8 (Very) Unusual Food Festivals to Whet Your Appetite
- Across the U.S. and around the world, communities throw joyful celebrations for their favorite foods — some of them icons, others barely known outside the region.
- Whether it be dairy snacks or cured fish or processed meat, communities build whole festivals around foods outsiders might overlook — with contests, crowns and other goofy flourishes.
- The popularity of these events makes even tiny towns the center of attention, at least for a day or a weekend.
All over the world, cultures mark their relationship with food through special days, harvest celebrations and festivals.
There are lobster festivals from Maine to California, and in the fall, you can’t throw a Honeycrisp without hitting an apple festival. But there are also events celebrating less-mainstream foods that you may enjoy exploring. Here are some that fascinate us.
Poutine featuring cheese curds.
What the Fluff Festival
Somerville, Mass., is home to an annual salute to Marshmallow Fluff. Now entering its 21st year celebrating the hometown treat invented by Archibald Query, the WTF Festival — held in September — has included such events as fluff jousting, fluff limbo and a fluff lickoff.
Cheese Curd Festival
Held in Ellsworth, Wis.— the self-proclaimed Cheese Curd Capital of the World — this festival honoring the squeaky, addictive dairy snack takes place in late June. The highlight is a curd-eating contest, with divisions for children, men, women and a “two-person relay.”
Baltic Herring Festival
Your nose will lead you to Helsinki’s favorite October festival, where nearly 30 tons of herring is consumed. A tradition for almost 300 years, the festival awards prizes including “Pickled Fish of the Year” and “Baltic Herring Surprise of the Year” (which, to date, has not been an ice cream).
Fresh marinated herring fillet sandwiches.
Yale Bologna Festival
If you assumed Bologna, Italy, is the bologna capital of the world, you assumed wrong. It’s actually Yale, Mich., home to several large meat processors, and it has been holding the Bologna Festival since 1989. More than 20,000 people attend on the last weekend of July each year, and a Bologna King and Queen are elected — as is a Baby Bologna.
Livermush Festival
Livermush is a regional dish in western North Carolina. It consists of cornmeal, seasonings and pig liver, and it’s the focus of October’s annual celebration in Uptown Shelby, N.C. The festivities include a livermush eating contest, for which each contestant is given packages of cold livermush, bottled water and, um, a trash can. The recent record for the 9-minute contest is 2 lbs., 1.8 ounces by a seven-time champion.
Waikiki Spam Jam
Continuing the run of processed-meat festivals, this one has an idyllic setting in Hawaii — inexplicably the state with the highest per capita rate of Spam consumption. The Spam Jam is held each April and draws an astonishing 40,000 people annually.
Spam musubi, a popular Hawaiian snack made of a grilled slice of Spam on top of a block of rice (sometimes with eggs), wrapped in a strip of seaweed.
Corn Dog Festival
The town of Bristol, Ind., boasts of being one of the largest producers of corndogs in the country. They’re not kidding: According to the website for the annual (since 2022) Corndog Festival, they crank out 1.1 million full-size and 2.9 million mini corndogs … every day. It adds up to about 40,000 tons per year — which is about what an aircraft carrier weighs. You can make a dent in that by entering the corndog-eating contest, where condiments and utensils are prohibited, regurgitation is disqualifying, there’s a three-minute time limit and the winner receives a trophy. The 2025 winner ate a surprisingly modest six.
Ugly Food
Iceland’s Ugly Food Festival (aka Thorrablot) celebrates the country’s Indigenous foods, none of which are Instagram-worthy. Specialties at the festival include sheep’s head, blood pudding, seal flipper, fermented shark and pickled ram’s — well, let’s just leave it right there.
Unusual or not, food festivals are one of the best ways to tap into local culture, learn how regional foods are tied to lives and livelihoods, and revel in the experience of people coming together to celebrate what they love. While Road Scholar doesn’t feature any of the above on our itineraries, we do offer quite a few learning adventures for the cuisine curious!
