Modern Farmer Digs Into The Cutthroat World Of Professional Butter Sculpting
Each year since 1972, Linda Christensen has spent 12 straight days sitting in a 38-degree booth at the Minnesota State Fair, sporting an orange jumper in front of thousands of onlookers, working diligently with clay and kitchen tools...and 90-pound blocks of butter. Her task? Carving butter busts of the contenders for Princess Kay of the Milky Way, an honor given annually by the Midwest Dairy Association to women who live or work on dairy farms. It appears that butter sculpting is alive and well in parts of the country. Move over, Jennifer Garner!
Modern Farmer – that's the same "hipster farming magazine" we told you about a few months ago – recently conducted an interview with Christensen, profiling the woman known as the Queen of Butter. She reveals that each bust takes approximately seven hours, she once sculpted David Letterman's face and that a large number of women elect to keep the finished pieces in small freezers at home – one of them has lasted since 1981!
While we're not exactly sure where to begin on this one, we admit that the artist's completed works are scarily impressive. Be sure to check out the full interview with Christensen, which includes a section on the world's "butter hotspots." Okay, now we're actually going to have to stop before we get carried away.
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