Judging the Perfect Green Bean

You might assume that all green beans look alike—and that would be a reasonable assumption—but Dee Ann Roberts knows better. Some green beans are lumpy. Some are spotted. Many are curved, or pale, or limp. None of those are acceptable characteristics for a prize-winning bean.

What you want in a prize-winning green bean is consistency. You want a nice, straight bean, not too mature, no spots, stems intact, and then you want it lying on a tray next to 24 other green beans exactly like it.

Roberts knows this because she's been exhibiting vegetables for years—both successfully (one year she and her husband, Duane, won the State Fair Vegetable Sweepstakes award) and not so successfully (another year her beans were disqualified because Duane, in his zeal to help, neatly trimmed off all the stems). She also knows this because she is this year's State Fair Vegetable Judge.

"Boy, they're pretty darn close, aren't they?" she said, leaning in close to get a better look. She was hunched over a long wooden table in the Ag-Hort Building at the fairgrounds, examining green beans, the first of 41 categories of vegetables she judged Thursday.

She touched one bean, lightly. "Except he's got that one little spot on it."

Roberts is a hands-on judge, ruthless in her examinations. She knows that if you don't get in and mix it up with the beans, many camouflaged mistakes could be overlooked. (Blemished beans can be positioned so the spots don't show, for instance. Or short and tall beans can be arranged so that the size difference is gradual.)

"Look at this," she said, picking up the 25th bean on a tray and laying it next to Bean No. 1. The 25th bean was startlingly shorter. "You can see how different they are in length. They try to trick you."

So before making any decisions, she poked the beans. She picked them up and studied them. She waved them to see if they were rubbery. She did everything but eat them, and the only reason she didn't eat them is that taste is not a factor. Nobody eats these beans. They look at them, judge them, beribbon them, put them in a room so people can gawk at them, and then, when the beans begin to wilt, they throw them away.

Other vegetables that last longer—squash, say, or potatoes—are donated to a local food shelf after the fair is over.

Rules is rules

All morning, Roberts' helpers trotted back and forth from the display shelves to the judging tables, toting vegetables. At the other end of the room, the Potato Judge pondered the potatoes. (Even though potatoes are generally considered to be vegetables, they get their own judge.)

Out in the hallway, contestants craned their necks, trying to recognize their own produce and visualizing blue ribbons. Erven Skaar—the fair's loftily titled Superintendent of Vegetables and Potatoes—trolled the orderly room, maintaining order. Roberts was oblivious to them all.

"Well, these are flat," she murmured, rummaging through a tray of beans that was almost indistinguishable from the tray next to it. "These are good, but there's a spot. These are overmature."

Suddenly, she straightened up. "And what about this guy?" she asked, stabbing a tray with an index finger.

Ummmm.

"No tops," she said briskly. "The tops have been cut off."

Kiss of death in a competitive bean.

Birth of a judge

Many of these rules originated with the legendary Orrin C. Turnquist, a former Superintendent of Vegetables and Potatoes who ran the vegetable division with an iron hand. Turnquist also is the author of the important document "Preparing Vegetables for Exhibit," which explains his philosophy: "Exhibits must be educational to be worthwhile," he wrote. "They must show that better produce is the result of the use of good seed and adapted varieties."

Three pages of "suggestions" follow, but over the years these have become the basis for the law of vegetable land. Now, fair officials meet each year to tweak the rules and decide such things as how big a small tomato should be (this year it's 1 1/2 to 2 inches in any one direction, and yes, Roberts measures) and whether or not it should have a stem (no).

Such perfection, such uniformity, may seem unnatural, but Roberts is unmoved. Still prodding beans, still eliminating entries, she doesn't even look up to give her answer: "With a whole bunch of beans, you can get there."

Roberts never set out to be a judge. She and Duane tend several big gardens in Inver Grove Heights, and for years they have entered the Dakota County Fair as well as the State Fair. But after a few sad disqualifications—not only was there the Trimmed Beans Incident, but once they had too many salsify (the rules call for six of this parsnip-like vegetable; they had brought a spare and forgot to remove it) and another time she mislabeled her carrots (a real tragedy, because her carrots were beautiful and the mislabeling was the fault of the seed manufacturer)—she signed up for a judging class.

"I didn't intend to be a judge," she said. "I went to the class to see what the judges were looking for, so I'd be a better exhibitor."

Eventually, she and Duane started winning pretty consistently and in 1986 they won the State Fair Sweepstakes, which earned them a very nice engraved silver platter and a tidy sum of money.

By then, Roberts had gotten hooked on the classes. Five classes make you a judge. Then you have to go to a symposium every three years to renew your certificate. After nine years of that, you're a life judge, and after nine more years you're a master judge. Now 64, Roberts became a master judge on April 20.

Intense preparations

An hour or so before the judging, the Ag-Hort workroom was humming with gardeners fussing over vegetables, trimming stems, wiping down produce with soft cloths, arranging their bounty on plastic foam trays.

Producing prize-winning vegetables requires a tricky combination of experience, timing and nature, and many of the gardeners had tips: mound the dirt over carrots and leeks to prevent "sunburn" (sunlight turns carrot heads green and leeks yellow); keep all tobacco products away from tomatoes; transplant faster-growing vegetables a couple of times so they don't mature too quickly and are at peak ripeness at fair time.

"It's a lot of work," sighed Ronald Olson of Cambridge, Minn., shaking his head. His wife, Loretta, was trimming leek tops into fan shapes with a pair of scissors. "Just a lot of work."

Still, the drive to win has compelled him to plant vegetables he would never eat—such as leeks. He hates all onions and grows them only for show. And it's paid off, because he and Loretta are three-time Sweepstakes winners.

At a table behind them, a bleary-eyed Edie Godfrey of Minnetrista whispered to herself as she counted her beans. One bean too many, one bean too few would disqualify her.

"I was up until about 3:30 in the morning, washing and sorting my vegetables, discarding obvious rejections," she said. "This is my fourth big year. I'm going for the Sweepstakes."

She looked back at the tray of beans, suddenly insecure, and began to count them one more time.

Meanwhile, across the hall in the tiny office of the Superintendent of Vegetables and Potatoes, Roberts was getting ready. As the minutes ticked toward Judging Hour, she was leafing through a seed catalog, boning up.