How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest | Hacker News Reader

How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest

smithsonianmag.com

17 pointsnoleary24 comments

Intelligent Extraterrestrial Being: "So get this: I swung by that planet next to Sol, right? And the Bipedalians apparently like enslave a ton of bovine en masse and take up most of their land to feed them, right? And they breed and eat their body fluids and muscles or whatever. Okay, but then I saw they like took the body fluids they nurture their offspring with—the bovine's fluid for the bovine's offspring not their own—, fed it to a bunch of smaller creatures until it became semi-firm, and then molded the hardened fluids into a scale replica of the bovine's likeness and put it in a transparent sarcophagus. I'm serious, it's wild. It's been there for years and people put on a big festival around it..."

Reminds me of: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

"They're made out of meat"

> Because the butter used for the Iowa State Fair's cow sculpture is recycled for many years, the cooler where it's made has a funky smell that most fairgoers would never know about on the other side of the display glass.

The fact that they recycle the butter for about a decade is reassuring though. A full cow worth of butter yearly just sounds wasteful, but this approach scales that back to a tenth of a cow.

One cow is not so bad in comparison to the erstwhile EU butter mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_mountain

Or the US cheese caverns: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/05/cheese-caves-missouri/, which also, as of 2022, contain about an Ford-class aircraft carrier and a half of butter.

It's 600 pounds of butter. US per capita consumption is about 6.5 pounds per year.

The definition of caring about it because you can see it.

Say $5/lb (retail price, surely they don't pay this): $3000 for 600lb.

Using cost as a proxy for the intrinsic value of things, I think just the glass in a cow-sized display case will be more than that, let alone with a refrigeration system built into it.

And if we want to go further, think of the embedded costs of the building it's in, and then include staffing, energy, maintenance, etc that's being "burned" by this exhibit!

I’m honestly surprised they reuse it. The amounts of butter you see on even a smaller dairy farm is tremendous.

Probably a PR thing because concerned citizens keep asking about it.

> When twins Hannah and Grace Pratt moved out of their tiny dorm room at the University of Northern Iowa and into their “adult” apartment, the mini-fridge they no longer needed gave their mother, Sarah, an opportunity: an extra place to store her art.

Is there a name for this kind of narrative "cold open" where you plonk a tangential detail of the article in the first paragraph, and only start the article properly in the next one?

My teacher would have crossed it out with "irrelevant, get to the point" in the margin! The irony of this being off the main topic of the article is not lost on me, but I'll drag it back into HN territory by saying "something something AI training data".

There’s a journalism school somewhere teaching these “writing tricks” and I hate it with a passion.

The other one is the “hot start” with a paragraph that is interesting and then it suddenly diverts to pages of useless backstory you don’t care about, and doesn’t resume for ages.

When did it become "hot start" instead of "in medias?"

That is.. pretty gross.

Is the whole mass supported on slender legs made of butter, or is there a metal "skeleton" encased in it?

It contains an armature made of wire

> Sarah has taken great pride in continuing Lyon’s legacy. She’s carved the cow so many times that she can almost sculpt from muscle memory. She starts with an armature, the wire frame that holds it in place, and then slowly shapes 600 pounds of Iowa butter into a 5½-foot-high and 8-foot-long cow over the course of a few days.

Ugh

Disgusting and cruel.

Disgusting I could see but "cruel" I don't understand...its not like it is a real cow encased in butter.

Dairy farming is pretty brutal to the cows, as is all industrial-scale animal husbandry.

(I'm not vegan, I eat dairy. It is what it is.)

The dairy lobby lied and told people milk is healthy. Milk is a dessert

Thank your mother.

Half of your HN comment history is about veganism.

Aren't there more appropriate places to rant about this subject

Sounds like he's not getting enough milk and vegetables for his brain to work.

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