Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food (review)

Savage Barbecue contemplates the rhetorical strategies surrounding "America's first food," the open-air cooked mounds of flesh, the huge slabs of pork or beef, prepared publicly on outdoor pits, dripping with grease and sauce. That food, thoroughly associated with the South, seems on face value to be utterly iconic of American culture, given the collaborative nature of its preparation, the prodigious amounts ingested by those who relish it, the informality of its consumption, and the lack of high-end etiquette attendant with eating it. Americans often associate barbeque with family gatherings, community rituals, and manifestations of local pride lauding their own state or city for the best variant on this culinary theme.

Any reader expecting a systematic history of barbecue, a chronologically driven exploration of how regional variations evolved, or a step by step analysis of the changing traditions of consuming barbecue around the United States will find little of interest in Warnes' book. He attempts instead to show how "barbecue" as a term, a concept, and a reality cannot be disassociated from the colonial experience, whereby Europeans—first Spaniards and then the British—used this food word and this mode of food preparation in the project of demonizing native peoples and later African Americans. To Warnes, the linguistic similarity between "barbecue" and "barbaric" spoke volumes for the ways in which Europeans developed a rhetorical strategy to accomplish several ends.

First, in their quest to subject and colonize the Americas, European colonizers needed to show that the people who lived there ought to be considered savages, outside the scope of civilization, with its ideas of rights and mutual obligation. Second, they needed to prove that all "natives" resembled each other, regardless of any ostensible differences between them. The Europeans created a literature that speculated, sometimes humorously but always derisively, on the barbarians of the "new world" and their inherently crude food practices.

But Europeans and Europeans in America developed a taste for this food, with its pungent odors of the out-of-doors and its smells redolent of fire and burnt flesh. The consumption of barbecue by "civilized" white men may on one level have merely involved the nearly universal phenomenon of people learning to eat each other's foods, but not in this case, according to Warnes. When white people, be they in Britain or the United States, engaged in the act of eating barbecue, they performed a cultural act. Through their ingesting of meat from a barbecue, they both announced their desire temporarily to loosen the restraints of civilization and to re-enact, repeatedly, the violent narrative of conquest and subjugation.

Warnes uses a variety of methodological strategies, most prominently the tools of cultural studies. He has taken individual texts, ranging widely over time, and meticulously unpacks them to uncover what lies at the heart of this book, his goal of proving that barbecue cannot be disassociated from the violence of conquest and the evils of racial subjugation. Europeans invented barbecue to further their hegemonic project and in the process invented America.