I will shortly be writing a post for the blog, Food Culture Index on Midwestern US butter sculpture. As such, I've been thinking through a lot of the issues associated with Buttercows and Butterheads: the transition from factory farming to CAFOs, women's role in agriculture, iconicity and nostalgia, tensions between popular culture, folk crafts, and high art--thus class, distinction, authenticity. I should be writing a dissertation right now, but I thought I would work through some of these issues in Fieldnotes as well. Here is Part 1. For more, read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
On Monday, 27 June 2011, I was riding in the passenger seat while my new friend Alejandro gave me evening tour of La Paz, Bolivia. My Viva cell phone rang and it was a number from the U.S. When I answered, my mother had bad news. I braced myself, and she told me “Duffy died.”
Duffy, or Norma Duffield Lyon was “The Buttercow Lady,” who sculpted life-sized cows from butter for forty six years at several Midwestern state fairs. As one could imagine, describing this phenomenon to Alé was a challenge.
Duffy, or Norma Duffield Lyon was “The Buttercow Lady,” who sculpted life-sized cows from butter for forty six years at several Midwestern state fairs. As one could imagine, describing this phenomenon to Alé was a challenge.
I first met Duffy in the summer of 2003, when I was a recent college graduate. With few job prospects on the horizon for a reasonably good student with Bachelors degrees in anthropology and performance studies, I joined up with a team of recent film Bachelors and MFA students and headed to the Iowa State Fair.
Duffy, “The Buttercow Lady” was a legend in her own right. For decades she had been sculpting life-sized cows out of butter. She starts with choosing a dairy cattle breed (Holstein, Guernsey, Jersey, Brown Swiss, Ayershire, and Milking Shorthorn), then works from sketches or photographs. She places 500-600 pounds of butter (about 2,400 sticks) on a wooden and chicken wire armature. At first, Duffy adds large handfuls to the frame to approximate the shape of the cow, and eventually fine-tunes the form with smaller additions of butter. Working both with her hands and sculpting tools in a refrigerated display case, the process can take between two days and two weeks.
Duffy would usually schedule her work to be finished in the first days of the fair, so that attendees could see her in process. Many fairgoers consider the Buttercow to be the definitive fair experience. Information booth volunteers told us that the most common questions they are asked are, “Where are the bathrooms? and Where’s the Buttercow?” (in the dairy building, of course). Some life-long devotees of the buttercow travel from the west coast, or will pay hundreds of dollars to assist with sculpting the tail through the fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation. When the film crew stopped at a local sandwich shop for lunch, the twenty-year-old cashier told us, “Oh the buttercow. That thing used to make me so happy when I was a kid.”
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