Alabama students eat barbecue for grades

From left: Will Foster, Jr., Jeff Vaughan, Matt Lee and Art Richey sample the sauce at Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Thursday Jan. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Jamie Martin)

By JAY REEVES
Associated Press Writer


TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Four college students walk into a smoky restaurant, sit at a table under a blaring TV and order up their class work for the day — two slabs of spare ribs dripping with reddish sauce, white bread on the side.

But this isn't lunch. It's writing about barbecue for an A.

The four spent January visiting some of the South's best barbecue restaurants for course credit from Birmingham-Southern College in a self-designed class that combines heaping mounds of meat with academics, all spread across five states.

After cleaning their plates and licking their fingers, the group would leave each joint with bulging bellies to document their experience with stories, photos and video posted on a blog and the Web site they built, southernbbqboys.com. Those components, along with a final essay each one is currently finishing, are being graded by the English instructor who helped them design the class.

So what do you learn in such a course? Eat enough barbecue and you'll gain weight, get sick or both. And 3,100 miles is a long, long way to drive for dinner in a 1998 Ford Expedition with a plastic pig's nose attached to the front.

"It's been great," said senior Art Richey, who came up with the idea for the epicurean odyssey. "But I'm definitely not going to have barbecue for a while after this."

Richey, of Russellville, Ala., wanted to take a road trip and write reviews of restaurants during Birmingham-Southern's monthlong interim period, which lets students propose out-of-the-box projects and complete them for credit.

Working with English instructor Robin Mozer, Richey developed a course contract with Will Foster of Alpharetta, Ga.; Jeff Vaughan of West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Matt Lee of Cullman, Ala.

They sketched out a trip through Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. They stuck to places that specialize in pork because Southerners know pork is the only real barbecue.

The group had a few places in mind, but they also created a Facebook group and took suggestions for other stops. They were soon overwhelmed with hundreds of recommendations, many from complete strangers.

The point of the endeavor, at least academically, was for the students to develop their writing, and they say that their storytelling and descriptive skills have improved as a result. Richey said he learned that it wasn't enough just to say a restaurant's barbecue sauce tasted good. "You have to describe it, say it's sweet as molasses or spicy hot."

"They've really put a lot of effort into it," said Mozer. "They're all focused on improving their writing; that's one thing I heard from all of them."

The trip wasn't without snags, though: Lee got food poisoning after a stop in Raleigh, N.C., but he remained on the trip.

Foster's pants are fitting a little tighter — he thinks he gained as many as 7 pounds — but he said it was worth it.

"We actually calculated that my GPA is going to go over 3.0 because of barbecue if I make an A," said Foster, a junior majoring in business administration. "Who'd have ever thought it?"
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On the Web: http://www.southernbbqboys.com

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.