Casey Brown
Student Life Editor
@CaseyBrown_CU
The smoke from two industrial-sized smokers wafted over the lawn of the Aggie Rec. Center at midnight on Oct. 29 as members of the Aggie Club and Agriculture Department began cooking for the annual Goat Roast and Pig Pickin’.
Throughout the night and during the entire day of Oct. 30, over ten chefs prepared a giant meal.
Hundreds of CU students, alumni and family members attended the feast, which boats the highest attendance of the Aggie Club’s many events.
River Mitchell, Aggie Club member and agricultural business senior, said the event has fed more than six hundred people over the last few years. The event itself has taken place for over twenty years and is a much-anticipated event in the CU community.
Mitchell also said the Goat Roast takes the work of many people and is worth all of the effort.
“We [have] feed about 600 people on average the last couple of years,” he said. “It is a lot of work; these guys started cooking two days ago and did a majority of the cooking last night. There were up all night, and there were 30 people slicing meat for today. It sure takes a lot of manpower, but it is fun, and we get to feed the community and raise a little bit of awareness about agriculture.”
Guests were treated to smoked goat, pig and chicken, along with the fixings of potato salad, coleslaw and beans.
Students from the Aggie Club and Agriculture Department served buffet-style to accommodate the high number of attendees.
Aggie Club President Elizabeth Cruse said many of her classmates helped prepare for the event and then served guests.
“The first one [Goat Roast] that I did,” Cruse said, “the students didn’t have to serve or anything, and I don’t know if they had to last year, but this year I was very happy with the amount of students that were here from the agriculture department and the Aggie Club – to be able to stop what they were doing and serve others.
I think that that really shows a lot about the type of people that we are, the personalities that we have, just being able to come out here and just serve our own campus and the people that we are around every day.”
Leading the Aggie Club, Cruse was one of the people who started cooking for the event. She also said the behind-the-scenes work to put the roast together allowed members of the club to get to know one another and spend time with one another outside of classes.
“We come out actually the night before,” Cruse said, “so last night there was a bunch of us out here, and we had a bon fire, and we started cooking at midnight last night.
“People stayed up last night all through the night and were here all day doing the cooking, but we really have a good time doing it … We do it to get our name out there and to show people that we are here.”
Both Mitchell and Cruse said the Goat Roast is a way to not only raise awareness of Aggie Club and the department, but also to raise awareness of food production by local resources.
“You go to the grocery store,” Mitchell said “and you never get to connect your food with your producer. Here, we can say a lot of what you’re eating here was raised here – a lot of this was raised on the school farm; that is one of the neat things about it.
“Hey, you know, this was raised by the department or the school. You get to see a connection there, and that is one of the neat things, which is a little bit closer in terms of the farm to the plate.”