Georgia History & Culture through barbecue

This is the first two episodes in a planned series of mini-documentaries about the role and importance of women in the region’s barbecue traditions both in the past and the present. Featured in these videos are two women pitmasters/bbq restaurant owners in Georgia—Jenica Gilmore of Vanna BBQ in Vanna and Tammy Woodard of Smokey’s BBQ in Garden City.

Our focus in this series will be on women pitmasters and restaurant owners operating in a ‘traditionally male dominated’ profession who have overcome adversity and a wall of “tradition” that blocked their entrance into the business of barbecue. We also examine women’s efforts to keep their businesses afloat during COVID, barbecue as an entrepreneurial opportunity for women who do not have the financial means to open a large business, maintaining a culinary tradition in the region, and acceptance by the local community.

Despite abounding historical evidence to the contrary, the prevailing popular image of the southern barbecue pitmaster has been white and male. But the historical record and present practice both refute such prejudicial presumptions and perspectives, with Black Southerners and Southern Women consistently occupying an essential, if marginalized, place around the pit and at the table in the region’s barbecue culture and history.

In the American South early and persistent claims to “authenticity” in the region’s barbecue culture have tended to defy this inherent diversity and variety by imposing monolithic “standards” to which barbecue pitmasters either conformed or risked ostracization. Like other forms of cultural expression, barbecue “purists” constructed arbitrary walls around the cause of authenticity almost wholly out of alignment with historical patterns of cultural development. The American South embodies these trends when focusing on issues of gender and race in producing, consuming, and assigning cultural meaning to barbecue.