Hot Times at the Garlic Festival

July 26, 2005 — -- There's one thing Americans love more than bratty celebrities, it's food. Perhaps that explains why giant festivals give mustard, ketchup and other pantry staples the star treatment in mini Mardi Gras all across the country.

More than 125,000 garlic lovers are headed to California for the Gilroy Garlic Festival this weekend. They'll brave the pungent aromas for a walk down Gourmet Alley in order to bask in mounds of scampi, calamari and such exotic items as garlic ice cream and pan-seared rattlesnake-on-a-stick.

This year's three-day clove-apalooza will be especially challenging because it's "BYOB," and in this case that means, "Bring Your Own Breath Freshener." In recent years, festival sponsor Listerine provided free Cool Mint PocketPaks. Now, you and your nostrils are on your own.

"We've always wanted to keep the event from being commercialized, so we've limited corporate sponsorship," said festival spokesman Peter Ciccarelli. "I expect many people bring mints anyway."

No degree of halitosis, however, is expected to interrupt the mass consumption of 10 tons of beef, four tons of pasta and four tons of calamari, which will be washed down with 5,000 gallons of Pepsi and 450 kegs of Coors.

The town of Gilroy calls itself "The Garlic Capital of the World," and the two tons of garlic shipped out for the festival keep local farmers happy. Moreover, the nonprofit annual event has raised more than $7 million for charity over the last 25 years.

At this year's festivities, Aisha Zasa -- the freshly crowned Miss Gilroy Garlic 2005 -- reigns, as 42 musical acts sauté the crowds from three stages with rock, country, Zydeco and R&B music.

If garlic isn't your thing, California has a party for all its cash crops. Encino hosts Tomatomania. And stalkers are welcome at Stockton's Asparagus Festival.

While you might have suffered childhood traumas when your mom served them up, a record crowd this spring of 87,594 asparagus fans celebrated their totem vegetable in song and dance. They inhaled 30,000 pounds of the green stuff, apparently spurred on by asparagus wine and beer.

There are unlikely food festivals all across the country. If you've got the stomach, the Testicle Festival even awaits you in Missoula, Mont. Lovers of Rocky Mountain Oysters gather for the annual feast on Sept. 16, which bovine Americans now consider a national day of mourning.

I'm especially amazed at the extravaganzas that honor condiments and other refrigerator items that we typically ignore. And while some are industry-sponsored events that reek of product promotion, others are done purely out of gut-busting love. Here are a few of them:

1. Mustard: When the Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series, many feared it was a sign of the Apocalypse. Others worried that it would be doom for Wisconsin's National Mustard Museum.

Rabid Red Sox fan Barry Levenson only turned to mustard collecting after his team blew the 1986 October classic. With images of first baseman Bill Buckner's infamous grounder-through-the-legs error fresh in his head, he went to the market and stared despondently, entranced by the endless selection of condiments.

Amid the French's, Gulden's Spicy Brown and Poupon, the baseball gods spoke to him: "If you collect them, they will come." And he did.

Nearly two decades later, the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum has become the state's least likely tourist attraction, open seven days a week, with a six-person staff. Levenson gave up a legal career to curate a display that now includes more than 4,100 varieties of what most of us just slather on a hot dog and forget.

"We've got more types of mustard than Pete Rose has hits," he boasts. And while Mount Horeb, just outside Madison, has no local mustard industry, it's got plenty of bratwurst lovers.

This year, 3,000 attendees will muster up fun at the Aug. 6 Mount Horeb event. Oscar Mayer's Weinermobile will be on the grounds, dispersing free hot dogs, There will be a taste-off, cook-off, and, of course, mustard bowling, with plastic yellow squeeze bottles as pins.

It's no faux pas to ask to put alternative dressings on your dogs, but you'll have to pay. Ketchup is $10 a bottle, while the free mustard flows like wine. In fact, you should try the mustard wine.

After the Red Sox's World Series victory, ending 86 years of frustration, Levenson had to rethink his career change. "It gave pause to every Sox fan," he says. "I figured, after being world famous for putting Mustard Day on the calendar, what else can I do?"

Levenson has, however, also written a book on criminal law and food. For those who relish justice, it's called "Habeas Codfish."

