Barbecue Theory
The word barbecue means different things to different people in different parts of the country. My spouse grew up in California and thinks, or used to think, that anything cooked outdoors on a grill is barbecue. And that’s fine. But then most people are also aware of the kind of barbecue that is slow-roasted, predominantly pork, and usually attended by “bbq sauce,” and that this kind of barbecue is, culturally and gastronomically, altogether different from generic grilling. If you want, you can think of the more specialized genre as “southern barbecue”; to me it is simply “barbecue.”
Reflecting on why barbecue passions sometimes burn hot, Don Taylor posits what I would call the nostalgia theory of barbecue:
[W]hy do many people seem to care so much about barbecue? I believe the answer lies in the economics of pigs, especially in the agrarian South of years past.
[* * *]
I think feelings are so strong about barbecue because feasts around pigs were infused with meaning since they represented shared experiences with loved ones and friends in both good times and bad. So these meals of both celebration and lament, centered around cooking a pig, became culturally meaningful in a way that make me interested in disagreeing with others about the best type of sauce to put on your barbecue. Because these events are important, it makes the way barbecue is prepared and served, important. Even if you are many generations away from a farm, I suspect this is the basic reason that many people have such strong feelings about barbecue.
This is all sociologically interesting, and in the rest of the post Don gives us a nice glimpse into a piece of his heritage, the tradition of “pig pickin’,” and the economics of cull hogs—all of which I enjoyed.
Still, on such a serious matter as this, I feel I must question some aspects of Don’s account, which seems to imply that barbecue fervor has more to do with a cultural context than with the qualities of the food itself. I’ve never been to a pig pickin’, and I doubt that more than a fifth of my recent forebears ever did either. The closest thing to pig pickins in my own experience would have to be something like neighborhood fish fries or maybe Thanksgiving dinner. I like fried fish and roast turkey, but they do not come close to spurring the same level of carnivorous infatuation in me.
It bears mention that, done right, barbecue pork tastes and smells diabolically good. Consequently I’m more inclined toward a biological/chemical theory of barbecue. Indeed I admit to having had in the past a vague notion there must be some sort of dedicated barbecue/bacon receptors or reuptake inhibitors or something in the brain somewhere. Like bacon, barbecue pork punches a powerful combination of buttons: the rich aroma, the fatty, the salty, a touch of the sweet; ideally, the bbq sauce contributes a moderate element of spicy and perhaps tangy but without interfering with the native qualities of the pork proper. And everyone knows there’s something preternaturally addictive about bacon. 43% of respondents in a Canadian survey said that they would rather have bacon than sex. A sizable corner of the internet is devoted to various forms of baconalia. (Btw, here’s The Incidental Economist with a side of bacon.) Instinctively I’d have thought all this points to a biological explanation.
But then this NPR story reminds me that taste is mostly about odor, and that we shouldn’t think too reductively about the effects of odors. Interviewed in the story, cognitive scientist Johan Lundstrom specifically notes a social aspect of the phenomenology of bacon:
Because bacon is one- to two-thirds fat and also has lots of protein, it speaks to our evolutionary quest for calories, Lundstrom says. And since 90 percent of what we taste is really odor, bacon’s aggressive smell delivers a powerful hit to our sense of how good it will taste.
“There’s an intimate connection between odor and emotion, and odor and memory,” Lundstrom says. “When you pair that with the social atmosphere of weekend breakfast and hunger, bacon is in the perfect position to take advantage of how the brain is wired.”
A “weekend breakfast” doesn’t reach the depths of social meaning that Don’s pig pickins carry, but it strikes me that human emotion, memory, and meaning generally are concepts without application outside the social context in which they take shape. Bacon and barbecue alike, acting through the sense of smell, register in these channels and therefore surely do operate, in a nonspecific way, on a level rooted in social consciousness and nostalgia. So I credit Don with adding an important dimension to my understanding of barbecue and why I want it so damn much.
Starry Night (in bacon)
Image via bioephemera.
Vitamin-D Deficiency
This vitamin-D infographic from Information Is Beautiful is nice and timely, as the Institute of Medicine is just out with a new report on recommended allowances for vitamin D. The trouble is, it looks like the information, while beautiful, may not be entirely reliable. For example, the graphic suggests that 77% of Americans aren’t getting enough vitamin D. But, according to the LA Times, the IOM report suggests we do get enough:
The panel concluded that “with few exceptions, all North Americans are receiving enough calcium and vitamin D” from the foods they eat — many of which have been fortified with both nutrients. For all but a few, adding more of those nutrients in pill form would be useless at best and, at worst, would risk harm, added the report, which was two years in the making.
