In praise of giant cabbages

Forgive us for writing yet again about giant cabbages but we’ve spent some time researching and writing about them this past week and just can’t help sharing our opinions.

First, we’d just like to say that we find the spectacle of the weigh-off at the Alaska State Fair to be endearing in the way that we find a lot of things endearing in our state. This is an activity that is goofy at its core and that everyone has worked hard to make goofier. From the Cabbage Fairies to the Cabbage Classic guessing-game raffle to the spectators in the stand, we are all in on the joke.

We know this is silly and that’s why we love it. There’s something quintessentially Alaskan about that, in the same vein as the Talkeetna Moose Dropping Festival and the weird stuff on the wall of every local dive bar from Fairbanks to Homer.

Secondly, this year we realized that, despite ourselves and even knowing that no one is really taking this all that seriously, we can’t help but get wrapped up in the drama of the whole thing. Mat-Su College President Talis Colberg — whose modest entries in the yearly competition have become a yearly target of our cabbage-themed mirth-making here at the Frontiersman, much to his delight — summed it up well in our preview story on this year’s weigh off published Friday:

“There is some uncertainty about what the size will be,” Colberg said. “There’s some deception at play in the appearance in that you can look at a cabbage and think you know how much it weighs but you don’t.”

And the drama isn’t just on weigh-in day. When we talked to Scott Robb — reigning world champ and holder of the giant cabbage record in the Guinness Book of World Records — and he told us that he’d beaten his perennial competitor Steve Hubacek at an early-round weighing, we actually got excited at the prospect of standing around in a pen waiting to see watch cabbages weighed on a Friday night.

Turns out, as it has been many years before, Hubacek brought home the win and the $2,000 check this year. We congratulate him on returning from a year’s hiatus from the cabbage game with a win.

We’ve written the story of the cabbage-growing Hubacek dentist a half-dozen times or more but we’re still not tired of it. The kind of neck-and-neck competition, the horse race between Hubacek and Robb, is kind of the source of a lot of the drama that makes the whole thing exciting.

Lastly, we’d like to say that the weigh-off makes us think of our state’s heritage. Big vegetables have kind of been a part of Mat-Su since the Colonists arrived. Big cabbages were in our paper from its earliest editions, laying at the feet of a beauty queen in one issue or being handed off to a railroad official in another.

More than that, though, the weigh-off harkens back to a time in Alaska when we kind of had to make our own fun. We didn’t get television stations when the rest of America did. We don’t have professional sports teams to cheer on. Weighing giant vegetables seems a lot like competitive dogsled racing and the blanket toss and the Nenana Ice Classic.

We love these things because we grew up with them and we grew up with them because we grew up here, in Alaska, and not some place where there’s pro football to watch. It’s Alaskan and however goofy it is just makes it that much more special.