Barbecue Nation

Isn't barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all regardless of nationality, caste, color or creed? For all Americans, this is manly outdoor cooking—messy food you eat with your hands. Freud understood the urge well. For every civilized meal, eaten inside politely with a knife and fork, cooked by women, served on china, there's the primal, even savage barbecue. Roasted meat gnawed from the bone is nothing new, nor are these associations.

Think of Homer's warriors roasting whole oxen, we just happen to have raised this form of cooking to High art. What they all have in common: serious passion and strong feelings about the meaning of barbecue.
These macho associations going one step further, though, implies that the barbecue, from the initial encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, right down to the present, is really about race?

The idea of barbecue, Freud argues, even when alluring, is tainted by associations with the primitive, exotic other, the cannibal, and the assertion of white superiority, violence, and exploitation.But isn't barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all, and belonging to the rare universal ownership. Popular images of freakish bald-headed cannibals chomping on arms and legs certainly would seem to suggest, a long tradition of conflating barbecue and cannibalism.

Early conquistadors and their chroniclers who first described the crude cooking methods of the Native Americans unwittingly forged an association that would be used to justify the exploitation of natives who slow-cooked not only horrid beasts like iguanas, but even human flesh. Barbecue is associated with a sort of outdoor party, favored by hunters and sailors.

And the sailors do what sailors do: eat raucously, make bad music and dance, tell stories, drink way too much rum, smoke, and then stumble home.

Of course, this is not to deny that racism and violence have been an integral part of all life, not merely in the America, but everywhere. Barbecue too has been a crucial element in this mix, but it fails to show any thread that the two have anything to do with each other.