How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest
25 comments
·August 25, 2025thomascountz
rich_sasha
Reminds me of: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
"They're made out of meat"
adzm
> 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.
Freak_NL
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.
grues-dinner
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.
maxerickson
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.
grues-dinner
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!
grues-dinner
> 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".
bombcar
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.
privatelypublic
When did it become "hot start" instead of "in medias?"
nutribueno
[dead]
recallingmemory
That is.. pretty gross.
SideburnsOfDoom
Is the whole mass supported on slender legs made of butter, or is there a metal "skeleton" encased in it?
nylonstrung
It contains an armature made of wire
c22
> 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.
KnuthIsGod
Disgusting and cruel.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
The dairy lobby lied and told people milk is healthy. Milk is a dessert
DonHopkins
Thank your mother.
nylonstrung
Half of your HN comment history is about veganism.
Aren't there more appropriate places to rant about this subject
DonHopkins
Sounds like he's not getting enough milk and vegetables for his brain to work.
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..."