Ready? Set! Eat!

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Name your favorite Maine food and chances are there’s a festival to celebrate it. Wild blueberries? Check (August 19 – 21 in Machias). Moxie? Check (July 8 – 10 in Lisbon Falls). Lobster? Check (August 3 – 7 in Rockland). Clams? Check (July 15 – 17 in Yarmouth). But until recently, the whoopie pie had no such special day in its honor.

Then in 2009, a group of people in the Piscataquis County town of Dover-Foxcroft decided to hold a fund-raiser for the downtown Center Theatre. And what better way to raise those funds than by celebrating Maine’s favorite handheld treat? Five hundred people attended the first festival. Last year the number was close to four thousand. This year the organizers of the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival are expecting more than five thousand to pack the town on Saturday, June 25, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. All in honor of whoopie.

“Last year twenty-seven bakers were encouraged to bring other flavors in addition to the traditional chocolate cake and white filling,” explains Janet Sawyer, the chair of the festival committee. “And they did. There were a lot of combinations and permutations.” Everything from orange creamsicle to mint chip can be sampled (or purchased) in the “Whoopie Zone,” which costs five dollars to enter.

Whoopie pie tasting is obviously the main attraction, but those with a competitive appetite can enter one of the fiercely fought whoopie pie eating contests. Music and crafts round out the schedule. Rumor has it that the festival will attempt to set a Guinness World Record for making the largest whoopie pie in the world.

Dover-Foxcroft “is the center of the [whoopie] universe,” declares Amos Orcutt, president of the Maine Whoopie Pie Association and the man most responsible for the legislature’s recent debate over making the whoopie pie the official state treat. With the recent flurry of attention whoopie pies are receiving in the national media, that universe is expanding quickly, and with it Dover-Foxcroft’s visibility.

That was the hope all along, says Sawyer. “We are very remote and we vie with Washington Country for being the poorest county in the state.” She sees the festival as a showcase for “the pace of life, the inclusive community spirit, the safety and well-being, and, of course, the whoopies!”

A few hours in the “Whoopie Zone,” and you’ll see what she means.