EDITORIALS & LETTERS

I’ve been thinking about CASI pods. Great Peppers are busy documenting pod facts to prove they are acceptable to CASI Bylaw requirements. To retain CASI affiliation, a pod must have twenty-five paid members, at least one annual meeting and election of officers, an annual pod cookoff, and must work for the promotion of chili through CASI only.

A survey of the CASI landscape reveals a very diverse scenario as to how these requirements are filled. There are pods with close to two hundred members and there are pods that only have a small handful of members with an adequate number of names added to reach twenty-five. There are pods that have formal monthly meetings and pods that call it a meeting when a few members attend the same cookoff. There have been “paper” pods that really exist only on paper.

You can look further into the details and see that there are many pods with 100+ names on their membership lists that can’t get more than a half dozen members to attend a meeting. There are very large pods whose membership list has the same names as many other pods’ lists and few of the members live within a hundred miles of where the pod is based. There are pods that exist only for some perceived political advantage – a vote at the Great Peppers Meeting.

There are many ways to satisfy the paper requirements for CASI, but what is really important for our pods? Is it enough to have a locale with an enthusiastic, unified group of cooks who promote CASI and develop successful cookoffs in their area? Should the membership requirement refer to local members? Is twenty-five the appropriate number or could a smaller number succeed?

What do you think?


POTPOURRI

Happy Birthday to Donell Dickerson, Peggy Gahagan, Terry Guerra, Ruth Peach, Jeannette Cardenas (today) and Jim Hedrick, Kay Mallet, Gene Shouse, Al McDonald (Saturday).

“Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.” - Tallulah Bankhead

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