Event organizer Dale Hancock, an epidemiologist in the Field Disease Investigation Unit in the College of Veterinary Medicine, said all are welcome and the festivities start at noon.
“It’s not really an officially sponsored thing,” Hancock said, but he’s been doing the cook-off for about a dozen years and said it’s a good time of the year for a celebration. Along with the chili competition and poetry contest, Hancock said, there will be a short Willie Nelson sing-along in honor of the iconic musician’s 77th birthday.
“I don’t like most country western,” Hancock said, “but I do like Willie Nelson. He’s from Texas and so am I.”
Last year’s event attracted more than 15 chili teams, and Hancock expects about the same this year. The competition hasn’t produced any particularly hot rivalries, say between the teaching hospital and VCAPP, but it has produced some interesting chili.
For four years running, he said, a graduate student from Nepal, Bijay Adhikari, took home the top prize for a recipe that included paneer, a fresh cheese common to cuisines of South Asia.
“He didn’t know how to make chili until I told him,” Hancock said, and the paneer was definitely his own idea. “His version of chili would not have passed muster in a Texas cook-off, but it was good.”
This year’s poetry contest attracted 14 entries, Hancock said, and it’s a diverse group of poems. To keep the contest on the up and up, the poems are being judged by Ron McFarland, an English professor and poet at the University of Idaho.
Hancock said he’s not a closet poet, but he decided the chili cook-off needed “a little bit of literary influence.” In fact, the poem he wrote last year to prime the pump was the first he’d ever written for public consumption. In a tip of the hat to his well-known antipathy to cats, his poem was titled “Cats of Perdition.”
His submission this year is about a blue heeler he treated for a snake bite more than 30 years ago and still thinks about.
“It’s kind of a tear-jerker to me,” he said, because the dog jumped in front of the snake to protect its human companion.
Hancock said anyone can enter the poetry contest. Last year he received an entry from the retired dean of the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island. Hancock surmises that he found out about the contest from a blog written by Bryan Slinker, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine.
The rules of the contest are simple. Poems must be about animals, veterinarians or animal lovers; they must both rhyme and have rhythm; and they should be written in a language that Willie Nelson would be comfortable with, minus the swear words.
Last year’s winner, student Ben Werkhoven, appears to have successfully flouted that last rule. His entry, “The Passionate Dairy Vet to His Cows,” owes more to Christopher Marlowe (“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) than to country western. A sample: “So if it please thee to join me now/ Come with me and be my cow.”
Also last year, second place went to student Rachel Record for “Life of a Cow,” and third place went to pharmacy technician Janet Van Nuland for “Chili Dog.”
Like last year, this year’s poems run the gamut from sad to silly. Some of them are pretty strange, Hancock said, but in a good way. Veterinary poetry appears to be uncharted territory, but Hancock is unfazed.
“We’re starting a new genre, I guess,” he said.