14 May: Barbecues

The weekend starts here! The second weekend in May is usually when the International Barbecue festival takes place in Owensboro, Kentucky, and has done since 1979. Whether there'll be one this year remains to be seen at time of writing. I suspect the plague will have put paid to it for the second year in a row, but here are 10 facts about barbecues anyway. Hopefully by the time we're allowed to have parties, even in our gardens, again you might just about remember some of them.

1. Humans have been cooking meat over open fires since time immemorial. Since 29,000 B.C. at least. Archaeologists found the remains of a cooking pit in 2009 which dated back that far. There were mammoth ribs and conch shells found in and around it. Perhaps that's why mammoths went extinct. Remains of what might have been barbecue type feasts have also been found in the archaeological excavations around Stonehenge. There’s evidence that humans started cooking their meat with controlled Fire about 1.6 million years ago.
2. Some scientists have even suggested that barbecuing was responsible for the evolution of the human Brain. Cooking meat makes the protein in it easier to digest, so energy previously used to digest raw meat could be used for developing better brains, instead.
3. There are numerous theories as to where the word "barbecue" came from. One is that it derived from a West Indian word, "barbacoa," meaning "slow cooking over hot coals." Another is that it derives from French; the original pirates of the Caribbean would cook animals whole on a spit and this gave rise to the term that the animal was cooked “whiskers to tail” or “de barbe a`queue.”
4. The barbecue as we know it may have originated with cowboys in the late 19th century. Cattle barons were too stingy to provide the best meat for their workers and the cowboys quickly learned that the best way to cook it was to barbecue it.
5. A barbecue was first called a barbecue in 1733, when Benjamin Lynde of Salem, Massachusetts, wrote in his diary on August 31st, “Fair and hot; Browne; Barbacue. hack overset.” The abbreviation “barbie” was first recorded in Australia in 1976; and the abbreviation BBQ was first recorded in Los Angeles in 1938.
6. America may say that barbecues are as American as apple pie, but they're also popular in other countries. Australia is the obvious one, and in 2019 the UK and Germany tied as the most barbecue loving countries in Europe, hosting approximately 137 million barbecues each. They're certainly growing in popularity in the UK. In 2009 British households would hold an average of 2.5 barbecues per summer. In 2019 the figure had risen to more than 10. At time of writing, it's a heinous crime to host any kind of get together in the UK, but hopefully one day we'll be able to get the barbies out again.
7. In the UK, the average amount spent on food and drink for a barbecue is £41.
8. In Australia, the phrase “barbecue stopper” is defined as “a topic liable to generate intense debate at a social gathering”.
9. The USA has two cities which claim to be the Barbecue Capital of America – Memphis, Tennessee and Kansas City, Missouri, while Lexington, North Carolina claims to be the Barbecue Capital of the World. There's also a town in North Carolina called Barbecue.
10. The first US President to host a barbecue at the White House was Lyndon B. Johnson.

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