Smoked Meat and the Anthropology of Food

An Introduction

James R. Veteto and Edward M. Maclin

It seems only fitting that anthropology would have an interest in the slow cooking of meat on a spit over an open pit of coals, as it is one of the most ancient ways of food preparation known to human beings. Yet it is also a contemporary foodway in many parts of the world, so its persistence spans nearly the whole trajectory, as we currently know it, of human cultural experience. Many would perhaps not be surprised then that the much discussed and maligned etymology of the word barbecue can be traced to the Spanish word barbacoa, a bastardization of an American Indian term, used by the pioneering nineteenth-century anthropologist E. B. Tylor to describe "a framework of sticks set upon posts" (used by the Arawak of Hispaniola to smoke animals over a hot coals) in his work Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (cited in Warnes 2008). Of course, Andrew Warnes has argued that Tylor's term was significantly lacking in accuracy and infused with Eurocentrism. Nonetheless, it is striking that one of the founding fathers of anthropology has been so influential in the origin and spread of the word that we now know, in English, simply as "barbecue" (so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary cites Tylor, apparently inaccurately, as the original authority on the term).

Nearly all anthropologists, and perhaps a smattering of other anthropologically savvy readers, will recognize that our title is a play on the book The Raw and the Cooked, by the great French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969). Lévi-Strauss saw these two categories of food as representing a pair of binary opposites that denoted a deeper level of structural organization universally common to all human beings. Ours is not quite such a broad claim. By denoting "Slaw" and "Slow Cooked," we have pointed out two components of a barbecue meal that are ubiquitously present in all subregions of the American South. However, that is where our modest structural analysis will end, not the least of reasons being that the human culinary variation laid upon those two basic categories of food is so dazzlingly diverse and particular that it prompted barbecue scholar John Shelton Reed to famously make the observation that "Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes" (2004, 78).

Situated among a wide diversity of world barbecue traditions are those of the American South, where intraregional variations of slow-cooked, smoked meat have an almost cultlike following. It is an oft-repeated saying in the South that there are three subjects that must either be avoided in casual conversation or be defended to the death, and those are, in no particular order, religion, politics, and barbecue (with college football not far behind as a fourth contentious topic). This book is a collection of essays that articulate a kaleidoscopic look at one of the major barbecue regions within the U.S. South, that of the Mid-South. West Tennessee/Memphis is the best known, and arguably the hub, of the Mid-South barbecue tradition and as such receives the bulk of our attention. Yet the spokes of this hub reach out into neighboring subregions and states. This collection investigates snapshots of Mid-South barbecue from middle Tennessee and Mississippi to central and southern Arkansas, and even into the Piney Woods of northernmost Louisiana.

Our delineation of the Mid-South is, of course, to a large extent arbitrary, but has also been borne out through the life experiences and ethnographic work of the authors. Veteto came of age eating barbecue at family gatherings and roadside joints between Lexington, Tennessee, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, every summer, and Maclin grew up firmly in the West Tennessee barbecue tradition from the vantage point of his family's historic farmstead near Stanton, Tennessee. Though Veteto noticed differences between the barbecue served in Lexington and Hot Springs, he also observed that they were a lot more similar to each other than to the barbecue of North Carolina, Georgia, or Texas. Other scholars have likewise noticed continuity in the barbecue of the Mid-South, but have defined the region in slightly different geographic terms. For instance, Southern food writer John Egerton sees Mid-South barbecue as existing in the section of Tennessee "that includes the area north of Jackson and around Dyersburg. It extends into parts of Arkansas and Kentucky. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but that's barbecue country to me" (qtd. in Kelly 2007, 112). In this book we will attempt to define our interpretation of Mid-South barbecue as we go along. We are confident that readers will get a better understanding of the variety and commonalities of barbecue served within the region as they read through the case studies presented in this volume. We will also challenge the boundaries of our delineated region by presenting case studies from border areas such as the Timberlands of southern Arkansas and northernmost Louisiana, where barbecue enthusiasts are torn between two competing traditions: the Delta-style Mid-South pork barbecue and vinegar-based sauces found in the eastern portion of the Timberlands, and the Texas-style beef brisket and sweeter sauces found in its more westerly locations (see Nolan, Chapter 4, this volume).

Unfortunately, Southern barbecue has received scant attention in the vast literature of the anthropology of food. Warnes (2008) argues that this is because of a bias by famous anthropological food scholars such as Sidney Mintz, who dismiss the assumed-to-be completely invented, commercialized, and unhealthy nature of Southern barbecue in favor of the more organic and traditional lifeways of regions such as Mediterranean Europe....