However, we’ll have smaller juicy steaks on the grill along with my son’s vegetable dish in tin foil. We’ve come to an understanding long ago!

For anyone not familiar with the extraordinary event that is the World Series of Barbecue, let me paint you a picture…

Imagine the vast, open plain of Kansas City’s old stockyards — the very place that made Kansas City the “Cowtown” it’s still known as today — filled to the bursting point with row upon row of barbecue pits and cookers of all sorts: big, professional rigs with hundreds of square feet of cooking surface; little Weber “bullet” smokers; tiny lil’ Smokey Joes. There’s more than 500 competitors on-hand for this, the biggest, baddest barbecue contest of them all, and the culmination of the entire competitive season. It all comes down to these two days.

It’s a carnival atmosphere with tents and awnings and a few dozen Elvises parachuting in… all the trappings of a village that’s been thrown up overnight with the sole intent of having a damn good time. In the air hangs the luxuriously sweet fragrance of wood-smoke, exotic spice and burnt sugar, while the best cuts of beef and pork that money can buy slowly caramelize, braising in their own juices until they become the succulent food of the gods.

And that’s just the Open contest. Folks participating in the Invitational… let’s just say they take food to a whole new level.

Damn. Homesick all of a sudden.

We have a place in our small little town who actually placed at the American Royal and in August there is the Rib Off.

GO MEAT!!!

More to the point, I believe grass-fed is better than grain-fed beef all ’round. Methane? Much of it (some 40%) can be captured and turned into energy. (Cow-power!)

As for CO₂ production, I think there’s some confusion here, probably because calculations of greenhouse gas production frequently include methane in terms of its C0₂ equivalent (pound for pound methane has 22 times the heat-trapping potential of CO₂.) And then there’s measures of how much CO₂ is created in the process of hauling beef around from producers to consumers, a good reason to buy your beef locally.