I made a conscious decision that morning to have eggs for breakfast. You could ask me why, but I’d probably just tell you it was out of spite. I wanted to stick it to the chickens. I wanted them to smell it on my breath. I eat your unborn young, I wanted to tell them. I wondered if they would understand.

So it was with malice in my heart that I set out with Emily to the 96th annual Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg. For better or worse, the universe (read: our work schedules) had decided that the only day we could get away was the first day of the show: a Saturday. Emily had warned me before we left that we could have trouble finding parking nearby if we didn’t want to spend between eight and 10 bucks for the privilege. But then I thought about it for a moment and decided that I didn’t want to be one of the people for whom $10 was a worthy investment, if it meant cutting out a little bit of walking from my life.

So we parked three-quarters of a mile away instead, in a decidedly shady-looking part of Harrisburg (not that that narrows it down much) and crossed back over a bridge that was not so much a bridge as an airborne gravel road to get back to the Farm Show Complex. I was struck by the colossal building’s architecture: it was not tall, but it had a huge footprint, with an imposing brick and concrete facade. Carved into the edifice above each of the main entrances were words like COMMERCE and AGRICULTURE and between the architecture and the too-obvious labels that looked as though they were designed to suggest shouting, I began looking for a statue of Lenin to complete the postcard-worthy portrait of Soviet-era Russia.

Just off camera: the mighty hammer and sickle.

But we were soon past that and then inside, and when the doors slammed shut behind us, each of my senses was overcome violently, and I knew, suddenly, that I’d taken my last deep breath for quite some time.

I wondered if we’d chosen the wrong entrance, because I expected something somewhat more inspiring than this, which… what exactly is this?

The evidence told me that it was a sandbox, but that couldn’t be right. There was a cluster of chattering children inside it, with buckets and little shovels and dump trucks, but the sand was too large and… yellow? Is that… corn? It was indeed, and I could only stand and gape for a few minutes as the children scraped and scooped and dumped the big yellow kernels around and on each other. I saw one of them attempting to make a corncastle. Could such a thing be done? It was a beautiful and terrible sight, and we soon moved on.

The thing that greeted us next was, if you can believe it, one hundred times more heartbreaking. It was a clown, all big-shoed and big-nosed and painted up. But as I got closer, I could see that he was leaning on a walker, complete with those slit tennis ball sliders on the feet. And underneath his makeup he was all oatmeal grey and withered, which made his tortured smile even more sick and sad than your average carny. Other clowns milled around him, leering and threatening passersby with half-inflated balloon animals and handkerchiefs-from-nowhere.

I decided then, as I hope you now decide for yourselves, not to let these first few uninspiring sights sour the Farm Show for me. Then again, I grew up in New York and while I’d expected something of a kind with the Great New York State Fair, I was never-the-less in a still-new country, where perhaps things like corn sandboxes and elderly (possibly sickly) clowns were not quite so extraordinary or unsettling.

So I found myself faced with a more familiar sight: the expanse of one of the exhibition halls, all bustling with visitors and displays and ribbons. We passed the 4-H exhibits and quilt square competitions and made for the butter sculpture: one of the centerpieces of any self-respecting fair.

We found it toward the center of the hall, swarmed with people pointing fingers and cameras. I had my fingers crossed for a castle, or maybe dragons, or some other larger-than-life creature carved lovingly from the thick yellow stuff. What we found instead was enough to set my mind to spinning.

It melts in your mouth and also everywhere else.

My mind reeled with questions, like: Was the sculptor brilliant or incredibly lazy? Is it meta to have a butter sculpture of a fair at a fair? Did the original sculpture of a fire-breathing dragon melt in some sudden unseasonable shift in the weather and they had scrambled aimlessly toward plan B? Where did the irony begin or end? I’ll let you decide.

We did the penny tour of the jam and preserves displays and the photography exhibit, and passed by an audience seated in a sea of folding chairs, eyes turned toward a panel of judges seated behind a table up on a stage. They were eating, alternating between tentative bites and small sips of water from plastic bottles. I knew then that they were sampling the contestants’ submissions for the apple pie baking contest. I wondered how many people in the audience were actual contestants and how many were just passing through the show. If any of them were contestants… what did they hope to learn from watching the judges take little bites of their pie? What were they looking for? Some shift in their expression or facial tic? Some little smile as the pie met their tongue? Some tip-off to indicate what kind of reception their dead grandmother’s time-honored recipe was getting? I wondered how many more of the contestants were pacing nervously somewhere out of sight the way I do, when I’ve handed a manuscript to somebody to read, too nervous even to be in the same room while they read it.

We walked on. We followed the ever-worsening smell of shamelessly public bowel evacuations and made our way to the halls that housed the farm animals. For a time I stopped following the smell and started following the damned adorable farm girls instead. From my earliest days visiting the New York State Fair, I romanticized these young women – the only people there who weren’t wearing cowboy boots because they thought they were kitschy. I liked to imagine that the farm was all they’d ever known since they were just children, and they knew nothing of the ways of the outside world. I could save them. A few of them looked like they’d only just purchased their first pair of snug Old Navy jeans or North Face fleece vests last week. I watched them lead cows through the crowds with confidence, or corral pigs with steely determination and thought about all the wonderful things I could teach them, about how much bigger their world would be for having met me. But now and then the illusion was shattered, when I watched one or two of them return to their family’s stall to check Facebook on their iPads, or I’d overhear little shreds of conversation containing phrases like He cheated on you how many times? Gone was the portrait of perfect nubile innocence married with farm-bred confidence and strength of character. Nature had found a way after all.

