Fremont's festival with an adult baby-food eating contest

The contest everyone in Fremont talks about is a row of grown adults racing to spoon their way through jars of pureed peas and squash. That’s the National Baby Food Festival, and it is exactly as on-brand as it sounds: Fremont is the home of Gerber, calls itself the Baby Food Capital of the World, and once a year the whole downtown leans all the way into it.

The festival is older than its name. It started in 1951 as “Old Fashioned Days,” a community throwback to the area’s horse-and-buggy past. In 1990 the town stopped being coy about why anyone had heard of Fremont, embraced the Gerber heritage outright, and rechristened it the National Baby Food Festival. It now runs the third full week of July.

The lineup commits to the theme. There’s a baby crawl race, where the contestants are actual babies and the finish line is whoever’s parent shakes the most appealing set of car keys. There’s a baby photo contest and a baby food cook-off, where the trick is making something a person would willingly eat out of those little jars. Around the gimmicks runs the ordinary good stuff of a small-town summer: a parade, a carnival, live music, and food vendors packing the downtown blocks.

For a town of a few thousand, the crowd it pulls is real — streets fill up, parking thins out, and the place runs at a higher volume than usual for a few days each July. It’s the kind of friendly, slightly absurd tradition worth pointing the car toward, if only to watch an adult human lose a heat to a jar of strained carrots.