It is the first weekend of the Iowa State Fair, and Beth M. Howard is still thinking about pie.
“I’ve tried to get away from pie a couple of times,” she said, “and I just keep getting pulled back. I’ve surrendered.”
Howard has made a career off the pastry, first by writing a memoir about how it helped her work through grief (2012’s Making Piece: Love, Loss and Pie). She went on to open and operate the Pitchfork Pie Stand in Grant Wood’s American Gothic House from 2010 to 2014, as well as judge pie baking competitions at the Iowa State Fair. In 2021, she published the cookbook Ms. American Pie, followed by a travel memoir, World Piece: A Pie Baker’s Global Quest for Peace, Love, and Understanding.
Howard crisscrossed the state to film her documentary Pieowa: A Piece of America, and has been doing the same now as she promotes the film across Iowa, the Midwest and beyond. For Howard, observing Iowans’ relationship to the dessert was the perfect opportunity to unpack values she holds dear, such as community and connection.
“My first idea for the film was just to do the pie competition at the state fair,” she said. After all, the Iowa State Fair is an excellent encapsulation of the bakers who populate the state. Two years ago, Howard filmed documentary footage of the fair’s famous pie-baking competitions. (Some of the participants were able to catch a screening of Pieowa at this year’s fair.)
But Howard soon realized plenty of other pie stories across the heartland were worth focusing on, too. After all, you don’t have to have a blue ribbon to strike gold. Howard gushed over a delicious slice she had at the fair that left without a prize.
“It was called Not Your Typical Triple Berry, and it had chokeberries, golden berries and blueberries, and it was an all-butter crust. It was the highlight of my day,” she said.
“I rarely get to eat pie. People say, ‘You must eat pie all the time.’ I’m like, no, I bake it and give it away!”
Along with the state fair, the documentary features events like RAGBRAI, in which bikers from around the world eagerly line up for lovingly and painstakingly baked pies in Iowa towns like Quimby, and prolific piemakers like “the church ladies” of Donnellson.
The film has a clear interest in the ways pie invites opportunities for social good. Seen through the Des Moines Eat Free Pie initiative and the North High School Latinos in Action class baking for those in need on Thanksgiving Day, it becomes clear that pie is more than a meal; it is communion.
“I talked to a guy after the film screening last night at the state fair,” Howard said. “It was the second time he’d seen the film, and he brought his girlfriend. He started telling me this story about the last time he talked to his grandma before she died. She was making 13 pies to take somewhere. To see him standing there with tears in his eyes, I started and his girlfriend started tearing up. The film strikes such an emotional chord for people. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s resonating so much. It just takes you back to some really special memory of love.”
Pieowa sheds light on the nonprofit, the personal and the professional. We encounter locals who have started pie businesses and witness how varied this path can look. Food trucks, brick-and-mortar stores, even home bakeries, all of which are demanding. When she was running the Pitchfork Pie Stand, Howard recalls many people mentioning how fun it must be to have a weekend store, but it was also incredibly challenging.
The essence of pie lies in the patience it requires, the time one must devote to making it well. Whether one bakes for hobby or for work, those who commit to the task are kind-hearted givers. Take Rachelle Long, owner of Chellie’s Sugar Shack. In the film, she aspires to own a brick-and-mortar shop, but is still joyous baking in her kitchen while also operating as executive director of the Taste of the Junction multicultural festival.
Long captures the film’s warm spirit, according to Howard. “We need more community events like that.”
Leave your preconceived notions of pie at the theater door. Pieowa demonstrates anything wrapped in a dough can bear the title. The Eggroll Ladies, for example, are featured in the film. As fate would have it, they finished a demonstration at the fair just before Howard’s screening in August, even offering their leftover eggrolls for Howard to hand out.
It’s Howard’s dream that pie is served after each screening, or even better, that people go home and make some. “Put your phone down, use your hands, engage your senses and make something,” she said. “People love it that much more because they know that you took the time to do it.”
Iowa may be a pie state, but what’s our state pie? That’s a point of contention. It’s currently sour cream raisin, but many folks find this choice outdated. In the film, Better Homes and Gardens food editor Jan Miller even calls for a new vote. I had to ask Howard which pie is her pick.
“Strawberry rhubarb or just rhubarb,” was her answer. “It would sell out first every time at the stand, but also because of the way [rhubarb] grows here. It’s plentiful and it’s free. The Iowa way is to, like the farmers, make do with what’s on hand. I live a half hour from a grocery store, but I live one mile from my neighbor’s rhubarb patch!”
Pie has the potential to mobilize us, to stir something within us to create and to give, to share with and to cherish those we may otherwise take for granted. Leave the crumble for the cake; Howard believes pie can help build a better world.
“Pie is an easy point of entry for change,” she said. “We need to connect in real life. We need community. We’ve got to take care of each other.”
Special screenings and Pieowa events this fall
Friday-Thursday, Sept. 12-18, Whiskey Creek Film Festival, Cozy Theatre, Wadena, Minn.
Sunday, Sept. 21, Screening with Q&A, The Capitol Theater, Burlington
Friday, Sept. 26, Screening with Q&A (pie will be served), SCIT Theatre, Leon
Monday, Sept. 29, Okoboji Writers Retreat Q&A with Beth, Okoboji
Sunday, Oct. 5, Screening and Q&A w/ Beth (pie will be served), Iowa Theatre, Winterset
Saturday, Oct. 25, Screening and Q&A w/ Beth, Peace Lutheran Church, Waunakee, Wisc.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2025 issue.