This is a food festival is different from your normal seafood festivals or other food festivals on the coast, and it does sound like a lot of fun. The Grits Festival is held every year in the small town of St. George, which calls itself the Grits Capital of the World. The residents of St George consume more grits per capita than anywhere else in the world. St George puts on an amazing grits festival every year to prove it.
You might not be familiar with grits, unless you’re a true southerner, because three-quarters of grits sold in the United States are sold in “the South” in an area stretching from Texas to Virginia, also known as the “grits belt”. If you haven’t tried grits before, you should try to visit the grits festival. Believe it or not, during the World Grits Festival you can literally “roll in grits” in St George.
Anything as popular as grits deserves its own annual festival. So each April the good folks of St. George, S.C., stage their annual World Grits Festival which draws tens of thousands of grits lovers, and some of the curious, to their town about an hour west of Charleston.
Not only can you roll in grits in St. George, you can also eat grits – grits breakfast, grits dinner, and you can also learn about grits grinding. Work up a real apetite by participating in the 5K run, so that you can compete in the grits eating contest later on in the day. But that’s not the only contest at this festival. The highlight of the festival has to be the Roll in the Grits contest. You simply get into a tub filled with gooey grits and roll around, trying to get as much as possible to attach to your body. In addition to the popular grits rolling contest there is a lot more offered. There is a corn bag toss contest, corn shelling contest, hula hoop contest and a wheelbarrow race – so in other words, lots of fun for the whole family.
The World Grits Festival takes place on April 13-15, 2012 in St. George, South Carolina.