The menu beside the cash register reads: The Burger, “One of the greatest burgers in the world you must have before you die.” – GQ Magazine. It adds to that: “Burger Bling.” – ABC News.

BGR, just outside Washington, D.C., is where President Obama goes when he wants a serious burger, which means Bill Clinton has probably been there too. Even if you do not agree with their politics, you cannot argue with their taste buds. The “exclusive, award-winning, blend of Prime, aged, all natural, hormone-free, grain-fed beef” definitely tastes different than most burgers. Perhaps the “buttery brioche bun”, baked especially for them, helps. Rosemary fries do not hurt. Whatever it is, the soda machine alone would make a Star Trek convention beat you down for a shot in line at lunch. On this contraption, you control every aspect of your drink from brand name to flavors from an iPad-ish screen.

I’ve been in a lot of burger joints in my life and few have ever framed this statement and hung it on the wall next to the front door: “You are about to eat the worst damned burger to ever ride between two buns.” They all claim superiority.

The burger, I mean “The Burger” at BGR takes the whole category to a new level. It comes in many versions beyond the basic. “The Cuban” is a favorite of Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post. The Greek won the “Throwdown With Bobby Flay” on Food Network. Everything on the menu has an accolade of some type. “The 9-Pounder” has starred on The Travel Channel, Food Network and an I.F.O.C eating contest (whatever that means). It is so big BGR needs 24 hours notice if you want to order it. Not exactly fast food.

Gourmet burgers are no new thing if you have been out to eat in the last five years. They are everywhere. Some people just do it better than others. BGR does that in every way, and in appreciation the joint is packed. Across from me right now is a dude that, from my angle, looks like Charlie Daniels after being shot in the face by a cheeseburger. There is an entire onion ring perched in his beard. His wife, while destroying a hormone-free burger, can hardly make that claim herself since she has a five o’clock shadow at 1 in the afternoon. A plains-clothes cop – I assume he is a cop since he is wearing a gun in a holster – stands in line behind three women dressed like they are at the opera. Two lawyer-looking men chat up the office slut over in the corner while a table filled with loud crew-cut men behind me yells opinions about the difference between Merlot and Pinot Noir. I’m here to tell you, that only happens in D.C.

I’m not Dutch and the chunk of cast iron on the counter does not look like an oven unless you are a cowboy, but this thing can cook like Bobby Flay with a grudge. It will make a good cook out of anyone, even if you have no defined recipes, which, I believe, is the whole point: a Dutch oven is its own recipe.

It is wise before you start tossing stuff in any old pot to consider your options. Any investigation into the fine art if cast iron cookery will point you in the direction of Le Creuset’s $375 sacrebleu’d 101-year-warrantied French beauty. If you bought the first one in 1925 it would still be under warranty – until 2025. That is quite a serious piece of culinary cultural relevance right there.

I do not own a Le Creuset cast iron enameled Dutch oven. Mine cost only $48 and came through Amazon from a company called Lodge, an old-school cast iron manufacturer in Pittsburg, Tennessee. It has a lifetime warranty, beating the 101-year Le Creuset warranty, neither of which I would ever collect on no matter when I bought it. My grandmother left me a Lodge cast iron frying pan from the early 1900’s and my mother left one purchased in the 1940’s, most likely. I can attest to the ability of a Lodge to both sustain and possibly kill members of my family with equal proficiency depending on what’s cooking and how much fat is involved.

A Dutch oven recipe is ridiculously simple: Pour a cup of white wine over some raw chicken. Cheap wine is good. Cheap chicken is scary. So plurge on the chicken.

Chop up a handful of carrots and celery and a lemon or orange, your choice, and snug them all up beside the bird in a suitcase-packing arrangement. Thinly slice 4 garlic cloves and lay them on top with several sprigs of rosemary and thyme and couple of leaves of sage about the size of your ear. Salt and pepper to taste. I put in a little sugar just to make it a bit less healthy. If you are feeling adventurous, pour in some beer too. Why not? Put the heavy top on the thing and cook at 400º for about two and a half or three hours. That’s it.