You can't afford NOT to buy their semen.

Through all the animals were still more – possibly countless – displays, all selling or shouting about some kind of awareness. I was meant to be acutely aware of agriculture, or aware of how many every day products bees were responsible for producing, or how many children die each year from mislabeled hazardous household chemicals, or how an alpaca could be a friend for life; a poster from PAOBA – the Pennsylvania Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association – encouraged me to COME HOME TO ALPACAS! – whatever that meant.

The demolition derby, all set to begin.

Lunchtime was approaching, and so we found the food court, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people seeking nourishment of their own. I soon realized that just about every single food item on offer was a byproduct of some creature that we’d come to love in our visitations with them, or else some other conspicuously farm-grown thing or another, though with some distinctly American twist. The vegetables, for example, farm-grown though they once may have been, were unidentifiable now, buried beneath layers of grease and fried breading: mushrooms and broccoli and cucumbers and bloomin’ onions. The creamiest milkshakes you can imagine, courtesy of enough sugar for all of us to come up just shy of diabetic comas. The only aberration was pizza, though they tried to tell us that it, too, was a distinctly Pennsylvanian selection.

We’d planned on saving the very best for last. Our entire day had led up to this point. At 2:00 we made our way back to the hall that housed the cacophony of the chicken exhibits to revisit the ducklings, which were in the process of being carried to the slide in an Amazon.com box. Two boys – perhaps brothers – took turns holding up a squeaking duckling to a camera, which I later found out was connected to a webcam for those housebound Farm Show enthusiasts to enjoy. The ducks were deposited in the small pool of water and milled around for a little while, ignoring the almost cruel-looking steel slide rising from the center of the pool. With a little coaxing and some supervision from the boys’ father, the ducks were encouraged to mount the ramp and climb to the top of the slide. The idea was that they’d be lured there with the promise of food, which hung from the top of the slide in a dish, just barely out of reach, and in reaching for it, they’d lose their balance and tumble down the slide and back down into the pool.

It was a sound plan, except that there was, after the first morning show, a coating of food at the top of the ramp, which two or three ducklings had monopolized, pecking happily away while a queue formed on the ramp behind them. With food close at hand, they had no reason to overextend themselves and fall down the slide. I could feel the anticipation, palpable and electric, in the crowd behind me.

I should take a moment to point out that “crowd” is almost not even the right word. I’d consider “mob” as well. I’d actually had to fight my way to the front just to get a view, like it was a Mötley Crüe concert. And I soon realized that the only thing more fun than watching ducklings fall down a metal slide was watching people watch ducklings fall down a metal slide. The parents looked bored, like there were seven hundred other things they could be doing. The senior citizens looked just as bored as the parents, and I suspected that after so many years on earth and after everything they’d seen, they were determined not to let anything enchant them. The children, though, were enraptured, and I believed that any one of them could watch the ducklings at play until one or the other of them died of starvation. They truly did have a Farm Show complex.

The ducklings soon fell into a rhythm, reaching for the food dish, reaching the point of no return, and then toppling off the slide and down into the water with just the most adorable little splash, to the audible delight of the audience. They’d circle back around and waddle up the ramp again, to begin the process once more, none the wiser that they were stuck in an infinite loop of causality.

Did they have to practice this at home? Was there some kind of certification process?

I reflected on the whole Farm Show experience as we slowly found our way back to the exit after we’d seen all the ducklings we could handle. And it was then that it occurred to me what it was that all of this represented: it was, at its simplest, a celebration of mankind’s dominion over the earth. It was like my determination that morning to cement my place on the food chain by filling myself with unborn chickens; it was as though we were collectively shaking our fists at nature and demanding that they recognize just how many different things we can make out of the creatures of the world.

Suppose I was on display? Suppose humankind was displaced as the dominant species? What could we possibly have to offer our new overlords? I don’t have all that much hair on my body; it’s not thick or luxurious and seems only to grow in inconvenient places: not altogether useful for fashioning coats or mittens. My skin is fragile and sunburns easily, so it would make a terrible drum skin or poncho. And as much as I enjoy a trip down a metal slide, I suspect I’d wise up soon enough to the siren song of out-of-reach food, and join with my brethren to construct some manner of siege machine or rudimentary lathe with which to obtain the food that had so long eluded us.

Frankly, I think we’d find very quickly that we are a distinctly untalented and unremarkable species. Our domineering presence on the earth, quite obviously, has nothing at all to do with the things we can fashion for ourselves, but how well we’ve learned to make use of the many things the world has to offer.

I’m sure I was meant to leave the farm show feeling informed and aware of how vital the agriculture industry is for the state of Pennsylvania and the world itself. What I didn’t count on was anger that we’ve turned it into some trifling sideshow. And yet, without the theatrics and the insidious lessons about the importance of farmers, I’d allow myself to overlook it, even as I enjoyed my weekly cheeseburger or poured milk from some local farm on my Rice Crispies. So it is that we cheapen the things that we love; we cheapen in order to honor them.