Smokin' For The Homeless

I want to take a short break from competition recipes and such to talk for a minute about something I did last Friday for the second time and plan on doing in the future as many times as money and circumstances permit.

I go to church with the people that run Hearts Community Service. One of the activities they engage in is feeding the hungry in Ann Arbor. To help out I've smoked pork shoulder and brisket for them on a couple of occasions. Here are some of the reasons I help out in this way in particular.

1. I like to cook. Anybody that has known me for more than about 30 seconds knows this.
2. It's cheap. I get pork shoulder for $1.79 per pound sale. The regular price for brisket at GFS is less than $3.00 per pound. You can't even buy decent bologna for that little.
3. My employer is very generous with allowing its employees to work at home, which means I can get up early, fire up the smoker, get the meat on, get 8 or 9 hours of work in and then take the meat off the smoker and get it ready.
4. It is a very visible way I can show my kids the importance of giving back, helping the less fortunate, etc. Talking about all of these things is one thing. Tangible examples are quite another. Actions speaking louder than words and such, I suppose.
5. Barbecue lends itself to cooking large amounts of food at a time and, sadly, there are plenty of hungry people out there.

There are plenty of people that help out with assembling the sandwiches and getting the food where it needs to be. This part of the prep is, to me, a very small part in a much larger effort. But I know it's a part I can do well, so I pitch in when I can.

I felt particularly inspired to share this because, after the idiocy in France that transpired last Friday, November 13, 2015 and the subsequent turning away of Syrian refugees in various states in this country, a lot of the complaints and support for this knee-jerk reaction were along the line of "Why don't we worry about OUR homeless and OUR veterans and OUR poor first!". I cannot help but wonder how much these people that are complaining have actually done to help anybody. If you are truly concerned, I would strongly encourage you to change that phrasing from "Why don't we" to "Why don't I". What can I do today, maybe right now, to help out somebody less fortunate? Maybe if more people were worried about what "I" could do instead of what "we" or "they" could do, there would be a lot less people out there in desperate need.

God Bless.