During cooking, your house will smell better than your grandmother’s kitchen ever did. Open a window and neighbors and dogs and cats will be attracted. Since it is about 65º in January, I cracked the window and a cat is looking at me right now. Small children down the street will cry for their mamas, it smells so good. There is only one catch to this recipe: not many leftovers. It is simply that hard to stop eating it. And if any are left, it is wrong to not give some away.

Do beef brisket or pork loins or short ribs in one of these things and you will feel like Iron Chef Michael Symon in a full sweat. No matter what you cook, the results are always the same. It’s like a sad movie, you know up front it is going to be a tearjerker, and yet you still cry at the end.

My wife just walked by and read that and said my analogy makes no sense whatsoever, but I am still under the influence of the Dutch oven chicken so that is my excuse. I may cry right now, in fact – there is nothing left.

If you want to lose weight, eat at the hospital. The selection is a lot like your high school cafeteria and tastes so bad you can probably shed 10 pounds a week just sliding your plastic tray across the metal rail, avoiding something that might be mashed potatoes or could be oatmeal or even grits. Hard to tell, even after you eat them. They always have meat, however. At least it appears to have once been part of an animal. I saw a piece of animal-shaped meat that resembled something I saw on Animal Planet from New Zealand. Cannot remember the name, however. A Tuatara, maybe?

Excuse me for a second. (mumbling in background)

Okay, I am feeling a little bad about the harsh words I just wrote up there. I just walked into the kitchen to get a cup of juice and my wife read that paragraph and said I was being just plain mean. I told her the hospital serves food like that to encourage people to lose weight. She did not buy it. She is sticking to me being mean as her verdict. She is looking at me right now with her “you’re mean” snarl. I’ve seen that look represent several other emotions over the years.

I told her I was going to say something good about it. She just walked away. To make good on my promise, here you go.

One day a week at the hospital is fried chicken day. You can tell even before you get to the cafeteria. You can smell it. Or at least if you are from south of Maryland you can. That aroma gets people worked up. Few things besides barbecue smell as good as fried chicken. It kills the hospital smell faster than you can say, “That pill cost what?” A huge crowd waits in line, hoping the thighs are not all that is left. The hospital’s fried chicken is not bad at all. See honey. I’m being nice. It just goes to show that it is hard to screw up fried chicken, even if you can screw up mashed potatoes.

It does beg the question: why is a hospital serving fried anything? The answer is pretty simple to me. They need customers; not just the cafeteria, the actual hospital. Eat enough fried chicken and you will be staring at a hospital bill one day, guaranteed. Or, perhaps you will never see the bill. Your survivors will.

I stood outside the cafeteria watching people roaming with plates of fried chicken wondering how long it would be before they are patients.

Then I got in line.

Hey, I’m from Alabama. You do not turn down fried chicken, even at the hospital.

Want a better burger? Slap a fried egg on it. Looking for a way to turn regular old potato salad into a first place church prize winning side dish? Chop up a fried egg in there. Nestle a fried egg up against shrimp and grits or cuddle it under a catfish plate and wait for the compliments. Fried eggs are like optional equipment on a car. Just go ahead and add it and be done with it. You’ll enjoy the road a lot more with a fried egg riding beside you.

I’ve seen people put fried eggs on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sunny-side-up a lemon meringue pie. A woman in Opp, Alabama used to wrap wieners in fried eggs. Called it “pigs in a rooster jacket.” I’m telling you, if you want to impress a first date or your boss or turn and enemy into a friend, serve something with a fried egg on it. Keep in mind, though, if someone offers you a fried deviled egg, stay away from it. The devil part is in the details.

The strangest one I’ve seen is an entry in the Covington County Fair back in the 1970’s where a woman shellacked a fried egg, glued it to a small piece of plywood painted like a sunrise with the egg as the sun – and she won a blue ribbon. As She walked away with $7.50 in prize money, I saw the jealousy in the faces of the losers, of whom I was one.

