Yes I'm a Committed Vegetarian and Yes I Love Netflix's 'Barbecue Showdown'
At my secondary school, there was an urban myth about philosophy (I was educated in France). It forewarned that, as you proceeded through higher education, philosophy-essay questions would get indescribably harder. The ones we were then being set were along the lines of, “Is art necessary?”, but, by the end of university, it was posited, we’d be answering prompts of just one word. “Swear to God,” the rumour-spreaders would say, “The question could just be ‘Meat’.”
Lately, I’ve had occasion to turn the subject over in my mind, like a rib-eye on the griddle of my brain, to use a simile that doesn’t quite work. In the last year, I – a dedicated, committed, some might even say, boring vegetarian – became hooked on The American Barbecue Showdown. TABS, as no one calls it (not even Netflix, who shortened it to Barbecue Showdown for season 3), is a programme that lives and breathes meat; a show that has red-hot blood running through its red-hot blood; a cookery competition where you can practically smell the Maillard reaction in real-time. I would no more eat a chicken nugget than I would punch a baby, and yet, there I was, sagely observing to my housemates, “Ah, man, he didn’t brown his hog enough, that’s a disaster for him right there,” as I mainlined falafels.
I first got meat-hooked last year, around the release of TABS’ triumphant second season, as word of mouth reached me that there was a loud and inviting newbie on the cookery competition block. Imagine The Great British Bake Off – but with T-bone instead of sponge and the American deep south in place of rain-spattered England. Instead of contestants called Susan or Brian, you have John Boy, Kent or (I’m not even joking) Shotgun. Instead of an adorable marquee hung with bunting, there is a barn and a fire pit. Instead of cuddly Paul Hollywood, there is the fearsome Melissa Cookston, a restaurateur and seven-time world American barbecue champion, twisting her jaw forbiddingly around vowel sounds hitherto unknown to man; instead of mild innuendo, there is Jesus.
While there are many things a person can bake – biscuits, cakes, breads of all kind – after watching a mere three episodes, it became increasingly apparent that there really aren’t that many ways to barbecue food. Every single instalment of TABS contained a highly wobbly variant on the challenge “Cook us meat and two sides”. Season 3, Episode 1 (“Bad to the Bone”)? Meat and two sides. Episode 2 (“Brew and ‘Cue”)? Two meats and two sides. Episode 3? The cooking challenge, here, is to cook two meats, as well as two sides.
When I first started watching, like a rube, I imagined that there would be a vegetarian round at some point, to really test the skills of the participants. “Will they marinade celeriac steaks?” I pondered. “Will they do griddled aubergine three ways?” What a fool I was! Every single episode of The American Barbecue Showdown was laser-focused on one thing and one thing only: the cooking, on open fire, of a big chunk of animal flesh. At the end of each challenge, the host, actor and comedian Michelle Buteau, cried, “Show me the meat!”
In fact, The American Barbecue Showdown was so much about meat, and so American, that it routinely discussed cuts of meat we’ve scarcely heard of here, in the embarrassing, effete, soup-swilling UK. Contestants cooked things called “tri-tip”, “dino ribs”, tomahawk steak and all manner of flank, shank and brisket. Why did these meats sound so vastly more meaty than anything we have? Rump and rib-eye seemed suddenly pathetic, like the names of pirates in a story by an eight-year-old.
The cuts themselves were great quavering sides of raw meat the size of an adult labrador, trussed up and seared and bundled onto coals, which then turned brown and golden, oozing juices as the judges passed comment on the “bark” (outer shell) and tender interior of the steak or chop. “This is goooooood brisket,” Kevin Bludso, a relaxed American barbecue restaurateur, or the Prue to Melissa’s Paul, would astutely drawl. “You can sure cook meat.”
I need to be clear that at no point did I look at the meat and want to eat it. This wasn’t about reversing a life regret. The meat was revolting to me. I found the fat and veinage repellent; I was sickened by the jiggle of the uncooked carcass. All of the searing, charring, smoking, pulling and braising seemed quite profoundly strange; two weeks ago, my 10-year-old asked me to explain to him what an egg tastes like. My reply, “like a wobbly, creamy meat”, did not help either of us look less like aliens.
My enjoyment of the show stemmed from the brutality of the meat, its violence. What meat signifies, of course, is death, and our primal essence as hunters. Perhaps, in these fraught times, there was a kind of thrill from being confronted with that. There was something fascinatingly defensive about the show, in the way that issues around environmental decline and animal welfare were not allowed to creep in. It has been known for years now that we all desperately need to cut back on meat-eating; that animal-rearing is simply not sustainable at current rates. But you wouldn’t know that from TABS or Masterchef – or pretty much every food writer and TV chef at work.
The American Barbecue Showdown blithely presents a bygone world of merry hog-eating as if this could be an enduring reality. Is this a last-gasp act of defiance from people who, like cigarette executives in the 90s, know that the heyday of their favourite pastime is pretty much up? There was something admirable in that bravado, even as it refuses to face painful truths.
In July, a casting call went out for season four, now simply titled Barbecue Showdown. Ignoring the fact that it was recruiting the best backyard or competitive barbecuer in America, and that I currently live in a first-floor flat in Haringey, I wondered if it was time to throw my metaphorical Stetson into the ring. Was I destined to be the first, pioneering vegetarian barbecuer, dazzling Melissa and Kevin with my griddled aubergine trifecta, and waving some lightly smoked courgette flowers in front of my fellow contestants’ oozing tomahawks? But no, it was a crossing of the protein rubicon for which I wasn’t quite ready. But I’ll certainly tune in, archly chewing my lettuce, hopped up on moral rectitude as the world hares giddily towards the abyss, and cheering for the oblivious, down-home Dixie meat-wranglers as we go.
This piece appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire. Subscribe here.
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