Cooking Ribs

Cooking Ribs raises $64,000 and goes ECO !

One so easily associates cooking ribs with the pleasurable and usually gluttonous pastime of eating ! But who would have thought that it could raise $64 000 for a charitable organisation ?

The Ribfest organised by the Rotary club of Guelph-Trillum, at Hillside, Guelph lake in Canada, boasts the attendance of around 50 000 rib hungry fans.

Also, RibFest and the Hillside music festivals have become summer events in this city, being fun events that have strong followings. A green roof above the main stage signals Hillside's ecological message to the world.

Artistic director Sam Baijal made the comment "We were green before the word green was even in the vocabulary,".

Food is served on plastic plates with reusable cutlery which is washed by volunteers. Beer is served in plastic reusable mugs. Free city water is supplied by a 15,000 litre tanker truck to be drank from a thousand stainless steel canteens.

If you drink from a can, it will be recycled, and your beer will come from a keg instead of a bottle. Grease, an inevitable byproduct of a weekend of cooking ribs, is recycled into biodiesel. Power comes from a generator.

But some problems aren't so easily overcome, problems like the Styrofoam containers that hold the ribs, beans and coleslaw. Since they're the container of choice for the ribbers who come from far and wide to RibFest to sell their product, local organizers' hands seem tied.

Now does that not provide a different picture that gets conjoured up in our minds when cooking ribs ?