“It is why people are so friendly in the South, fried eggs,” said a cook at a restaurant outside Tuscaloosa back in the spring. “A biscuit pinching a slice of country ham and a fried egg gets even angry people to smile.” Not sure it would get a Crimson Tide fan to believe that wasn’t a catch on the goal line in the LSU game, but you cannot blame an egg for that.

I do have to draw the line at one practice my uncle used to do. He put a fried egg on his fried chicken. To me that is just overkill of the lifespan of a hen. Do not mix the fried embryo with the full-grown crusty bird. “Just ain’t right,” as my daddy used to say. But then again, he ate that egg on my uncle’s fried chicken, so he must have been talking about something else. I still cannot do it. But I will eat a fried egg in chicken salad. So I am not much better now that I think about it.

Fried eggs are working folks’ food. How can you tell? Try to get a fancy place like Ruth’s Chris to ease a fried egg on over to the top of your steak. Will not happen. Promise. But go to a hole-in-the-wall joint owned by anybody named Earl or Mama or Big Hank and ask for a “yellow yoke in a white coat” and they’ll know exactly what you mean. I hope.

When you go to Texas, you begin to notice things. Like horns, for instance.

Longhorns are the first set of horns you’ll see. Big, husky cows carry them around on their heads, as do burnt orange-clad football players in Austin. I have hung out with longhorns for years, both two and four-legged. One likes barbecue. One IS barbecue.

Trucks and SUV’s and limos adorn automobile grills with the business end of a cow far too often down there, and if you have ever had an altercation with a bovine hood ornament in a grocery store parking lot, you understand the concept.

Next thing horny you will run across in the Lone Star State is the strange-looking Horned Frog. These spiked creatures do not just roam around TCU’s football field – and they are not purple, either. They will crawl, however, up on the sides of your house, or in your house, or even in your bed if you are not paying attention. I’ve seen Horny Toads as big as midget iguanas (if there is such a thing as a midget iguana, and I believe there is). Technically, I would call these ugly little rascals lizards. But I’m not a Hornologist.

The most legendary horned animal in Texas, of course, is the Jackalope. Hundreds of Jackalopes decorate the walls of resturants, bars, barbecue joints and funeral homes from Marfa to Amarillo and from Houston to El Paso. I even saw one today over the bar at Caliente in Richmond. And that’s a long way from Texas if you have a GPS.

According to friends in Fort Worth, it is a state law in Texas that if you serve food or alcohol to the public, you must display a taxidermied Jackalope somewhere in your business establishment at all times. After today, it seems like Virginia has begun the practice as well, although I doubt Attorney General Cuccinelli has had time to make it a law since he spends most of his day running for governor.

Truth is – and I do not care what people who disagree with me say – Jackalopes are real animals; I kid you not. People argue with me about this all the time. Stupid people. People who do not like fried pickles or boiled peanuts or Tom Petty. And those people are damned wrong. Wrong as it is to cook a steak well done or not yell Roll Tide at least once a week.

Jackalopes are the spawn of antelopes bumping uglies with big, old jack rabbits. I mean hefty sons of bitches that can push a car out of ditch in a horned-frog-strangling rain. I know people who work at major universities and they tell me there is a species of rabbit in the Southwest called an antelope jackrabbit. A big old boy according to sheriffs and drunks. It can outrun a striped-assed ape. They did not tell me that, but I have seen it more than once. And you would see it too if you ever pulled off the side of the road near San Antonio to water the scrub grass and cacti. That particular act seems to stir up this particular animal to jack it up to 5^th gear. Imagine Richard Petty with antlers. That is what I am talking about.

Jackalopes can come from other biological unions as well: pigmy deer, for instance. You can milk them too. It cures all kinds of ailments from incontinence to hangovers to ugliness, which I tried about 20 years ago, but it did not work. Results may vary.

