We’re almost to the end of May, which means National Barbecue Month will soon be drawing to a close. I hope you’ve been celebrating appropriately. You did know that May is National Barbecue Month, right? And that May 16 was National Barbecue Day? I, for one, can never forget, for each year my email is flooded with pitches from PR reps convinced I have completely run out of things to write about.
“With it being National Barbecue Month,” one begins, “I wanted to check in and see if you have any roundups planned of must-try barbecue spots in Little Rock.” Another generously offers, “In honor of National Barbecue Month, we’re sharing this coveted BBQ Shrimp & Grits recipe from Nashville’s [restaurant name redacted].”
No, I do not have any Little Rock roundups planned, and it’s kind of rich for a Tennessee restaurant to offer a shrimp-and-grits recipe to a writer in Charleston, where the dish was invented. But thanks for checking in. Those pitches must strike a chord with someone, for every May newspapers and magazines across the country recommend “Five Spots to Celebrate National Barbecue Day” and implore readers to “Celebrate National Barbecue Month with Tips from these Pitmasters.” Special kudos go to the Orlando Sentinel, which last May pulled off a double backflip with an article headlined, “Korean BBQ Keeps It Lit for National Barbecue and AAPI Heritage Month.”
Who decided that May is National Barbecue Month, anyway? And that May 16 is National Barbecue Day? No, there’s no federal agency nor standards body tasked with approving and maintaining the celebratory calendar. Americans, nevertheless, have been “celebrating” National Barbecue Month for more than half a century, and not always in May. In the summer of 1963, stories started appearing in newspapers from Fresno to Miami announcing that June was National Barbecue Month. Written by local columnists and reporters, they offered grilling tips and recipes from someone identified as the “local chairman of National Barbecue Month” for their respective cities. Photographs of said local chairman, clad in aprons with spatula in hand, often ran alongside.
The articles returned in 1964 and 1965. Many cited “nationwide chairman” Edgar W. Garbisch, “a prominent American industrialist.” Some referenced a “National Barbecue Month Council,” but no organization by that name seems to have actually existed. Though the recipes differed, an attentive reader might have noticed that each incorporated a common ingredient: a teaspoon or two of Kitchen Bouquet. The grilling tips varied, too, but they inevitably included “brushing the meat with Kitchen Bouquet” to “help seal in juices and flavors.”
It turns out that the field in which “prominent industrialist” Ed Garbisch was prominent was the packaged food industry. He was CEO of the Grocery Store Products Company of West Chester, Pennsylvania, whose flagship product was – can you guess? – Kitchen Bouquet, a so-called browning sauce that imparted a dark, pleasing color when brushed over a steak. In 1967, for reasons unknown, National Barbecue Month was moved to July, and Kitchen Bouquet stopped promoting it the following year. Still, plenty of food columnists kept using National Barbecue Month as a hook for summer grilling pieces in the years that followed.
In 1981, the recently formed Barbecue Industry Association revived National Barbecue Month and moved it to May, and it didn’t hide its sponsorship. Now called the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (HPBA), the organization has kept the grilling stats, polls and tips flowing ever since.
Compared to Buzzard Day from the 1960s, National Barbecue Day is a relative newcomer
Barbecue was not the first thing to be promoted via a national day, week or month. Just after World War Two, all sorts of trade associations started sending out press releases announcing National Apple Week or National Car Care Month, complete with print-ready article copy, which many newspapers ran almost verbatim.
William D. Chase, the librarian for the Flint Journal newsroom, started keeping a file of these press releases for his reporters, and in 1957 he published Chase’s Calendar of Events with 364 entries. More were added each year, and the book soon became an essential reference not just for lazy journalists but also for TV comedy writers, who mined it for “news of the weird” material.
Chase’s Calendar of Events is still published, but it now has plenty of competition from free ad-driven websites, which are quite promiscuous in doling out national days. Compared to Buzzard Day, which dates to the 1960s, National Barbecue Day is a relative newcomer. A now-defunct national-day site called Foodimentary was plugging it in 2014, but 2017 was the year that PR reps really embraced the occasion and started pitching endless streams of half-baked grilling tips and restaurant round-ups. My inbox has been a wreck ever since.
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