Fresno, CA–14 May 2022

The National Garlic Festival

Given that the Gilroy Garlic Festival has restricted its operation from a large event to a few much smaller events, I was excited to find out about the unrelated National Garlic Festival in Fresno and went there with a friend.

Gilroy

For those of you unfamiliar with the pre-pandemic Gilroy festival, it’s useful to give some background. The festival was the big event in the city. Attendance ran in the hundreds of thousands of people each year. To handle parking, organizers set up an off-site area with shuttle buses to the main festival area in a large park. There were signs everywhere on the roads coming in to town to guide people to the parking areas.

Once at the festival, you’d see close to a hundred artists selling their wares, three or four stages with various kinds of music, and, of course, dozens of food booths where you could sample dishes centered around garlic. You could even get garlic ice cream and garlic wine. There were several tents selling festival merchandise. The artwork on merchandise (T-shirts, tote bags, etc.) was selected from a competition among local artists. Most important, this was a community event. The whole city was involved in the festival. Hundreds of volunteers helped direct people in the parking area, give information to people on the fairgrounds, and keep the festival running smoothly. School athletic teams and community groups had food booths, and part of the festival proceeds were given back to those organizations.

This, then, is the gold standard against which anything calling itself a “national” garlic festival would have to be measured.

Fresno

Unfortunately, the Fresno event didn’t even begin to measure up. The only street signs posted were “Road closed ahead” and “Special Event”—hardly enough to guide people. If there was any off-site parking, there were no signs indicating it. After we found parking and got to the festival entrance, there was (again) no signage for people who already had tickets and people who were in the line to buy tickets.

Giant (approx 3 meter tall) garlic bulb at entrance to fair

Once inside the festival, there was a giant garlic bulb…

Crowd of people under a banner “Eat. Drink. Stink.”

…and a banner or two.

Table with garlic (including leaves, not just roots)

But other than that, and a table of garlic…

Green tractor with large rear wheels and small front wheels. Wheels are yellow

…in an exposition building…

Ferris wheel and two carnival rides that swing people through the air.

…you wouldn’t know it was a garlic festival at all. It seemed just another typical fair/carnival with the typical carnival rides.

And as for specialty garlic foods? Not hardly; there was a booth selling garlic fries and one with garlic bread. The mini-muffin stand had “garlic bacon bites,” and I was able to get roasted garlic with my sausage sandwich.

There was garlic ice cream; one small plastic spoonful per customer (unlike the small cone one could get at the Gilroy Festival). Other than that, garlic wasn’t the star of the show; it barely made a cameo appearance.

Most of all, though, there didn’t seem to be any real community involvement. There were few if any people there to give information, no community groups running food booths. The cynic in me says that the people who are mentioned at the bottom of the web site (National Food Festivals, Inc.) took a standard fair and slapped “garlic” onto the name. Overall, the whole festival seemed to be a last-minute, half-hearted effort. This was even reflected in the T-shirt design (or lack of design):

The next time someone wants to advertise as a “national” garlic festival, they really need to step up their game—the people who did this one didn’t have much of a game at all.

Note:

I don’t mean to give the impression that it wasn’t a fun day; the people-watching was excellent, and my friend and I manage to make a fun day out of any event we go to.