The scariest part about a Jackalope is the sounds one can make. They will mimic birds or gators or dogs or your mother-in-law. I heard one singing like Lady gaga last year when I visited Dallas. Just to be fair, though, the music speaker was next to the Jacklope’s head and it was dead, so do not quote me on that. But if you remember a while back, Lady Gaga did sprout horns on a few TV specials. I do not thing that was a coincidence.

Before I get nasty emails from people in Oklahoma and Wyoming, I’ll say it right now, Texas is not a Jackalope’s only home since they can not only run fast, but far. And I am not sure if they ran from Texas to far away places or to Texas from far away. Either way, Texas has a hell of a lot of them.

Some liars claim that Jackalopes are just rabbits fitted with horns by sneaky taxidermists. That is just not true. I would bet Eric Cantor’s job on it. I have run from them, towards them and dined under them. Jackalopes are more real then TV preachers, and if my old Texas friend Connie Reece or her sister Laurie will back me up, I think we’ve seen a few Jackalopes give a sermon or two as well. Connie? Laurie? Help me out here.

Barbecue is the most popular subject in Southern literature after drinking, Jesus and football. You cannot click on a Southern website, flip through a Southern magazine or unfold a Southern newspaper without a “Top 10” list of barbecue joints being hoisted on their own smoky petard with savory descriptions smoking under a beautiful photograph of a sandwich that would make an Auburn fan yell “Roll Tide!” at high noon out in front of Toomer’s Corner. Barbecue will get you trouble like that, worse than beer or bourbon, even. Cue has its on DNA changing gene, turning Christians into gluttons and gluttons into bypass patients.

Having worshiped at damned near every decent and some indecent barbecue establishments across the South for well over 48 years, I can say without reservation, this is a subject I know too well and my medical records prove it.

The sloppy picture you see up there is not the beautiful shot you will find in Garden and Gun or Southern Living or on the Food Network. Those are lovely side shots, prepped by a food stylist and turned just right to make you hornilicious. No, I took that picture up there with my phone in the middle of a “Cue Coma,” which can happen when you wander upon a sandwich so fine you use a fork out of respect. You can see the fork in the pic. Of course, that “Cue Coma” condition can change from place to place and time to time depending on your level of passion, hunger and luck. On a Saturday afternoon in Winter Park, Florida, I ran across all three at once – the barbecufecta, the father, son and holy smoke of flavor.

Although Orlando is not exactly a hotbed of barbecue piety by any top 10 list – I passed a small building exhibiting all the signs of amazing smoked gold: a smell that attracts lawyers, rednecks, chefs, children, dogs and wayward housewives. The line was not just out the door; it was out in the street – the dangerous part on the other side of the yellow line where minivans roll with abandon toward Mickey’s headquarters down the road. When people are willing to stand in 4-lanes of tourist town traffic to lick their fingers after holding your meat, that’s the only advertising you need in barbecue circles.

Once John Rivers, formerly the president of a $1.4 billion pharmaceutical company, decided to ditch it all and start smoking meat, Orlando jumped up the Cue list a few notches in my book. 4Rivers Smokehouse is the result. I do not know what type of drugs he sold before in his pharma world, but I can say with greasy honesty and Plavix-gulping delight that his current prescriptions will cure what ails you.

Mr. River’s barbecue and sides are as good as I have ever tasted. That’s a hard-ass statement, I know. I mean every word. From the lines outside, I am not the only person chewing with that opinion. It is worth driving 11 hours down I-95 for is the smoked jalapenos stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon alone. I swear to God you’ll admit to crimes you did not commit just to eat another one of those poppers. In the pic up there, it’s the odd-looking thing in the white Styrofoam container at the bottom. The other three are in my stomach right now. One bite of anything in that pic and you’ll forgo the lines at Disney World to stand in John’s line off West Fairbanks Avenue in 98º humidity, rain or shine.

