A little before 10 a.m., we crossed the Capanaparo River and pulled into a speck of a town called La Macanilla, deep in the plains of western Venezuela. The man in the front passenger seat of our S.U.V. was named Lolo, and he’d been telling us he was hungry for more than an hour. Lolo, who loves to eat and loves to talk, ran for mayor in this impoverished corner of Venezuela. Sometimes when he greeted voters, as in La Macanilla, he hiked up his orange shirt to show his bare belly, round and smooth as a brass Buddha’s. It was a kind of campaign ad: I eat well; vote for me, and you can too.

Lolo raises, buys and sells cattle, which is what was on the menu that morning — barbecue for breakfast. The way they do it here is called carne en vara, which means beef on a stick. It is primitive, elemental and delicious. We stopped at a nameless restaurant next to the road that consisted of a tin roof with no walls, a few plain wooden tables and chairs. In one corner was a steel box without a top, about two and a half feet high. A few logs were burning inside. Large hunks of bright red beef, cut from the carcass of a cow that was raised a few miles away and probably killed yesterday, were cooking on skewers over the coals. Parts were charred. Parts were bloody. It was caveman food.

The way carne en vara works is you tell the cook how much you want, by weight. The first time I ate carne en vara (for dinner), I was in the company of a more penurious friend who liked to order by the half kilo or quarter kilo. That wasn’t Lolo’s style. He started with a kilo or a kilo and a half and went up from there. The cook pulled the stick off the fire and sliced a chunk of meat into a tin pan, which he put onto a hanging scale. Then he cut it into bite-size chunks and dumped them on a plate. The plate was plopped onto the center of the table, and a tray of crackerlike cassava bread was set out. No cutlery. Just gorging.

I’ve pulled many steaks, charred outside, bloody inside, off the grill back home in Brooklyn, but it was never like this. Maybe it’s eating with your hands. Maybe it’s the wild sweep of the plains all around. The first time I ate carne en vara I was covered in grease. But I noticed that no one else seemed to be piling up the paper napkins. The next time I watched my tablemates and I saw that for all its primitive excess, there’s a delicacy about eating carne en vara. You use your fingertips to pick through the bloody and charred pieces until you find the one that speaks to you. Then you pop it into your mouth and start the hunt for the next one.

