“We’re not fanatics,” Dan Levine, of the Campaign for Real Barbecue, says. Photograph by Brian Finke for The New Yorker

For some years, I’m now prepared to admit, I somehow labored under the impression that Rocky Mount is the line of demarcation that separates the two principal schools of North Carolina barbecue. Wrong. The line of demarcation is, roughly, Raleigh, sixty miles west. The Research Triangle—the area encompassing Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill—is a sort of demilitarized zone, where someone who’s been concentrating on the barbecue scene, as I was on my most recent visit, half expects to see the distinctive blue helmets of United Nations peacekeepers. Rocky Mount is within the eastern North Carolina sphere of influence, where barbecue means the whole hog, chopped, with a vinegar-based sauce that is flavored with pepper. To the west of the DMZ lies territory controlled by the forces of what is variously called Piedmont- or Western- or Lexington-style barbecue—a version that uses only pork shoulders, chopped (or, sometimes, sliced), with a sauce that is also vinegar-based but has been turned pinkish by the addition of ketchup or tomato sauce. All of that should have been obvious even to somebody who, being from Kansas City, was brought up to assume that barbecue meant ribs or beef brisket, with a thick, tomato-based sauce, and that the presence of chopped-up meat at a barbecue joint would be an indication that a customer of long standing had absent-mindedly shown up without his teeth.

The agent of my enlightenment on this issue was John Shelton Reed, the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, who is one of the preëminent sociologists of the South. John and I got acquainted a decade ago, when the two of us spoke at a Southern Foodways Alliance conference in Oxford, Mississippi—an event that some of us still refer to as the Barbecue Summit. His speech was called “Barbecue Sociology: The Meat of the Matter.” Sociologists of his era often draw conclusions from everyday activities—the words that people in various places use to address their mothers, say, or the difference between the South and other parts of the country when it comes to the practice of cremation vs. burial. John and I both admire the work of the late Wilbur Zelinsky, a cultural geographer, who, in 1951, located the northern boundary of the South by analyzing a horse-mule census in the disputed area. (Where more plows were pulled by mules than by horses the South began.) In his scholarly work and in his writing for the general public, John has had a special interest in barbecue. He said in his summit speech, “I don’t think you can really understand the South if you don’t understand barbecue—as food, process, and event.”

In “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue,” which John wrote with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed, and William McKinney, no less a food authority than the late Craig Claiborne, whose bona fides included having been raised in Mississippi, is quoted as saying that the difference between the two main schools of North Carolina barbecue is “slight and subtle.” An untutored traveller might pass through the state without noticing that difference. Wherever the traveller stopped, chopped pork would be available in a bun that also contained a layer of coleslaw. It would also be available on a plate or, sometimes, in a “tray”—a small, stiff-paper container of the sort that can be seen in supermarket butcher cases wrapped in plastic and holding something like ground meat. The beverage being offered would probably not be beer, as it might be in Texas or Memphis or my home town, but sweet tea, often with the pitcher left on the table, or a bottled soft drink that tastes like a cousin of cherry Coke and is called Cheerwine. The dessert selection would probably include cobblers and banana pudding. In all parts of the state, the hot sauce on the table would be a North Carolina product called, improbably, Texas Pete.

Despite these similarities, a devotee of North Carolina barbecue would say that a traveller who missed the differences from meal to meal was simply not paying attention. In John’s Barbecue Summit speech, he said, “Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.” He sees that as stemming from the “fierce localism” that is a part of Southern culture. During my visit to North Carolina, he showed me a map that he sometimes displays while giving speeches; it depicts “The Balkans of Barbecue.”

The largest areas on the map are, of course, the two principal camps, but the map also shows, coming up from South Carolina, a swath of territory dominated by mustard-based sauce. And it shows a couple of areas that might be called the Barbecue Barrens. Exchanges between the two principal camps can indeed sound a bit like age-old disputes in the Balkans, or like basketball trash talk between a Duke fan and a fan of U.N.C. During a controversy some years ago about whether Lexington, which boasts of having more barbecue purveyors per capita than any other city in America, should have its annual celebration designated the official North Carolina barbecue festival, Dennis Rogers, a newspaper columnist who champions the rival Eastern style, wrote, “People who would put ketchup in the sauce they feed to innocent children are capable of most anything.”

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John and I were on the subject of North Carolina-barbecue geography because I’d gone to the state to look into the Campaign for Real Barbecue—an inquiry that would involve some barbecue consumption on both sides of Raleigh. He is one of the founders of the campaign, which was established in 2013 to preserve authentic North Carolina barbecue as a significant element in the culture of the South. John, who grew up in East Tennessee, sees much in that culture that is worth preserving. What he finds himself resisting was expressed succinctly by the late Southern cartoonist Doug Marlette in the days when Atlanta, in its haste to become what its boosters referred to as “The World’s Next Great City,” seemed intent on sanding off all its Southern bumps and edges—not just the ugly residue of legally sanctioned racism. Doug Marlette called it Bubbacide. John seemed to be offering a partial inventory of what could be wiped out in a Bubbacide when he wrote, in a 1991 essay, “We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ’possum, go to Baptist churches, and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.”





1 / 7 Chevron Chevron Photographs by Brian Finke for The New Yorker A plate of pulled pork and sliced pork shoulder at The Pit, in Durham, North Carolina.

His partner in the campaign is a young man named Dan Levine, who (with the occasional help of his friend Jonathan Bloom) runs a blog called BBQJew.com. The blog’s name sums up the dilemma that would face an observant Jew who had a taste for smoky meat but lived in North Carolina, where the single word “barbecue” on a menu is understood to mean barbecued pork. In North Carolina, which is second only to Iowa in pork production, hogs greatly outnumber people. The Nahunta Pork Center, which is roughly between Raleigh and Rocky Mount, claims to have the largest display of pork in the eastern United States, and I’m prepared to accept that claim. On the day that John and Dan and I dropped in to look around, it was displaying, among other porcine edibles, pork ears, pork spleen, pork tongues, pork feet, pork tails, fatback, hock bones, country-cured hams, cracklings, smoked sausages, bacon, cured pork shoulder, smoked picnics and Boston butts (which together make the upper part of a shoulder), cooked pork-chitterling loaf, souse (pork skins, pork ears, pork hearts, etc.), and Tom Thumbs, also known as Dan Doodles, which are the large intestines of pigs stuffed with sausage and smoked. Pork is the only kind of barbecue that the Campaign for Real Barbecue considers “regionally appropriate” for North Carolina. The icon on a sign that identifies a business as a barbecue joint, in the way that a striped pole would indicate a barbershop, is a pig—usually a pig that looks remarkably cheerful considering the fate that has befallen the pigs to be found inside.