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Area hippies are readying their macrame and vegan poutine in anticipation of that merry, faerie time of year — Oregon Country Fair is just around the corner. The event takes place on the second weekend of July in the cottonwood-shaded floodplains that are the ancestral home of Kalapuya people, in what is now called Veneta, just outside Eugene.

The fair started up in the late 1960s as a fundraiser for a little community school, but it was the right place and the right time for the sleepy agricultural area to experience a permanent vibe shift. After a few years the fair’s organizers were eager to buy the fairgrounds land but were short on cash (classic hippies, man) so they tapped fair fixture and counterculture icon Ken Kesey to ask his prankster pals the Grateful Dead to play a benefit concert at the fair.

Kesey was from Eugene, and his brother Chuck and sister-in-law Sue founded Springfield Creamery, makers of Nancy’s Yogurt — one of the many homespun offerings sold at the fair alongside various whole-grain breads and probably more than one type of yarn-based handicraft. The yogurt recipe was brought to the creamery by Nancy Van Brasch Hamren, a San Francisco transplant who worked as the creamery’s bookkeeper; it was the first commercial product in the U.S. to add Acidophilus cultures (Chuck’s idea), but the simple recipe and technique came from Nancy’s Dutch grandmother.

For the climate-conscious, consuming dairy and beef is often at odds with personal goals to not add to the problem. It’s a conundrum; methane is a major cause of climate change, yes, but emissions from local dairy cows are nowhere near the magnitude of, say, leaks from producing and shipping oil and gas, which will require systemic, industry-wide policy change to quell. Tropical dairy alternatives like cashew or coconut milk, made from products grown on razed rainforests and shipped halfway around the world, don’t feel like the best replacements, especially with emerging breakthroughs in reducing methane emissions by adding seaweed to cattle’s diets.

If fighting food waste — another contributor to climate change — is important to you, sometimes the best option is to eat what you already have instead of going to a restaurant or a grocery store. (Being a homebody is also one of my favorite pastimes, so this is a frequent choice in my house.) I usually have yogurt in the fridge and my garden is producing loads of loganberries and red currants at present, so this is definitely easier for me than schlepping it to the frozen novelties aisle. I also like knowing that these frosty treats were made entirely from stuff sourced very close-by, without a bunch of extra packaging. They’re also nutritious enough that you can have them for breakfast. Makes 12-15 frozen pops (depending on the size of your molds)

Ingredients

1 dry pint (2 cups) fresh berries (Oregon-grown if you know what’s good)

2-3 tablespoons honey or maple syrup (or more, if your berries are sour)

1 quart vanilla-flavored yogurt, whole milk or nondairy

Instructions

1. Puree or mash the berries with the honey or syrup, then mix in the yogurt. If you want pretty swirly patterns in the pops, leave streaks in the mixture instead of fully blending it.
2. Pour the berry-yogurt mixture into your popsicle molds and freeze overnight.

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/27/recipe-superabundant-oregon-country-fair-berry-yogurt-pops/