a mere six months before the Iowa caucuses. So no fewer than 22 Democratic presidential candidates will be speaking at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox, a booth set up at the fair by the newspaper, at which candidates stand on bales of hay to deliver a pitch to people they hope will attend the caucuses in February.

If that were all that went on, there wouldn’t be much wrong with it, other than the fact that the good people of the Hawkeye State shouldn’t receive all this attention and pandering they currently get every four years. Not because they’re particularly unworthy but because no one state deserves it. And the caucus system is itself an abomination that should be banished, for a multitude of reasons including the fact that it makes it extraordinarily difficult for disabled people, people with young children, and people with uncertain work schedules to vote. No wonder that, even after all the courting they receive, less than 16 percent of Iowans turned out for the 2016 caucuses. Other caucus states are no better; in Minnesota, for instance, the state that consistently has the highest general-election turnout in the country, turnout in the 2016 caucuses was a pathetic 8 percent.

But let’s return to the State Fair. Though everything presidential candidates do is taped and scrutinized by the media, at events such as this one we get into a particularly intense cycle of insincere playacting and brutal theater criticism, because candidates are being asked to enact something we call “authenticity,” which by its very nature is inevitably phony.

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I’ve ranted before (see here and here) about how pernicious the demand for authenticity is, in part because what reporters are actually judging when they praise one candidate for being authentic and savage another for being inauthentic is, ironically, nothing more than the quality of their performance. Was George W. Bush more “real” than Al Gore or John F. Kerry? No. They were all acting, hyper-aware of the cameras on them as they labored to “connect” with voters and show how regular and down-home they could be. Bush was just a better actor.

And inevitably, the moments held up from events such as the Iowa State Fair are the ones that illustrate and validate what we in the media already believed about the candidates. They weren’t newly revealing, they just offered a way for us to reinforce what we’ve been saying, or at least thinking, up until now.

So when candidates arrive at the Midway, reporters take their ordinary demand for authenticity and turn it up to 11. Is the candidate wearing properly casual clothing and shoes? Does she seem at ease perusing the booths and chatting with passersby, as though there weren’t five cameras in her face? How Middle American were the foods she chose to eat? Did she stuff them in her mouth with the proper enthusiasm?

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The media’s search for candidate authenticity through appropriate consumption of local downscale food favorites is an old story (don’t get me started on the quadrennial Philly cheesesteak spectacle), but it’s one that tells us precisely nothing about what kind of person that candidate is, let alone what sort of president they’d be. And isn’t that supposed to be the point of all this campaigning?

So if you’re tempted to judge a candidate harshly for their performance at the Iowa State Fair, remember that a performance is exactly what it is, every second of it. And consider that there might be better ways of figuring out who you should vote for.