If you are kosher, carnivorous, and love barbecue contests then the first ever Hava NaGrilla Kosher BBQ Contest & Festival in Willow Grove, PA might just be the place for you this Sunday, June 7th. While I would never be caught alive at a BBQ celebration let’s hand it to them for two things: the title made me chuckle and the itinerary. The event lasts from 10 am until 3 pm and they have separate judging times for: beans, chicken, ribs, and brisket along with a kosher pickle contest to boot. And, in order to participate in the contest you would have had to register a month in advance along with your team of BBQ experts and come up with a plan and a team name.

Now I don’t know about you but I love a good slab of tofu on the grill every now and then. How come I could only find one tofu festival on the web? It was the Los Angeles Tofu Festival and it ended in 2007. In my opinion it seemed like less of a festival and more of a contest being that a vast component of it celebrated the speed of one’s tofu consumption not its flavor. I couldn’t even find many kosher food festivals and the ones I did find happened years ago too.  (Mind you… this post is not concerned with the likes of kosher food conferences, those are well represented.)

So as not to feel entirely despondent I kept searching and did find some upcoming vegetarian food festivals that look like fun.

• The Maine Animal Coalition’s Fifth Annual Vegetarian Food Festival is July 18, 2009.
• For those of you in Bristol, England there is the Soil Association Organic Food Festival, September 12 and 13th,  2009, celebrating all things organic.
• The 13th annual Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival which will be held on September 26, 2009.
• The 14th Annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival on October 31 and November 1, 2009.

On a more personal note I too am having a celebration of my own. This summer marks the beginning of my tenth year as a vegetarian. I have decided to commemorate this with a top notch vegetarian meal that I plan to make myself. In an era when time seems to slip by I am choosing to mark this personal milestone so that I will take the time to celebrate a conscious decisions that has the potential to get buried. I hope to thereby re-energize myself (and possibly some people around me) and declare once again that this it is an active lifestyle choosing to eat in a sustainably responsible manner. As I often say to
my young children, “I can eat chicken I just choose not to.”