Does it get any more Midwestern than this? The answer is “no”…and I love it! To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing, the three astronauts on that mission are being honored with life-sized sculptures made out of butter at the Ohio State Fair.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon and changed the course of history. The state of Ohio has a strong kinship with space travel: Neil Armstrong was an Ohio native and so was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Ohio also has a long history of dairy production. Combine all those factors together and you get the magnificent butter display at this year’s Ohio State Fair.
Dairy farmers donated over 2,000 pounds of butter to help create the sculptures. An artist from Cincinnati named Paul Brooke and a team of sculptors spent 400-500 hours creating the buttery tributes in a cooler set at 46 degrees to prevent the pieces from melting.
Here’s a cool time-lapse video of the butter being sculpted:
Alexander Balz, one of the artists, said, “The space suits were a real challenge, to be honest. It’s easy to sculpt things that you know. When you sculpt a human being you memorize it, so this was a challenge.”
Roughly 500,000 people are expected to have attended the State Fair in late July and early August. Here’s a video with some great footage of the display.
What a unique and cool way to honor a pivotal event in American, and human, history!
And, by the way, I’m really hoping that this butter sculpting catches on more widely because it is fabulous.
