The Future of Barbecue

The future of authentic slow-cooked barbecue in the United States is not clear. Old-fashioned barbecue cookery is labor intensive and time consuming, many of its prime practitioners are nearing retirement, and few younger people are willing to take their places. Environmental and safety regulations in many parts of the country make it difficult for barbecue restaurants to continue to operate their wood-burning pits. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, interest in old-fashioned barbecue was at an all-time high. One of the reasons was the growing popularity of barbecue contests. Two of the biggest contests were the American Royal Barbecue Contest in Kansas City and the Memphis in May Contest, which started in the 1980s as relatively small, local barbecue cook-offs. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, each of these contests was drawing crowds of over 100,000. Most of the contestants were nonprofessional cooks who competed on teams, many of them with such colorful names as Elvis Porksley’s Greaseland Porkers, The Pit and the Pigulum, or Tangled Up in ‘Que, to name but a few examples.