August 30th 2008
Why Europe Doesn’t Understand Us
T
he best barbecue I’ve ever had? Well, that would be a tie between the Styrofoam clamshell full of fiixin’s lovingly cooked by a bunch of old black guys at a converted gas station in West Louisville, and the spread laid out at the place in the woods in Missouri, where the host was a porky white guy with a plastic pig nose.
Barbecue is the unique and uniting American cuisine that inspires odes of appreciation and passionate debates over the best recipes, whether it’s at NASCAR tailgate parties or southern church picnics or suburban back yards coast to coast. But to Europeans, it all looks very, very different. From a book review by Andrew Leonard on Salon:
To this day, writes [Andrew Warnes, author of "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," and] a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue “has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name.” Barbecue’s early popularization in 18th century London was “wedded to the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery.” In one of the earliest English-language descriptions of this imported cuisine, Ned Ward’s “The Barbacue Feast,” published in 1707, “the whipping of slaves goes hand in hand,” theorizes Warnes, “with the savage barbecuing of meat. Both belong to the production of a new imperial supremacy that can corrupt those it empowers.”
Just because he spent a couple hours reading old documents doesn’t mean Warnes is smart enough to draw logical (as opposed to academic) conclusions from his research. He is a typical academic: He cannot breathe unless he’s over-read every situation he confronts and overloaded his analysis with notions born of false intellectual superiority coupled with belittling analyses of those of us not fortunate enough to be blessed with Warnes-like wisdom.
You see his over-amped brain at work again when he describes the first meeting - over barbecue - of Columbus’ crew with the natives, or Amerindians, as I guess we’re supposed to refer to them today:
Head to head, the Amerindian cooks and Catholic crewmen of Guantanamo Bay magnify the differences of the two worlds, each incarnating and distilling a veritable mass of humanity.
And here I thought they were just guys on a beach. Besides, is Warnes really certain that the misfits who sailed with Columbus reflected the “veritable mass” of European humanity? Let’s find an academic to study that! But I digress …
But this symetrey by no means places Native Americans on an equal footing with their Catholic conquerers. Rather, it lumps Natives together in order to fix them in place as innocent but heathen, and it lumps their conquerers together in order to fix them in the place of natural judges of the New World.
Wow. All because the Amerindians cooked their meat on open fires instead of pots! And if that conclusion is not rash or poetic enough for you, try this one: Warnes equates the delicious barbecued fish with heaven and the “sheer hideousness of the ‘disgusting’” barbecued iguanas with the “temptations and bedevilments of the Garden of Eden.”
So, here’s the bottom line: Europeans refused to be bedeviled and besmirched by heathen open-fire cooking, thereby cementing themselves as the socially superior masters, while we Americans gave in to our dark inner nature and accepted the open-fire cookery, necessitating that we kill all the heathens that brought it to us, then go on seeking other darker-skinned peoples to kill just because “barbarism” and “barbecue” sound so much alike.
Spare me … and pass the spare ribs.
Posted in Academia, Books, Europe | 2 Comments » | 
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Comments
August 30th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Hmmm… barbeque as compared to those fine EUropean dishes like a haggis or escargot and sweetbreads.
August 30th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Actually, escargot and sweetbreads are rather delicious when prepared properly.
Best barbecue? Arthur’s in Kansas City. Made famous by the Republican convention there in 1976. I stopped by there in about 1981. Haven’t found anything like it since.