Savage Barbecue

"...from the era of conquest onward, barbecue arose less from native cooking practices than from a European gaze that wanted to associate those practices with preexisting ideas of savagery and innocence... barbacoa or barbicu or barbikew or barbeque, however it has been spelled, not only referred to the smoked foods of American Indians, it also enacted Europeans' deep desire to see those foods as barbarous--as the result of a primitive kind of cookery, savage and base, akin to that which their own distant ancestors long ago performed."

--Andrew Warnes, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food