Faulkner County 4-H team wins second place at Mid-South 4-H Food Pantry Competition

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — After competing in 4-H food competitions for the last three years, the Faulkner County Hillbilly Cooks earned a place on the podium at the Mid-South 4-H Food Pantry Competition.
The team earned second place overall. The Hillbilly Cooks and two other Arkansas 4-H teams from Grant and White counties competed against eleven other county teams from Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana.
The event was part of the Mid-South Farm and Gin Show, held in Memphis, Tennessee, from March 1-2. The teams were tasked with creating a healthy meal in 45 minutes using common food pantry ingredients, such as rice, pasta and canned vegetables.
Teams were also required to incorporate a mystery ingredient assigned to them at the competition. For the Hillbilly Cooks, this was a can of mixed fruit, which they used in several elements of their winning dish.
“They made a whole meal out of their ingredients,” said Tracy Clark, Faulkner County extension 4-H program assistant for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “They made a Greek yogurt dish with their fruit and a bit of honey, and they also made a salad, where they used the fruit to make a vinaigrette. They also chose to use ham from the pantry and glaze it with honey, and they served that with rice and more of the fruit mixture.”
The teams made their dishes using a double electric burner and an electric skillet. Hillbilly Cooks team members Morgan Brodsky, Clark’s daughter Kacie Clark, Chloe Parish and Leah Smith had three minutes to present their dish to a panel of judges, where they shared nutritional information about the meal.
The Hillbilly Cooks first competed in the Arkansas 4-H Food Challenge in 2023. In August 2024, the team won third place in the challenge. Kami Green, Faulkner County extension 4-H agent for the Division of Agriculture, said the team’s experience working together helped them earn second place at the Food Pantry Competition.
“The reason they do so well is because they each have their own role to play,” Green said. “They just have fun. They’ve been together long enough that they know how to improvise and enjoy it.”
Green said that though two members of the team have now aged out of the 4-H program, the two younger members are already forming the next iteration of the Hillbilly Cooks.
“This has really encouraged and built the spark in the two younger girls to now recruit two more people to keep it going,” Green said. “They are just on fire. They’re ready to get going, and they want to start practicing. It’s really energized them to get more kids interested in it.”

Headed for a healthy future
JeAlberne Smith, extension 4-H program technician for the Division of Agriculture, said events like the Food Pantry Competition help youth hone skills in one of the four H’s: Health.
“Competitions like these allow our 4-H’ers to not only showcase their creativity and knowledge of food and nutrition, but it also teaches them how to budget and use their money wisely to create a filling and healthy meal,” Smith said. “4-H is all about career readiness and preparing our members to succeed in life.”
Clark said Hillbilly Cooks member Leah Smith enjoyed her 4-H cooking experience so much that she decided to enroll in the Culinary Arts program at the University of Arkansas – Pulaski Technical College Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management Institute.
“She hardly cooked before our first year doing the Arkansas 4-H Food Challenge,” Clark said. “This is her first semester up there, and she is loving it.”
Green said this is an important element of the 4-H program – exposure to potential passions or career paths.
“That’s the thing I love about 4-H as a whole: You have to join and go to your club meeting, but it has something for every single kid,” Green said. “One member of the Hillbilly Cooks is an ambassador for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, that’s her main project, and she could have just focused on that. But because we have all these other awesome opportunities, she did the cooking contest, she could do robotics or even photography.
“4-H helps grow our participants into really good citizens,” Green said. “It can give them that spark and help them really ignite what they’re wanting to focus on, like with Leah going to culinary school or it can be an awesome experience where it expands what they’re doing with their home cooking.”