IT’S BARBECUE SEASON. Cue men around the country donning an apron and tongs and making for the back garden for their annual pilgrimage to their primal selves.
There is something elemental in barbecuing that men find expressive of their identity and their function within the nuclear family. But why is this the case, and is it time for the barbecue to be democratised?
In a 1994 episode of Friends, Joey and Chandler arrive for a barbecue clutching a bag of charcoal and a pair of tongs. “Men are here!” they announce. “We make fire! Cook meat!”
While the makers of the show are satirising the Neanderthal approach we still have to the barbecue, they tapped into a cultural truism that is as true today as it was in the mid-90s.
“It’s very sensuous… you’ve got the char, you’ve got the smell, the flames, the smoke, you’ve got the glistening little bits of fat,” says TV chef Aisling Larkin. “There is a level of visceral excitement associated with fire and flames and ‘I can do this’. It definitely brings out some primal need that is much more in men than women.”
I am Head of Barbecue in our house. But I am Head of Bins too. There is something about waste and meat that assumes a certain male ineptitude. And Larkin is right; I do feel elated when I manage to get the grill lit well, the meat cooked beautifully. As a suburbanite living in a modest home with a postage stamp garden, there is a tiny part of barbecuing that allows the imagination to connect you to a wilder part of yourself.
Despite expanding equality in so many other areas of life, the barbecue remains a curiously male space. From scientific studies to advertising, almost all areas of popular culture continue to articulate barbecuing as a male sport. Something that women gladly leave to the guys. As something gritty, dirty, messy and masculine all wrapped up into a smoky, backslapping penis derby. Where the lads stand around the fire pit, beers in hand, backseat driving the cooking process, admiring the ‘kit’ and comparing it with their own equipment back home. The ridiculous whoops of “I see you have a Bluetooth connected meat thermometer… class.”
The world of advertising continues to be bafflingly sexist. The vast majority of ads for laundry detergent feature women heaving great loads of knickers and boxer shorts into washing machines, while the seasonal ads for barbecuing have the opposite theme. In 2021, SafeFood Ireland ran a TV ad campaign to promote meat thermometers (not the Bluetooth kind). It featured a couple preparing a barbecue, but it is the man who has the apron on and is flipping the burgers, as his female partner looks on.
A 2022 Granby Sausages ad has Joe McGucken at his grill intoning ‘I am the king, this spatula my sceptre and this barbecue my throne’. There is something about the marriage of a spatula, charcoal and meat that sends men into an aggrandising mess.
But the narrative of barbecuing often goes even further than this and attempts to invoke a vast patriarchal barbecue conspiracy. Take the Weber brand, market leader in at-home barbecue kits. In 2015, they ran a TV campaign which featured a boy, a middle aged man and an older gentleman all gathered around an outdoor grill. The message was clear. The tongs of power are passed from one generation of male amateur garden chefs to the next. It’s got to the point where you could borrow the tagline of the famous Swiss watch brand, Patek Philippe: “You never actually own a barbecue, you merely look after it for the next generation.”
Do the statistics back up the prevalence of men in the advertising space? In 2018, Michigan State University published a paper entitled “Grilling in America: A Gender-Based Study”. The results of their survey were very telling.
“Our surveyed female population indicated that only 18% of them were the predominant grillers in their family, while the males surveyed indicated that 67% of them were the predominant grillers.”
These statistics belie a harder truth. If the men are doing the grilling, what are the women doing?
According to Larkin, oftentimes the women of the house will do all the background work while the male grilling king accepts the accolades of his adoring diners.
“For most houses, what has happened is that the wife/the mom/the female has done the shopping list, gone and got all the ingredients together, prepped everything, organised everything. In most cases, she is the one who hands the man the meat on a tray and says, ‘Here darling, can you pop those on the barbecue for us please?’”
So, the barbecued meal becomes a game of supporting and starring actors on an imbalanced culinary stage. The star is the man, but he couldn’t have done any of it without the supporting cast.
“I know it’s really outdated, but I see that a lot still,” says Larkin. “I hate to say that I see that, but I do.”
Just as it was famously a woman who invented the dishwasher, it was a man who came up with the modern barbecue. George Stephen worked at the Weber Brother Metal Works in Illinois, a company that produced nautical buoys. In 1952, Stephen cut one of these in half, put legs on it and hey presto: the kettle barbecue was born. An interview he did with the New York Times in 1977, describing what back garden barbecuing was like before his invention, articulates the macho, red-blooded and yet slightly inept overtones of outdoor cooking in the mid-century.
“I was smoking up the neighbourhood and burning up half of what I cooked. What was worse, I had to spend all my time away from the bar, standing there with a squirt gun to put out the fire when the grease hit the hot coals.”
Little has changed since the 1950s. The Granby ad I mentioned earlier features a group of lads around Joe McGucken’s character, all offering their own advice on the best way to cook the meat in question. How many barbecues have we attended where the men congregate around the grill, admiring the kit on show? The bigger, the better. It becomes a sort of ridiculous and primordial competition. Like Tom Hanks dancing around his reinvention of fire in Castaway, screaming at Wilson the football. But this time they’re screaming at the barbecue guests, and they don’t care.
If we take a less Western view of barbecuing culture, things are different. I vividly remember the barbecue street vendors in Saigon during my travels in Vietnam. Women grilling succulent skewers of meat on tiny charcoal barbecues throughout the city. Steven Raichlen, the author of The Barbecue Bible, says that it is much more prevalent for women to barbecue than men in South East Asia.
So, men: release the tongs. It’s time for a more democratic approach to our barbecuing culture. I have a sneaking suspicion that if more women take control of the grill, the menu will immediately get more interesting. Speaking with one woman recently, she said her husband cannot for the life of him look beyond the idea of steak on a barbecue.
Studies show that women are more likely to be vegetarian than men are, so a more equitable barbecue could introduce more delicious grilled veggies to the table. Better than smoking bones any day.
Simon Tierney is a journalist and writer.
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