It's a tough week to be a pancake in Alberta

With excitement for this year's Calgary Stampede building and more and more mouths to feed as visitors and locals attend festivities all across Alberta, it's a dark time to be a certain breakfast staple.

Much like Calgary and its surrounding communities, the tradition of the Stampede breakfast is very humble. It all started with one good samaritan and a camp stove in 1923. An unknown but hopefully never forgotten local Calgary rancher took it upon himself to serve pancakes to any who attended the early days of the Calgary Stampede.

Since then pancakes and Stampede have gone hand in hand, with pancakes being served and eaten by the thousands and Stampede breakfast events raising money for a broad range of causes.

If you need some context on how much Albertans love their stampede pancakes it's estimated that if every person who attended last year's stampede had just one pancake that would be a total of over five hundred thousand pancakes served.

With Covid-19 regulations dropped and seemingly everyone from huge companies to small families hosting pancake breakfasts, it isn't hard to see this number being in the hundreds of thousands.

Now I know what you're wondering, how many pancakes have we made and eaten this year so far? 

Starting locally firefighters serving pancakes at the Canada Day celebrations in Strathmore served over 1000 breakfasts to hungry locals attending the festivities. 

The number of pancakes consumed nationally this week is a harder number to get but with over five hundred thousand attendants to the stampede so far and with ten days to go the number is bound to be staggering.

If you wanna help add a couple of pancakes to that ongoing count, check out a Stampede Pancake Map for upcoming breakfasts during this Calgary Stampede here.

So remember next time you sit down with a Stampede breakfast remember the hundreds of thousands of pancakes that wouldn't have been eaten if it wasn't for a cowboy and a camp stove. 

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