Summer spotlight: Outdoor cooking at community food organizations
August 28, 2026
Summer is the season for outdoor cooking! Our partner network includes multiple organizations that are bringing the joys of cooking outdoors to their communities. For community members who lack access to outdoor cooking facilities, the meals are an especially welcome treat.
The Community Food Centre that grills outdoors, year-round
At Natoaganeg Community Food Centre (CFC) in Eel Ground First Nation, NB, chef Brian Matheson doesn’t even wait for summer. He grills year-round. “It has to get pretty darn cold to hold me back!” says Brian.
Two large griddles enable Brian and his team to efficiently cook large volumes of food, even on days when temperatures are as low as -15 C°. Brian often grills food on the griddles and finishes the cooking in the oven. The food is then served hot right from the oven.
Over his ten years at the CFC, Brian has enjoyed grilling meats like chicken legs and pork chops, enhanced with his own seasoning mixes. But his favourite outdoor cooking moment was grilling moose meat burgers at the CFC for the first time.
“It came about right after COVID-19, and we had our first moose harvest,” Brian recalls.
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Cooking community-harvested moose meat out on the barbecues for community members, where the meat was processed and kept at the food centre and we brought it out as we wanted it, that was a special moment. It’s a point of pride for the community to connect to traditional foodways and sustain themselves with a sustainable food source.
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Chef Brian Matheson, Natoaganeg CFC
Community cookouts where the goal is to belong
Meanwhile, in Wolfville, NS, the warmer weather has been drawing crowds to the weekly community cookouts at a local park. The cookouts are run by Front Street Community Oven, a member of our Good Food Organization network.
Here in this town of 5,000 people, a community effort led to the building and installation of the organization’s brick, wood-fired oven in 2019. On Thursdays during the warmer months, Front Street Community Oven supplies core ingredients, while trained volunteers host participants and engage them in cooking activities. Cookouts focus on making pizza, parathas, bannock (known locally as luskinikn), and more.
But beyond providing food is a bigger goal. As Executive Director Duncan Ebata says: “Our goal is belonging. We are facilitating a culture of belonging through a process of fire cooking, community cooking, and hosting each other.” Every week, staff and volunteers build skills in inclusive hosting, belonging, bystander intervention, harm reduction, and anti-racism through debriefs and practice. Co-hosting the cookouts becomes a hands-on training ground for creating connection and belonging for all.
For Duncan, the cookouts speak to ancient cooking practices that are much-needed in the present.
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We’ve been cooking with fire for 50,000 years. And in this moment in time, it feels really important to gather in public and cook. A lot of people talk about the community oven giving them hope and a feeling of possibility. Whether people don’t have climate hope or government hope or whatever, they start coming here on a regular basis and they feel like they have a shared future together.
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Duncan Ebata, Executive Director, Front Street Community Oven
