Chew on this

Even with nearly 100 barbecue teams set to smoke thousands of pounds of swine at this weekend’s 14th Annual Blue Ridge BBQ Festival in Tryon, the festival food getting the most attention this time out is a bushel of carrots.

This is what’s left of last year’s Blue Ridge BBQ Festival, composted into soil to (ironically) grow veggies!

Last year, the event started turning its scraps into compost, eventually creating a rich soil from spat-out pork fat and discarded baked beans. Brenda Bradshaw, the festival’s public-relations director and an admitted newcomer to composting, was stunned by the transformation.

“That old nasty pile of goop turned into soil!” says Bradshaw. “And doggone if people didn’t haul it off. Now it’s growing good vegetables all over Polk County.”

Good Housekeeping magazine, still the arbiter of taste in certain circles, made special mention of the festival’s “Going Green” initiative when it highlighted the event alongside the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and CMA Music Festival in a recent inset devoted to festivals worth the trek. While the magazine briefly mentioned the available pulled pork, it saved most of its praise for the festival’s trash reduction.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the competition-grade ‘cue, which impressed enough sauce-soaked palates back in 1999 to win the National Barbecue News’ first-ever Best Barbecue Event award. But in an industry in which green refers to the millions of dollars Americans spend each year in pursuit of perfectly smoked meat, the festival’s sudden embrace of environmental ethics has earned the approval of earth lovers and barbecue fans both.

“You don’t think about barbecue folks being green-minded, but you give people the chance to do the right thing, and they do it,” declares Bradshaw.

Given team names like Buttrub.com, Butts-n-Breasts and Big Daddy’s Butt Rub, one could be forgiven for wondering if Mother Earth was the only lady on the minds of last year’s winning smokers. Still, Bradshaw says, festival leaders encountered very little resistance when they announced their effort to reduce festival waste by 75 percent.

“Everyone,” she says, “got on the bandwagon.”

In addition to collecting food waste for the hickory-smoke-scented compost pile, organizers recruited hundreds of volunteers to oversee a major recycling program. Stationed at recycling sites scattered across Harmon Field, they patiently demonstrated plate scraping and helped festivalgoers choose the correct bin in which to pitch their paper, glass and plastic recyclables. The effort was a tremendous success, resulting in a 33-percent decrease in festival waste.

This year, festival leaders hope to move even closer to their goal by eliminating the wet towelettes that have traditionally been distributed to messy eaters (i.e., just about everyone). Diners will instead be directed to one of 50 instant-sanitizer stations for a dollop of goo to cleanse their sauce-stained hands.

“We had to do something,” Bradshaw says of the initiative. With more than 25,000 hungry attendees over two days, she admits that the festival was having trouble coping with the resulting waste. “We looked at the tonnage, and it was amazing.”

According to Bradshaw, the Blue Ridge BBQ Festival is the only contest sanctioned by the prestigious Kansas City Barbecue Society to have gone green.

“We’re kind of proud of it,” she says.

The Blue Ridge BBQ Festival runs 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday, June 8, and Saturday, June 9, at Harmon Field in Tryon, N.C. $6/person, children under 12 admitted free. No pets or coolers. (828) 859-RIBS or www.blueridgebbqfestival.com