Judging from the size of the turkey leg I saw a guy gnawing at the fair, they've branched out into Ostrich Limbs. He had to hold it with two hands. They probably had to winch it over the counter with a block and tackle. You got it, bro? Use your back, you don't want a sprain. Surely the turkey from which it came could have been saddled up and ridden to work.

Never understood the appeal of those things. On Thanksgiving, I don't remember anyone passing up the breast meat and putting in dibs for a leg. Now, give me a slab of Turkey Meat with a cup of gravy I can wear around my neck, and I'm happy; you can hold it in your mouth and dunk it while having other hands free for Shaved Ice or Dippin' Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future That Never Seems to Arrive But Remains Tantalizingly Out of Reach.

The turkey leg might be the largest item you can buy. Seems unwise. The larger the portions, the less likely you'll want to eat something else. Perhaps the Rabelaisian gourmand eats a turkey leg with a bone the size of a Louisville Slugger, issues a ripe belch, and says, "Now for Stromboli as big as a rolled-up Sunday paper!"

But I see people struggling to finish their Big Fat Bacon, because they probably had a Poutine Smoothie 10 minutes ago and their stomach is working like a sewer dealing with 6 tons of wet cement. Must. Finish. Bacon. Honor demands it.

Most fair food is too big. I had a "slider," a term borrowed from White Castle, whose hamburgers are about 3 microns thick. The fair "slider" was a fist-sized wad of meat, and while it was incomparably delicious, it was only available in a matching set. So you perform a calculous unique to the fair: If I eat both, it's going to be hard to get through two-thirds of a bag of mini-donuts; I'll only manage half. If I don't finish this About a Foot Long, I can handle most of a feed bag of Fresh French Fries, leaving room for a hot pickle as big as a baby's arm two hours later.

In the end you eat too much, throw away less than you'd like, and wish that someone would put motor oil down by the transit plaza so you could be dragged by a rope to the bus. Or maybe use those big sticks like they use to get whales back in the sea.

So I plea: smaller portions. I would gladly pay a little more for the option to have a portion that would not feed someone twice my size who had been living on chewing gum and dried kale for a month. Give me less. Is that too much to ask?

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858