So far, and to the discredit of Southern culinary writers, I have not seen a national review of 4Rivers Smokehouse like the endless and deserved raves about Sonny Bryan’s and Sweatman’s that pour from traditional Southern publications. That will change. Guaranteed. John T. Edge, if you are reading this, set your GPS south and give this place its due.

http://www.4rsmokehouse.com

The dirt track hugs wooden bleachers angling up about 25 feet into the damp Shenandoah wind. A man in a camo gimme cap with a belly big enough to have swallowed a small child chugs by wearing a painted-on-tight t-shirt, confederate tats embroidering his hairy forearms. Gasoline fumes laced with cigarette smoke and the aroma of deep-fried grease float in the muddy breeze between the trucks parked in the grass lot. A pretty woman walks by with a Bible verse on her shirt while another woman, less pretty, curses at a man on her cell phone. Two-toned blondes in skin-tight jeans snuggle wiry thin boys next to a concession stand that is big enough for a decent wrestling match. I could tell this was going to be fun from county fair smell and the sound of rubber churning mud on the far side of the weathered grandstands.

Walking into the crowd, I look around at Jim, my doctor and friend long before that. “I’ll give you $20 to yell, ‘I love Barack Obama?’”

“I’m not taking that bet. Besides, I don’t have my medical kit with me,” he says with a straight face. He is not kidding.

Rain pounds the red clay track into a reflective ooze slicker than owl manure squishing under the tires of warped, colorful cars built by hand from pipes and fiberglass and a desire to win some spending money.

Nothing says Saturday night like wet bleachers plastering your ass to the seat of your pants while people around you yell at flimsy, dirt-plastered cars barreling around a slippery oval. The rain stops. Racecars rumble onto the slush single file. Everyone secretly waits for the wreck that eventually comes.

It takes 15 minutes. A Navy blue Mustang switches ends, grinding and sandwiching between two other Mustangs. It seems that every car on the track is a Mustang. I grin. Jim grins. The first wreck, albeit small, has occurred. Everyone feels like they got some of what they came for.

Above us, frantic bugs boil in hypnotic patterns around the lights causing Jim and me to divert our gaze from the speckled brown racing.

“Try to follow one,” says Jim, watching the bugs arc and loop in big, goofy circles.

I do for a while, before looking over at a grizzly gentleman spitting a slurry of Red Man and corn chips over the rail. It barely misses a pregnant woman eating a hotdog. You cannot purchase this kind of entertainment in New York City or Los Angeles. But it happens every Saturday night in small towns across the South.

“That guy looks just like…” A crunching sound to our left pinches off my sentence. What I see pushes the spitter from importance.

People stand and scream and point left. A bulbous man burps and yells, “Brrlook!” all in one raucous motion. Up in the tight curve of slanting earth a purple and white car collides with a lime green car spilling curled sheets of what was once purple and lime green cars onto the track. A red and blue racer swerves to miss the chunks and hits the guardrail like a paper airplane unfolding, sending wobbly slices of thin fuselage across the ground in a manner resembling tossed potato chips. The orange light glows from the tower, pissed-off drivers get out of their wrecks, and a hurried cleanup commences. The surviving cars roam and jerk back and forth around the track, anxious for the green light.

I inhale a haze of rusty air thrown up by spinning tires. Puffs from a cigarette brush my face, burning my eyes. Beside me, smoke plumes between the puckered lips of a woman chomping a mound of chili cheese nachos loaded with raw onions. Uncorking my earplugs, I look over at Jim. He looks like a man visiting either a zoo or a strip joint for the first time.

“I’m liking this,” he says.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama,” I say. “Wish my dad was here to see this.” He loved to watch cars drive in circles.

Jim and I stand frozen between city and country, lost in a time warp that feels like 1966. For me, the aroma of blue collar summer nights mix with fading memories of Red Farmer trading paint with one of the Allison’s while two men beat each other with cowboy boots not 5 feet away. This was my youth revisiting for just a moment. I cannot speak of what Jim’s thoughts held. But he looked hypnotized by the proceedings.

“Worth every one of those ten dollars,” says Jim. He turns, looks up at the crowd and leans in nervously. “Let’s get the hell out of here before these boys get all raced up out there in the parking lot.”

We walk away and into the misty night, our ears ringing, our noses filled with wet dirt, our inner rednecks smiling. Well, at least mine.

