Article - Now, Who Wants Burgers?

Now, Who Wants Burgers?
by William I. Lengeman III
(Originally published in the Lebanon Daily News)

The backyard barbecue. It's the Great American Pastime. Nothing defines suburban American culture more than a good old fashioned cookout. Just the word alone evokes images of Ward Cleaverish fathers, outfitted in tacky aprons and chef's hats and armed with sharp knives and long forks, standing over a dangerously unstable charcoal grill while they tend to burgers and wieners, or for the more upscale crowd, steaks, chicken or fish.

The backyard barbecue is every bit as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. Maybe even more so. According to the Naperville, Illinois-based Barbecue Industry Association, Americans fired up their grills more that 2.7 billion times in 1995, almost double from 1987's total. The average American grill is used 4.5 times a month during barbecue season. July 4 is the overwhelming favorite for cookouts, followed by Labor Day and Memorial Day.

Grill ownership was at an all-time high in 1995 and Americans are barbecuing year round more than ever. More than eleven million grills were sold in 1995. Seventy four million American households own a grill. Ownership is more highly concentrated among younger, larger families with higher incomes.

When referring to the grill, that penultimate icon of suburbia, it seems particularly fitting to borrow from the old advertising slogan - you've come a long way baby. A long way from the rickety, flying saucer shaped charcoal grills that used to inhabit every backyard from Bangor to Juneau and from Phoenix to Fort Lauderdale. A long way from long, drawn out battles with messy, uncooperative charcoal briquettes and cans of smelly lighter fluid that threatened to turn Dad into a human torch at any moment.

Barbecuing has become a deeply ingrained tradition in the United States over the last four or so decades. But it has roots that stretch back to prehistory, back to that earthshaking moment when a primitive cave dweller first thought to stick a piece of meat into a fire. It's agreed that Native American cultures later raised the practice of grilling food to a fine art. Even the word "barbecue" is derived from a Taino Indian word for a latticework grill. The Tainos, a tribe that inhabited the Greater Antilles, also gave the English language words like canoe, tobacco and hammock.

As the twenty-first century draws near, backyard grilling has reached a level of sophistication that would leave cave dwellers and Tainos with their mouths agape. The charcoal grill still rules the roost, but gas grills are catching up. 56% of Americans own charcoal grills, 55% own an LP gas grill, and a smaller percentage own natural gas or electric grills.

This is probably no news flash, but men are more likely to barbecue than women. Men also make buying decisions regarding new grills 57% of the time. However, women are more likely to instigate a barbecue in the first place, and they also decide what's going to be grilled. The most popular choice? Hamburgers, followed by steak, chicken and hot dogs.

The standard backyard charcoal grill, of the flying saucer variety, the one we all know and love so well, was born in the Fifties and it's still the most popular type of charcoal grill. George Stephens invented the device, fashioning it out of pieces of metal taken from buoys. As of 1995, the Palatine, Illinois-based firm of Weber-Stephens Products, the company that grew up around Stephens' invention, commanded a 46% chunk of the barbecue grill market, a chunk that netted the firm a sizzling $130 million in sales.

For Weber-Stephens, as for all grill manufacturers, it's a dramatically different marketplace today. The most significant change can be summarized in only two words - gas grill. Over half of all grill owners claim that their next purchase will be a gas grill.

But don't count out the charcoal grill yet. You can still buy them. You can pick up a tabletop model, square or round, for anywhere from $25 to $50. A full-sized, square model should run you about $35 and if you look real hard, you can probably still find one of the flying saucer models, probably for under twenty bucks.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before some enterprising soul came up with a throwaway charcoal grill. This little beauty is intended for one use, fits neatly on a picnic table top and it even comes with it's own built-in charcoal...and it's self starting. Where else, but in the land of the free, the home of the disposable?

But the real action nowadays is in the gas grill arena, though you'll have to pay a little more to get in on the fun. You can pick up a plain Jane gas tabletop model for as little as $40. Full-sized models range from a couple hundred for basic models and up to about $800 for gas grills with as many bells and whistles as you want. Among the most popular features of gas grills are larger cooking surfaces, shelves, side burners, fuel gauges, grease and ash catchers and smoking accessories.

In the bell and whistle category, for instance, there's the Weber Genesis 3000LX, an impressive apparatus with three burners, a range type sideburner and a warming rack. A local hardware store recently touted it's merits in a sale flyer. Expect to part with $659 of your hard earned clams for this beauty. Then kick in another $35 if you want the grill cover.

But even that's not the state of the art. For the connoisseur of backyard cookery there are elaborate outdoor kitchens, with grills that feature such niceties as infrared rear wall burners, rotisseries and built in smokers, along with other basic necessities such as refrigerators and televisions. The tab for one of these beauties can run as high as $4,000.

Humankind has progressed a long way from the dark days when there were no backyards, when grills were nothing more than a long stick and the delicacy of choice was more likely to be wooly mammoth than franks or burgers. Some might even say we've gotten carried away. But, after all - it is the Great American Pastime.

Copyright 2007, William I. Lengeman III