ABSTRACT
Anyone growing up in the American South, or even a visitor just traveling through the region, knows that barbecue and Dixie go together like honey and flies. No other food is so distinctively southern, as obvious in the signs seemingly everywhere for barbecue, or simply BBQ, posted on billboards, the sides of buildings, and menus of restaurants, cafés, and honkytonks scattered from Mississippi to Virginia. By barbecue, I mean mainly pork (but it can include beef and chicken) cooked slowly and basted often with carefully prepared sauces; hence the word as southerners use it refers both to the food and its style of preparation. Anything less is not barbecue; indeed, southerners bristle when outsiders casually talk of barbecuing but really mean just grilling burgers or throwing some chicken legs on a burner. To defame the word barbecue in this way is not just a sign of ignorance, but a violation of a sacred regional norm. In this chapter, I look at barbecue as a deeply embedded symbol in
southern culture. Food symbols are important in any culture; more than just an object of curiosity or taste, they are bound up with a people’s way of life, their deepest values and identities. That being the case, food symbols inevitably are implicated in religious and political matters. In fact, I shall argue that barbecue-and especially barbecue pork-is of crucial symbolic significance for the South, for both its unity of experience and cultural distinctiveness as a region.
