Every time I go home, I am greeted by a stack of newspaper articles on my bed; my mom has a habit of cutting out clippings from our local papers and saving them for me to read. I normally just skim through the articles and then toss them in the recycling bin, but a piece with the headline "Students get credit for road trip assessing merits of Southern barbecue" caught my eye on my most recent trip home.
My local paper on Feb. 15 ran an Associated Press article about four students from Birmingham-Southern College. They took a trip through Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, eating barbecue for credit through their school's winter term program that allows students to design their own courses. The "course" was created to help the participants "develop their writing ... their storytelling and descriptive skills." The students, who dubbed themselves the Southern BBQ Boys, have a Web site, Southernbbqboys.com, where they blogged about their travels. On the site, they describe their project as a "17-day academic journey across the South to eat, analyze, and blog about Southern barbecue ... [focusing] on the cultural origins, differences in style, and significance of Southern pork barbecue through the framework of food and travel writing."
When I finished reading the article, I immediately had visions of grandeur of traveling across the South Guy Fieri-style, from Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, eating some 'Q and somehow swinging course credit for it.
When I came back to reality and gave up my short-lived dreams of backwards sunglasses and a sweet red Camaro, I still couldn't get the thought of food for an academic purpose out of my head. I think the Southern BBQ Guys are on to something; in terms of studying the culture of a people from any time period in any part of the world, food is a constant that can always be analyzed. Methods to procure, prepare and store food have occupied people's minds basically since homo became erectus.
Certain parts of the country are defined by popular foods; the Deep South has pork barbecue, Texas is the home of all things beef and the Pacific Northwest is known for fresh fish. If there is one food I can think of that is quintessential New England fare, it is seafood and -- more specifically -- it's lobster. My all time favorite lobster preparation that screams summer on a beach in New England is a lobster roll. When it's done right, a lobster roll has chunks of chilled lobster meat mixed into a salad with just enough mayo to bind everything together, maybe a few finely-chopped veggies and lemon juice, all piled high onto a buttered, toasted hotdog roll. It's sweet, salty, savory, crunchy, creamy perfection.
So in the spirit of the Southern BBQ Guys, historical analysis and culinary adventure, I propose a study of New England through lobster rolls (can anyone say potential ExCollege class?). I would start the journey off in Maine and travel down through Connecticut, sampling different varieties of the dish along the way -- Maine lobster rolls are traditional, restaurants in Boston feature rolls with a gourmet twist, places in Rhode Island use hamburger buns instead of hotdog rolls and the Connecticut lobster roll is often made with drawn butter instead of mayo and is served warm. These various preparations are as diverse as the local histories of the regions that serve them.
But back to reality again. Maybe actually traveling through New England wouldn't work logistically, but using lobster as a jumping-off point to study the culinary and cultural history of our part of the country, just like the Southern BBQ Boys did with pork and the South, is a tasty twist on academia.
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Caryn Horowitz is a junior majoring in history. She can be reached at Caryn.Horowitz@tufts.edu.
