The incomparable John Shelton Reed opines about the politics of North Carolina barbecue in the New York Times:
Tuesday is Primary Day in North Carolina, and while things like trade, immigration and the deficit will help people pick their candidate for president, there’s another issue that has an outsize impact on how the Tar Heel State votes: barbecue.
Year in and year out, the way a politician approaches the question of cooked meat determines how he fares at the polls. As Herbert O’Keefe, the editor of The Raleigh Times in the 1950s, once said, “No man has ever been elected governor of North Carolina without eating more barbecue than was good for him.”
In our state the linkage between politics and barbecue dates back at least to 1766, when the governor appointed by the king, William Tryon, tried to win the good will of citizens annoyed by the Stamp Act by laying on a barbecue in Wilmington. (It didn’t work: The local Sons of Liberty poured out the beer and threw the barbecued ox in the river. Note that this was a full seven years before the Boston Tea Party, which gets all the publicity.)