(to be continued somewhere down the road)

I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I grew up in LA (meaning Lower Alabama). So when I speak of rednecks, it is not with disdain, but affection. I have changed a lot over the years since I used to try to out-redneck the next redneck, but right under the surface, my neck is still a little red. So it was with great anticipation that I accepted Jim’s offer to go to a dirt track Saturday night.

Jim is my doctor. He was a friend of mind long before I knew he was a physician. I picked up on his profession when our boys were playing little league baseball 15 years ago. People kept calling him “Doc.” After several games of me bitching about the lousy coaching I finally asked him if “Doc” was a nickname.

“No,” he said in his dry smiling manner. “I’m really a doctor.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I could probably use one.” And so our long friendship began, even though it is a little tough to go eat with a man who has to check your prostate every year. I suppose it comes with the territory when one of your best friends is also your doctor.

Jim used to be the team doctor for the Florida Gators football team. Being an Alabama alumnus, I long ago forgave him this athletic indiscretion. He is also a bit of an adventurer as he loves to camp out in thunderstorms, ride 90 miles a day on his bike and swim in arctic waters. To say he may be more eccentric than me is saying a lot. But that’s what I’m saying.

Human anthropology is one of Jim’s many offbeat hobbies. Studying people and their behavior feeds his endless curiosity and he goes far and wide to feed his affliction. Dirt track racing, naturally, is something he enjoys. Under a threatening cloud, we drove the hour and a half west on I-64 from Richmond past Charlottesville and over Afton Mountain into the Shenandoah Valley. We had thirty minutes to kill before the race so we went looking for some food. We found BBQ instead.

One of our shared pastimes is eating at out of the way dive joints that serve food neither of us, at our age, should be eating. But hell, he’s a doctor, so if I go down he can either help me or pronounce me dead. I’d as soon die in a BBQ joint with Jim than alone in my office writing a script. With my medical training, however, if he goes down while choking on a chicken wing, he’s screwed. For me CPR consists of calling 911 to report the location of the victim.

Before even getting to his pork sandwich, Jim got stuck in the restroom – literally. He was yelling, twisting the flopping, rusty knob and pounding on the malfunctioning door. I thought the commotion was a fight in the kitchen over a rib or some baked beans. A woman at the cash register finally had to rescue him. After my pork sandwich, the same thing happened to me. The adventure had begun.

While we drove towards the track and flossed chunks of pork from our teeth, tablespoon-sized drops of rain fell from the pewter clouds slowly roaming in from the west. In the distance the sound of grinding gears and screaming pistons bounced off the bottom of the roiling sky.

(to be continued)

I have made it. I have seen my mother and grandmother make it. I have seen Bobby Flay and Paula Deen make it. I have eaten it at every barbecue joint I ever sniffed my way into. I have had it on top, on bottom, on the side and as both appetizer and desert. Coleslaw is unpretentious, under-rated and off the hook when done right. When done wrong, however, you best stay away from the damned stuff. It can turn wicked in the hot sun of a church picnic after a few hundred flies have hiked across a bowl of it.

The ubiquitous raw cabbage salad is a Dutch concoction according to Wikipedia. The original 20^thcentury koolsla or koolsalade meant cabbage salad. I love it when translations work that smoothly. Koolsalade would be an awesome name for a bluegrass band, wouldn’t it?

None of the above is why I am talking about coleslaw, though. In a car headed to Williamsburg today, Kim Farlow asked Fred, Jeff and me to name the best coleslaw we had ever eaten. Before anyone could answer, I blurted, “No question! KFC. Bar none. Best coleslaw in the world.” Just saying the words made me want some.

