Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

The Washington Post finally climbs down from its high horse to talk about the real issues facing our country today:

And so it began, as it has countless times before. Bledsoe and Rogers have been puffing up the barbecue feud between eastern North Carolina and western North Carolina for decades. Bledsoe -- a former newspaper columnist turned best-selling crime book author -- is undeniably Mr. Western-Style, extolling the virtues of melty-tender pork shoulders glazed with a ketchup-based sauce. Rogers is adamantly Mr. Eastern-Style, pontificating about the vinegar-heavy morsels of whole hog favored Down East along North Carolina's coast.
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"People who would put ketchup in the sauce they feed to innocent children are capable of most anything," Rogers told his readers in the Raleigh News & Observer after word leaked about the barbecue festival bill. "Let the word go forth from this time and place that we, the Eastern North Carolina purveyors of pure barbecue, will not be roadkill for our western kin."
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"I guess it's the ultimate pork-barreling," said state Rep. Jerry Dockham, a Republican who co-sponsored the bill that would give the barbecue festival in his home county the state's imprimatur.
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The eastern-style advocates can rightly stake a claim as North Carolina's original barbecue. They smoke an entire hog, or cook it over electrical coils, and slather the meat in a sauce made from vinegar -- usually apple cider -- black pepper and red pepper flakes.

The western style, according to legend, developed in the 1920s in Lexington, where cash-strapped country folk bought barbecue sold from tents outside the courthouse. The meat came from the cheapest part of the pig -- the shoulder. The sauce was sweeter, with heavy doses of sugar and ketchup, some black pepper and only a dash of vinegar.

There is no bigger issue. Eastern Carolina-style, vinegar-based barbecue is the greatest food ever created on God's green earth, no matter how many unidentifiable pig parts you may find. I will brook no dissent on either of the following topics: Eastern Carolina-style is the best, and barbecue is better when the place making it just barely qualified for the health inspector. Also, sweet tea is fantastic.