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Everyone asks Jim Victor if he's sick of butter.

But after 12 years of sculpting with the creamy dairy substance, it still tastes delicious to Victor, spread on his pancakes and toast.

“I don't think about it as a food,” he said.

Victor's latest work is on display inside the Dairy Products Building of the 2007 New York State Fair in Geddes. Sculpted from more than 800 pounds of butter, the cow and baby calf stresses the role of dairy farmers in New York state as stewards of the land.

Victor spent almost 100 hours sculpting the animals with unsalted butter from the O-At-Ka milk plant in Batavia. He worked in a studio cooled to 55 degrees while he made drastic alterations to the butter's shape, then to 30 degrees while he crafted the finer details.

“Food is not intended as an art material, so you have to deal with it on its own terms, not yours,” he said.

As a food sculptor who also shapes objects from chocolate and cheese, Victor finds butter to be the easiest of edibles with which he works. It models the most like other materials used in sculpture.

“But sometimes my studio does get a little funky when the butter is old and hanging around,” he said.

Victor began working with food in 1982, when producers of the Broadway show “Sugar Babies” asked him to sculpt the busts of stars Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller from chocolate to commemorate their 1,000th performance. As a sculptor and art professor whose work has been featured in the New York Times and New York Magazine, Victor was at first hesitant to create a piece from food.

“I hadn't heard of it before. I thought it was pretty weird, and I didn't know how to take it,” he said. “But a job is a job and that is what was important to me at the time.”

After finding success sculpting from sweets, Victor branched out into cheese and butter. Now he estimates that approximately 90 percent of his work is made with edible material.

“It was an opportunity to make a living doing this, which a sculptor needs,” he said. “There are things you love to do and things you have to do.”

Out of cheddar cheese, he crafted a 3,000-pound three-quarter scale replica of NASCAR driver Terry Labonte's Kellogg's car, which was shown at the Richmond International Speedway in Virginia in 2003. The sculpture's four-inch cheese exterior was supported by a wooden armature.

For five years, Victor has been contributing butter sculptures to the New York State Fair. Each is commissioned by the American Dairy Association and Dairy Council in Syracuse with a particular theme in mind.

“There are only a few people in the country who design things in butter or cheese, and fortunately Jim had an open slot,” said Melissa Osgood, corporate communications specialist with the ADADC.

She added, “Anyone who's willing to stay in a very cold refrigerated tank and always have a smile on his face is fantastic.”

The association hopes that when the upwards of 100,000 people who visit the fair see Victor's sculpture, it will spark their interest in their home state's dairy and agricultural industries. This year, the dairy farming theme is also meant to direct visitors to www.dairyfarmingtoday.org, where Osgood said fair-goers can learn more about “what's in their back yards.”

As soon as the last set of eyes has looked upon the cow and its calf in the Dairy Products Building, it will likely be melted and thrown away. Thus is the fate of most of Victor's food sculptures, although he gave a butter sculpture to a North Dakota farmer who mixed it in with feed for his ponies.

Other past works — at the Nebraska State Fair and a farm show in Pennsylvania -— have been used to create biodiesel. Victor encourages anyone interested in converting the cows at the New York State Fair into fuel to contact the ADADC.

However, the butter can not be eaten.

“It's too dirty for human consumption, and my hands have been in it,” he said. “I'm not thinking about making food, I'm making art.”

Jim Victor's butter sculpture, made from more than 800 pounds of butter, adds up to 362,880 grams of butter. All that butter could also be used to:

• Bake 1,814 batches of chocolate chip cookies.

• Butter 12,066 short stacks of pancakes.

• Mix 25,555 hot butter Scotch toddy cocktails.

• Bake 4,800 loaves of garlic bread.

• Prepare 25,600 servings of fettuccini alfredo.

• Butter 38,400 ears of sweet corn.

• Butter 1,210 large bags of movie theater popcorn.

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