2. Sauerkraut: You might think the Ohio Sauerkraut Festival is just an extension of Cincinnati's massive Oktoberfest. But a majority of the 2,800 residents of nearby Waynesville aren't German. They don't even grow much cabbage.

Still, on the weekend of Oct. 8, they'll serve up 12,000 pounds of sauerkraut to some 350,000 cabbage lovers, and folks there won't have a single beer to wash it down.

Despite being located in a dry county, Waynesville two-day fest is heading into its 36th year, after a few neighbors cooked up the idea on a porch one summer night in 1970. Now, they hand out Sauerkraut scholarships and award prizes for the largest head of cabbage, as German oompah bands roll out barrels of fun to the clanging of Pepsi-filled beer steins.

3. Lentils: Even if they run out of soup spoons, you can chow down on spicy lentil enchiladas, authentic Sicilian lentil lasagna and lentil chili in Pullman, Wash. Just save room for the lentil ice cream and lentil chip cookies.

About 25,000 people are expected again on the weekend of Aug. 19 at the 17th annual National Lentil Festival. The state's Polouse region once supplied 80 percent of the world's lentils, and now produces 5,500 metric tons annually.

You can cheer on the intrepid bikers at the Tour de Lentil bike race while the kids frolic with the fun-loving Taste T -- a 7-foot furry legume mascot in blue farmer's overalls. Just remember, unless you've arrived in a tractor-trailer, don't enter the 250-gallon lentil chili sweepstakes giveaway.

4. Salsa: If you can't stand the heat, stay out of Scottsdale on the third weekend in April, when the weather's mild, but the competition at Arizona's Salsa Challenge is red hot.

This year, the crowds dipped more than 2,500 pounds of Tostitos chips into 819 gallons of salsa, and washed it down with more than 7,000 margaritas, 10,000 soft drinks and 15,000 beers.

"This is our Mardi Gras," says Mad Coyote Joe, a local chef and Salsa Challenge organizer. "It's a wild, two-day party, with Frisbees flying, girls in tank tops, and fun for families, couples and kids.

Supporters of the Hemophilia Association of Arizona started the event in a parking lot 21 years ago, and more than a decade ago, it moved into Scottsdale Stadium, where restaurants, salsa manufacturers and others vie for gut-busting honors.

This year's event raised $250,000 to sponsor a weeklong camp for kids with hemophilia. "It's getting so big, we're going to need a larger home," Joe says.

To cool the lips of 25,000 chip-chompers, organizers say they had to truck in 15,000 pounds of ice.

5. Ketchup: The old Brooks Foods Factory no longer bleeds red gold, but the people of Collinsville, Ill., won't let the world's largest bottle of ketchup leave us for that big pantry in the sky.

Kids of all ages have always been filled with anticipation as they head down Route 159 where you'll find a 170-foot water tower that the company built in 1949 to resemble a bottle of rich and tangy Brooks ketchup (although the company spells it catsup).

"The old timers still remember the Tabasco-y smell that would waft through town," says festival spokesman Mike Gassmann. "It's part of our history."

In the early 1960s, ketchup production was shifted to Canada. Brooks kept the Collinsville facility as a warehouse. Then, the company changed ownership several times, and when the facility was sold in 1993, fear spread that Collinsville's unnatural wonder would cease to be.

But in the name of civic pride, townspeople raised $100,000. By 2002, the giant ketchup bottle proudly took its place alongside Civil War battlefields on America's National Register of Historic Places.

The Collinsville festival -- held every June, to help pay for the bottle's upkeep -- is now in its seventh year. The event includes an exhibition in landmark roadside architecture, with pictures of the world's largest ball of string and a singing cow, which, of course, belts out Elvis Presley hits.

Gassmann, who's officially designated "The Big Tomato," says that President Bush even wanted to see the giant ketchup bottle, when he was campaigning in the state last year.

"Lucky for us it's Brooks ketchup," he says. "I don't think he'd be as eager to come here and be dwarfed by a giant bottle of Heinz."

Sen. John Kerry's wife -- Teresa Heinz Kerry -- was not among the 5,000 ketchup revelers at this year's event. Perhaps the only other disappointment is that organizers have yet to introduce ketchup paintball.

Buck Wolf is entertainment producer at ABCNEWS.com. "The Wolf Files" ispublished Tuesdays.