Attendees of this year’s Ohio State Fair will find a plethora of foods that a health-conscious person should not be consuming. The list of fried foods alone is staggering: Oreos, candy bars, cheese, s’mores and Captain Crunch just to name a few.

There is one fatty food that patrons will not be able to buy, and it’s shaped like the 27th President of the United States, William Howard Taft.

Butter sculptures are a tradition at the Ohio State Fair, which runs until Sunday at the Ohio Expo Center. For the past two years, Ira Tecson has helped in their construction.

This year’s butter sculptures include a cow and her calf and a pseudo Mount Rushmore featuring the heads of all the presidents who are from Ohio.

Made of AA grade pasteurized butter, they were constructed on-sight in the refrigerated display case.

“It took about a week to make working from 8 a.m. to about 5 or 6 at night,” Tecson said.

“I helped work on the Swiss cheese sculpture last year so they brought me back this year,” she said.

Tecson graduated from Ohio State in fall 2007 with a degree in sculpture and since graduation has done freelance work, including work for Victoria’s Secret.

Tecson contributed to the construction by assisting the four main sculptors: Bob Kling, Alex Balz, Jan LaGory and Paul Brooke. She was recommended to Kling by OSU sculpture professor Malcolm Cochran.

“He’s an old friend of mine,” Kling said of Cochran. “He recommended a couple of his students to me and Ira was one of them.”

Joshua Minto, an OSU art major, also aided Kling and his colleagues with the sculptures.

“The four of us get to do all the fun stuff and they help out with some of the details,” Kling said.

Some of those details include the basic shapes of the sculptures, such as the cliffs on the presidential mountain.

This is the ninth year the foursome has worked on the sculptures. Tecson said Kling, based out of Cincinnati, is the lead designer.

According to his Web site, he was a toy sculptor for Kenner and retired in 2000 as the director of sculpting for Hasbro. He has sculpted the likeness of celebrities such as Conan O’Brien, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elvis Pressley.

Working with students is one of the aspects that he enjoys about the state fair, he said.

“Ira is a very talented person,” Kling said. “It’s fun to have university students helping us. Who knows? Maybe in a few years when I retire, they’ll take over.”

David Surovec can be reached at [email protected].