If I'm excited about perhaps taking part in it, how do I even go about doing that?

Yeah, well, it actually has its own website.

It's luncheonswithlegends.com, or you can just Google Southern Living Luncheons with Legends.

And there are tickets, and all the information is available out there.

It's coming up, I think, September 20th, which is a Sunday.

So, you know... about six weeks from now uh in a place called hunter farm which is south south of uh charlotte north carolina and um it is a actually a um event that's sort of building off of a feature i did for southern living back in i think it was the april issue maybe the may issue of southern living called the next barbecue legends where i profiled five great pit masters who i sort of were speculating who might be the legends that when we look back on 2025 2026 who will be the the legends that we we talk about and i pick five candidates and uh one of them is lewis donald who runs sweet lou barbecue sweet lou's barbecue in charlotte and he had a brilliant idea of why don't we get all the legends together and do a big uh event and that's what we're we're doing so all five of the legends will be there it's a great lineup and um so they'll each one will be cooking uh sort of have their own station where they're cooking and they'll be oysters and appetizers and drinks a whole bunch of other stuff going on and music and all that all that good thing so it should be pretty a pretty fun afternoon limited

England.

But, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

It can come any number of times during the night, depending on how often you wake or half wake from sleep.

I've, I've always been a, a, a skimpy sleeper in terms of the length of time I spend asleep.

I r- am rarely asleep, uh, for more than two or three hours.

I'm usually in some other state.

And often I manage something approximating continuity of consciousness.

In other words, I maintain some level of awareness all night long.

We, we had been doing this work all this week, but we didn't have personal relationships, and yet we were able to intentionally meet up in this place.

was in the history of barbecue that fell out of the evolution of the history of barbecue but oh my goodness am i crazy or am i seeing more and more barbecue restaurants on the menu bringing lamb in and potentially as a replacement for brisket

Yeah, I definitely have seen a lot of lamb recently.

I just made a trip down to Texas back in June and ate a bunch of lamb down there.

It is popping up all over the place.

Yeah, we did talk about this at some point.

I've written about it a good bit.

Lamb was really one of the staple barbecue meats throughout the South up until really in the you know right after world war ii um and you know if you look at old barbecue menus old you know barbecue advertisements from the 30s and the 40s lamb and pork are usually you know together it's certainly here in the carolinas uh and lamb is often the the headline meat back then and it just totally we talked about at some point it's totally tanked after world war ii and and and faded you know just lamb in general in terms of like the american population eating it but particularly as a barbecue meat it just sort of sort of collapsed But yeah, you're seeing lots of places now, lots of pitmasters who are starting to put more lamb on the menu.

all right we have let's say 10 minutes left and i have a daughter that's on her way to atlanta georgia and i know georgia to have some really good barbecue competitors coming out of there namely myron mixon of course but then a bunch of other people from georgia as well so no shade on anybody i'm not going to mention my name after myron but myron obviously the most famous Can you do a little deep dive-ish on the Georgia barbecue scene and if it has its own influence on the rest of barbecue?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and so that snake grew up with me and I had it for about three year- and I thought that the goal was how fast can I get this thing as large as possible, because I wanna reach like genetic potential for length.

Okay.

I was a very different human being at that time in my life.

Like I thought the bigger tire trucks, like that's what I really wanted.

And now with gas prices at $5, I am- [laughs] ... man, my, the way that I live, like I, you cannot rip me out of a Honda Odyssey.

[laughs] Like that is my favorite vehicle ever.

Sure

Or grilled or anything

anythingGr- yeah, grill, I mean, certainly the American barbecue tradition does have at least some roots in the Caribbean, and how it came to be, uh, y- is a little, a little u- unusual.

But certainly the, um, the name of, of barbecue itself comes from the Caribbean.

It comes from this rack of sticks.

It was called either a barb- a bar- something that sounded like barbecue or barbacoa, uh, in English and Spanish.

Barbecue or something like that in the, the Ta- you know, in the, in the Indian, uh, languages.

And that got picked up by the European, uh, colonists as sort of like the, the way of cooking on this rack of sticks over, over wood fire.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Originally, it was, there was no country ham.

It was just called ham.

In fact, it was actually really called bacon.

In the early days, the term bacon was actually a generic term for smoked meats.

So you can actually see ads of like the 19, you know, or the 1810s where some merchant's saying, "I've got, you know, 400 pounds of bacon, a mix of hams, shoulders, and midlands," which is what we would call bacon today, which is the bellies.

The bellies were called midlands.

What do you know to be the truth, and is there a way out of this at some point?