Page 34 - Barbecue News Magazine May 2022

National Meat Your Neighbor Day
Third weekend in May
We need a campaign to designate the third weekend in May as National Meat Your Neighbor Day. This is a grass roots movement to encourage everyone to bring their BBQ grill to the street and start cooking on the third Friday, Sat- urday, or Sunday of May. You choose the day/time and the where/what to cook. A long as it is cooked outside and in your neighborhood. It could be at the end of your drive- way, in an apartment common area, or an approved space in the community parking lot. All you’ll need to do is get some food, follow safe cooking guidelines and start grilling! Inevitability your curious neighbors will stop by just to say ‘hello’. And that’s the whole idea behind Na- tional Meat Your Neighbor Day.
This is a great way to re-connect or get to know your neighbors as they pass by. This is not a full-fledged barbe- cue with all the fixings, just a small sample, or “taster” as my dad used to say. This is not meant to be very fancy, and you don’t even need to serve meat, in fact anything you de- cide to cook outside will taste great. It won’t matter if you use gas, charcoal, or a pellet grill, it’s the gesture of sharing food cooked outside with your neighbors that is the main point. Whether you share a fence, a wall, or a yard we all take part in the community we live in. Having a good rela- tionship with your neighbor is the basis of all successful societies. We are better together, respecting our differ- ences and enjoying the wonderful variety that life has to offer. National Meat Your Neighbor Day is a non-political, non-religious, non-profit event.
The simple act of cooking outdoors is one of the most
basic forms of communication. In fact, cooking together is the oldest surviving language of the human species, it’s a conversation without words but at the same time so much information can be shared just by eating together. Synes- thesia is the act of two senses responding when only one sense is stimulated or the dynamic interaction between senses. Synesthesia can occur by just smelling food being cooked over a fire and the crossed perception to come to- gether around the fire. That sweet smoky smell will travel for miles and signify a genetic response to gather. National Meat Your Neighbor Day is a primordial call to meet on the street.
Preparing food over fire is the basis of all human traditions. Keeping this ancient action alive and adapting to our cur- rent surroundings is the way we remind ourselves where we came from. People value traditions, especially food tra- ditions because they keep us grounded in a rapidly chang- ing world. Loss of traditions can trigger feelings of assimilation, marginalization, and ultimately lack of mean- ing or purpose. Our food and eating traditions have out- lasted entire civilizations. Recipes are the memories of our current and ancient past as much as they are instructional and informational today.
The desire to keep traditions is our way to connect the past with the present and form the reasons to continue fol- lowing a certain course of actions. Tradition gives legiti- macy to a particular set of values that can set the building blocks of a society. Tradition is the transmission of behav- iors and beliefs from generation to generation. The word ‘tradition’ comes from the Latin word ‘tradere’ meaning to transmit or handover for safe keeping. The tradition of cooking over fire is the most ancient of all traditions and it’s also the most important of all traditions. Without the ability to cook food over fire we simply would not be us.
Richard Wrangham stated in his 1999 theory “The Cooking Hypothesis” that the ability to harness fire and control cooking, especially meat, is the signal most significant transformative event in our species development. Regular consumption of cooked meat is thought to have triggered major changes to the human lineage, the genus homo. His research showed that this carnivore conversion occurred about 2.6 million years ago when rude cut marks on animal bones first started appearing in the archeological records. Cooking food makes it softer to eat and more digestive,
BarbecueNews.com - 34
MAY 2022
By: Ed Reilly