Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: Features

The M.E.A.T. Club entertains students at events with meat from their truck.

Walking down George Street, students might notice a red Chevy Suburban parked near the Sharpe Refectory. It bears slogans and bumper stickers like "M.E.A.T.: Mankind Eating Animals Together" and a picture of a whale with a harpoon through its side. Many students are not sure what to make of this.

"I actually just wondered what it is," said Kaitlin Fitzpatrick '10. "I have no idea what purpose it serves, or if it's like promoting some food company or something."

Others assumed it is meant to be funny or satirical. "I didn't really take it as anything serious. I just assumed it was a joke or something," said Michael Cohen '08. "I wasn't really taken aback by it or anything."

But someone who spent last summer at Nobadeer Beach, on Nantucket, Mass., would know exactly what it was.

For those beachgoers, the truck heralded an impromptu social gathering abundant with food, funny T-shirts and two friendly college students and amateur entrepreneurs who made it their job to bring people together through barbecues.

The truck is the vehicle of the M.E.A.T. Club. The two are Devin Wilmot '10 and Kevin Meehan, a student at George Washington University, who started their "professional tailgating" business as sophomores at Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts.

The M.E.A.T. Club holds barbecues and sells apparel with catchy taglines like the ones on the truck. The club is based around the idea that "whenever there is a plethora of meat, joy will follow," as its Web site - meatclub.com - boasts.

For Wilmot and Meehan personally, the club serves as a way to help people escape their busy lives and connect with one another.

Wilmot said the M.E.A.T. Club started as a joke in reaction to a film the Deerfield's student body was required to watch about chicken slaughterhouses. Wilmot and his classmates felt it was wrong to force every student to watch this movie, especially because the cafeteria was serving chicken cutlets for lunch, which was right after the film screening.

"Our dining hall got free-range chickens, so (the film) didn't even apply," Wilmot said. Frustration sparked the idea for the group they would soon create.

The club debuted its first batch of T-shirts on that semester's "Choate Day," during which Deerfield plays its rival high school, Choate Rosemary Hall, in various sports competitions. The T-shirts said "Choate Day 2003" on the front, and "Hungry? Why wait?" on the back, with a drawing of a pig roasting over a green flame. The pig was representative of Choate - the school's mascot is a boar - and the green flame because of Deerfield's color, Wilmot said.

Continued...

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