Fred slammed on brakes dipping the front end of the SUV into the right lane of I-64, sliding us all forward. “That’s exactly what I was going to say! KFC!” he yelled excitedly, pointing toward me in the backseat as if I had discovered a cure for southern college quarterbacks who take money from agents and get their schools put on probation. Southerners hate that kind of thing. Southerners also get pretty excited like that about coleslaw too. And even though I never saw one Dutch person in the South that I knew for sure was from the Netherlands, I know few Southerners who do not have a soft spot on their plates for KFC’s coleslaw. Fred is from Chattanooga. I am from Alabama. No shortage of coleslaw in either place. Still KFC rules. Kim and Jeff looked at us like we were in need of medical attention. But she brought up the subject. We just settled the question.

KFC nails coleslaw better than they do fried chicken. And if anyone from Tennessee or Alabama can find anything they like better than fried chicken, then you better invest in it. If Krispy Kreme sold KFC coleslaw-coated donuts…man, I cannot even wrap my mind around such a perfect investment. It does sound a little sick, but how can the two best food groups be bad together? Warren Buffet would buy a million shares, I bet.

I’m surprised there is not a big coleslaw fast food chain hugging interstate exits from Maryland to Florida and from South Carolina to Texas. If one Republican dared to say a harmful word against KFC’s coleslaw, the whole South would lean so far to the left that New Mexico would be pushed into California. That’s the power of the Colonel’s coleslaw right there.

When I die and get to heaven, I am pretty sure Saint Peter is going to hand me a pint of KFC coleslaw and a spork. I know this is not the way most Southern Baptist preachers have described heaven. I figure I will not be seeing those preachers up there anyway. Which is just fine. More KFC coleslaw for me.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q_wFGzjTtaU

Recently I saw a story in Garden & Gun by Roy Blount about worms, the kind people use for bait. We used to call them wigglers. In that same issue was a story about barbecue by John T. Edge. Even though I have spent much of my life either picking worms on my uncle’s South Alabama worm farm or eating barbecue from any hole-in-the-wall stand willing to sell me some, I will not try to out-Southerner either of those esteemed gentlemen by pretending to know more about both subjects than either of them. Most likely, I do not. After all, John T. Edge goes around the country eating everything he can find. His culinary resume is longer than the Dauphin Island Bridge. Besides, pretty much all I eat originates from Kroger or food Lion. As for Mr. Blount, I cannot hold a Coleman Lantern to his expertise and talent, no matter what his subject. Hell, he quotes Socrates and parses wigglers within a few words of each other. That’s impressive. But I am going to do something neither Mr. Edge or Mr. Blount did: I’m going to discuss barbecued worms.

First you have to clean the worms, then you marinate them in a generous pot of – okay, I can’t write this. No one should eat barbecued worms. Not even the dumbest drunk on a Mississippi night would eat a wiggler meant for fish bait. Do not tell me the slimy creatures are high in protein. My toenails are high in protein too, but no one is lining up for a snacky snack.

I knew an old man in the Florida Panhandle who swore he barbecued, deep-fried, boiled and roasted wigglers. He said people would drive all the way from Atlanta to dine on them. He sold something called “worm jerky.” He offered smoky, teriyaki and Cajun styles. If someone is willing to drive from Atlanta to Pensacola to eat a worm, then the price of gas is just too damned low.

I have read up on the subject. I know all about the ongoing study mentioned both in the New York Times and on Fox News (so it must be true) about how eating worms can help strengthen our immune systems. I do not care. It went on to imply that ingesting the dirt from the worm’s intestines could possibly cure allergies and asthma. Still do not care. I can, however, see why eating worms would make having other disorders, no matter how dire, seem more pleasant by comparison. I’ll take my chances with whatever disease comes along if eating worms is the cure.

A website from the UK sells “BBQ Flavored Worms” as a crispy “farm-raised” treat. Says the worms “taste similar to popcorn.”

Okay, I love barbecue as much as any three people you know, but I have to draw the line way back there in this story, long before the old man in Florida, long before the healthy claims of worm-eating and not far before crispy, farm-raised, barbecued-flavored worms that taste like popcorn. Have you ever had barbecue-flavored popcorn? Damn. It will turn you against both ‘cue and corn. I can only imagine one thing worse than barbecue-flavored popcorn: worm-flavored popcorn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDQHjYIojTs