Enslaved Americans invented BBQ in the United States
Between 400 to 500 years ago, events happen that brought enslaved Africans, colonizing Spanish, colonizing Europeans to these soils to disrupt the indigenous ways of life to form something new. At the time, those early inhabitants by nature of force and violence, happen stance or not, they made an impression that we may not be able to truly decode. However, when something great is defined, it can stand the test of time. One of those great inventions in the United States, is Barbecue and the inventors of the technique not recorders (people that coined the word), were left out of the early stories as they were viewed as machines. For a significant time, these people not machines continuously shape the Barbecue with what was available on the landscape at the time. By definition per Merriam Webster, invent is defined by 1) to produce(something, such as a useful device or process) for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment 2) to devise by thinking: fabricate. This is what I learned in engineering school, as what an inventor does and he has to protect his/her intellectual property, via patent, trademarks, or trade secrets.
For American Barbecue, the intellectual property was devised using influences available and integrating them in a way to solve the issue of how to feed the masses of elite people at a political rally. The people that acquired this intellectual property were enslaved Americans, from going from merely recognition from property to 3/5 person, and then to a full person, being freed from slavery after the civil war. Just because slavery ended, bondage went from physical to debt bondage with the sharecropping system. As America grew, the guardians of the knowledge were the enslaved Americans as they were also the practitioners that had very melaninated skin color for the longest period of time and as other societal things came available as America industrialized from an agrarian (agricultural) society, barbecue stayed with them as it was shared orally and further learned by apprenticeship in those farming base communities. The trade secrets of barbecue for enslaved Americans were never documented by the enslaved or their descendants that lived in an agricultural community in the American South, because they were not allowed to read or write, so what we know about their accounts are second or third person accounts, not a first-person account.
After a life time of cooking whole hog barbecue and then doing 8 years of research in BBQ through the literature, oral history collection, and experimentation, mostly unpaid as I definitely lost money along the way, I was finding information that was in the world’s greatest library, the cemetery. However, I like to think of the money lost as tuition that I paid for education. Similarly, to the tuition that had to be paid from college to my doctorate, learning costs either time or money. In making an invention, if a patent could be realized, there is an intrinsic Intellectual property and value proposition for someone to use it. For someone to use the invention, they would have to pay royalties or licensing fees as they evolve it, or build upon it foundations. I see parallels in barbecue, IP was acquired and people exploit without give any royalties or licensing fees commensurate to the level of the invention, even in a multibillion-dollar industry. Barbecue belongs to people, not to a region. At a time period all over the southern United States, it looked merely identical when people were cooking in open earth dug pits for whole animals that were mopped with a vinegar-pepper base sauce from the Virginias, the Carolinas, all the way to east Texas. The connected tissue across those states names, were the enslave America. Regions of barbecue formed as people move to cities as industrialization gained traction and the concept of barbecue changed. Today, if Central Texas does not want to acknowledge barbecue with it roots in southern pitcooking when you see direct heat pits with burn barrels in Hill Country, I think they should coin a phrase of smoking meat and return barbecue and its usage back to melaninated people that created it. I left Barbacoa cooked in Mexico/Texas region and how people in Hawaii cook pork because it is a totally different thing from a point of technique and we should called it what those indigenous folks want and hold it with high respects. The sad reality is that the exploitation is so bad today, that the acknowledgement of melanated people are totally ignored while white people gain for profit or non profit. Just look at what influencers, non festival organizers, TV shows, books deals etc. I hope when someone read this, say that one has to work for the money. Well I have worked for it, and for most of what I have I obtained for it, it is pale in comparison. I am so glad that I did not due this labor of love for money, because I would be broke. However, when you come today for knowledge in barbecue, please know the labor and intellectual property costs. Otherwise, you may get a bunch of wrong, incorrect information, that is taken to be humorous when it is serious matter. One last thing, just because a black person write a book about black people in barbecue it does not mean it is the gospel, as black culture is not monolithic and lived experience versus research are two things. Also in terms of books written by mainstream authors that talk about history and culture of barbecue, what happens when the books they all cite the same research and the research is wrong. From what I learned in engineering school, the books need correction with public recognition or they should be taken out of print so not to continue to proliferate a bad message. Just my thoughts, as the invented practice of Barbecue was invented by enslaved people and not indentured servants and quit citing the wrong information originally developed by Ned Ward.