And the IOM report didn’t even factor in the levels of vitamin D our bodies produce through sun exposure, making it even less likely that we are undergoing an epidemic in vitamin-D deficiency. The dispute about how many of us are vitamin-D deficient is, as you’d probably guessed, about where to draw the line between enough and not-enough. NPR:
The new report says people’s blood levels of vitamin D don’t need to be higher than 20 nanograms per milliliter of blood. Leading proponents [of high-dose supplements] aim for a blood level of 30 or even 40.
If 30 were the right number, more than half of the U.S. population could be considered deficient in vitamin D.
Obviously, the dietary-supplement industry’s boosters want the number to be higher. But the IOM report did not find reliable evidence supporting the need for higher levels, though it deemed a daily intake of up to 4,000 IUs to be reasonably safe (for adults and teenagers). IOM did not find evidence for benefits other than bone health.
Here’s the infographic. Click to biggerize it.
Hat tip to coolinfographics.
Food Bill Irony
The food safety overhaul passed the Senate 73-25 today. And not only did it achieve a modicum of bipartisanship in the form of GOP votes, it was also fueled by bipartisan snacks:
Some Republican and Democratic Senate staff members — who in previous terms would have seen each other routinely — met for the first time during the food negotiations. The group bonded over snacks: specifically, Starburst candies from a staff member of Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and jelly beans from a staff member of Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat.
Starburst and jelly beans are what they ate? While negotiating legislation to ensure that the nation’s food supply is healthy? That is . . . just . . . there’s only one word to describe it: Art.
Food policy sage Michael Pollan talks about the substance of the bill with Ezra Klein here.
The Thing about Ribs Is That They Are Not Proper Material for a Sandwich
Dear Memphis,
I would like to bring to your attention a few matters concerning the concept of a sandwich. A sandwich is a 100% edible food item consisting of two primary components: (1) two or more units of bread and (2) sandwich contents enclosed within the bread units, all of which, I stress, should be fully edible by ordinary human consumers. One should not have to worry that part of one’s sandwich will turn out to be wholly inedible, as would be the case with, say, a “sandwich” of tuna on a bun of concrete.
Like tuna on concrete, the stacks of barbecue ribs occupying the content portion of the “rib sandwiches” commonly served in your city arguably violate one of the central principles of sandwich formation. One is forced to disassemble one’s “sandwich” and eat its parts separately.
Such measures, it is true, are adequate to avoid damage to one’s teeth and internal organs as might otherwise result from the attempted eating of the “rib sandwich.” But there are several drawbacks to this approach. First, it undermines the unity of the sandwich, making it rather a meal of bread and ribs. And second, it undermines the utility of the bread buffer. You see, a core benefit of the sandwich form is that the bread shields the sandwich user from certain secondary attributes such as stickiness or greasiness or other non-gustatory properties of the sandwich contents.
A simple change of nomenclature would probably suffice to address these concerns. Perhaps a new city ordinance could achieve this goal and also require that every restaurant have at least one item on the menu that is green, preferably from a plant.
Pre-Weekend Wordery: The Adjectival Kitchen Sink
Ezra Klein shares this:
A friend of mine used to say that the rhetorical separation between good food and bad food came down to adjectives. Onion omelet? Pass. Caramelized onion omelet? Sure. Chicken? What do you mean, chicken? Roast chicken? Sure. Vegetable salad? Yawn. Spring vegetable salad? I’ll take a look. And it’s easy to go on: Potatoes vs. roast potatoes, fish vs. seared tuna, beans vs. farmers market fava beans.
There are a lot of vegetables (and assorted other non-meat items) that can be prepared in a lot of different ways. But if you’re not interested enough in the dish to explain what’s in it and how it was made, it’s a pretty good signal to potential buyers that it’s not very good. You don’t see menu items labeled “meat” and you shouldn’t see menu items labeled “veggie.” It’s like a large, blinking, sign: “THIS WILL NOT TASTE VERY GOOD.”
No doubt it’s true: adjectives are often helpful. But not always! My complaints about contemporary menu drafting are more often in the opposite direction: way too much quasi-descriptive embellishment.
I’ve come to think the adjective-seared jumble-aya of today’s menus is also a pretty good signal of a dish (or restaurant) to avoid. It’s as if contemporary menus are caught in some kind of rococo arms race, with each item buried deeper in modifying phrases than the last, to the point where it becomes a serious challenge to identify the noun portion of the meal. You know, something like: Applewood hickory-infused rosemary pine nut glaze reduction with lavender herb encoarsened fair trade sea salt and bianco Lombardo-Piranesi asparagus with ground truffle remoulade simmered in extra virgin vine-ripened Gaioli-in-Chianti and peppered 6-month chevre over a bed of wild, first shade harvest Guyana mache.
Surely there’s some middle ground here. I mean, there must be a point at which modifier gumbo becomes counterproductive in piquing our appetites.
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