Eating All 93 of Minnesota State Fair's Stick Foods for Charity
It took Mandy Colten 10 days to eat all 93 items, an average of 9 per day.
— -- It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Or so Minnesotan Mandy Colten thought of eating all 93 of the foods served on a stick at Minnesota’s state fair.
“I’ve never missed a state fair in my life, and I was thinking last year how I can get more involved and justify going more than once,” Colten, 26, told ABC News. “I thought, ‘What better way to connect with Minnesota and do something local than this?’ I made it my New Year’s resolution to see if I could do it, so I had the last eight months to get organized.”
In that time, Colten, a research analyst, crafted a list of all the items to devour – dishes from deep-fried Twinkies and lollipops to Cajun shrimp and deep-fried brie – created a blog and solicited family and friends for donations to her crazy cause.
“I set up a donations page, and it was initially for just family and friends who thought I was kind of crazy,” she said. “But it turned into something bigger. I’m not trying to make any money, so I figured all the proceeds could go to Make-A-Wish Foundation. This was a silly dream of mine, so what better cause than helping kids live out their dreams?”
It took Colten 10 days to eat all 93 items (an average of 9 per day), delighting in some, like deep-fried Snickers, her favorite, and suffering through others, like wine-crusted deep-fried brie, which she described as “awful.”
All in all, though, Colten would do it all over again – especially for the hundreds of dollars she was able to raise.
“It started out as something fun that I wanted to do for myself and my love of the state fair, and it really turned into something else,” she said of the experience. “It was a really fun way to connect with new Minnesotans.”
