NEWS

UNC student society plans barbecue-eating marathon Nov. 16

CHAPEL HILL -- Long before November, Will McKinney was dieting.

He's not fat, and Thanksgiving wasn't what worried him. Rather, McKinney was in training for an all-day eat-a-thon Nov. 16 by the Carolina BarBQ Society, an officially recognized student organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

McKinney, founder and president of the 130-member group, defined the Nov. 16 "Down East Extravaganza" as an attempt to eat at as many North Carolina barbecue restaurants as possible in one day. Society members will head for eateries in the Greenville, Goldsboro and Wilson areas.

"I think we'll be okay if we disperse the process throughout the day," said McKinney, asked about potential gastrointestinal consequences.

McKinney, a candidate for student body president last spring, started the society about a year ago after he and his friends developed a habit of visiting a different barbecue restaurant each month. Now, society members include faculty, students and Chapel Hill-area residents. Dr. Eric Mlyn, director of the Robertson Scholars Program at UNC and Duke University, is faculty adviser. Members meet about once a month to eat barbecue somewhere in the state.

Most months the club brings a speaker who discusses different aspects of the modern South. Speakers have included Dr. John Shelton Reed, a UNC professor emeritus of sociology and expert on the South, and Shelby Stevenson, a poet and professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Stevenson read poems about barbecue. "It spoke to our members about how important food is to one's memories and the place one comes from," McKinney said. "Our increasing membership speaks to how important food is to the culture of North Carolina."

New member John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Miss., plans to go on the Nov. 16 extravaganza, McKinney said. The group, part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, seeks to celebrate, preserve and promote traditional and developing food cultures of the South.

Also among the Carolina society's diverse membership is Jane Daniels Lear of Gourmet magazine. She heard about the society from Edge in Mississippi. And she hopes to attend a society meeting in the future, McKinney said.

"She's paid her dues," he said, a one-time $15 fee that covers the cost of a society T-shirt.

Many members are Jewish, he said, and many are from out of state, including McKinney, a senior history and political science major from Greenville, S.C. "The sauce is mustard-based down there, which I think is infinitely better, but the barbecue place closest to my house serves it with a Cheerwine base, and that's pretty good, too."

The group got a heaping helping of Southern culture recently when Ferrel Guillory, director of the UNC Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life, spoke to four tables of society members -- six or seven per table -- at Allen and Son Barbecue just north of Chapel Hill.

"We talked about how food and politics go together, and how different states, particularly in the South, have different foods for their political gatherings," Guillory said. "In Arkansas, it's a catfish fry. In Louisiana, it's a shrimp boil or a crawfish boil."

And in North Carolina? Guess what. "We talked about the importance of food in bringing people together, and the decline of large rallies where food is served," Guillory said. "The more campaigning is done on television, the less it is done at the really big rallies, the great barbecue feasts in the tobacco barns as you go county by county."

They also discussed political terms that come from the traditional foods of political gatherings. Clam bake, the political food event common in New England, also came to mean a gathering of a candidates' supporters for food, speeches and entertainment, Guillory said. In politics, pork barrel, a kind of barbecue term, means "filling up the budget with extra goodies."

For more information about the society or to sign up for the trip, contact McKinney at wmckinne@email.unc.edu.

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(Katie Blixt, a junior journalism and mass communication major from Bermuda Run, contributed to this story.)

Contact: Will McKinney, 919-260-4174, wmckinne@email.unc.edu

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu