Pork is king: North Carolina isn't the only one going whole hog--so is the rest of the country.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: NC Trend

Barbecue is having a moment. Pork is showing up everywhere from the Charlotte-based chicken titan Bojangles' Inc. to scratch-and-sniff lottery tickets. Some might say it's a barbecue renaissance as the traditional dish of the Carolinas is reimagined by high-end restaurants in Raleigh, Durham and Asheville. At the same time, Dan "Barbecue Jew" Levine and Southern culture scholar John Shelton Reed have teamed to save "real barbecue." Even the Fox TV show The Simpsons last month featured a barbecue-themed episode as Homer bought a cooker: "It's not a grill. It's a smoker that you can grill on," he explained to his family. The rest of the world is quickly catching on to what North Carolinians already know: Barbecue is a noun, not a verb.

North Carolina is the nation's No. 2 pork producer, after Iowa. Last year, hogs generated about $2 billion in revenue. State officials counted about 8.7 million head as of Sept. 1, not much less than the human population of about 9.9 million.

Real'cue

Hundreds have signed the True 'Cue pledge dreamed up by Levine, promising to eschew so-called "faux 'cue" cooked with gas--and tattle on restaurants that don't I smoke their pork solely with wood or wood coals through online reviews and word-of-mouth. The campaign is tongue-in-cheek, but he's serious about preserving authentic methods as he travels the state to "certify" barbecue restaurants. Levine, who writes his BBQJew.com blog under the name of Porky LeSwine, is a real-estate developer for Durham-based Self-Help Credit Union. He co-founded the tmecue.org website with Reed, an author and retired UNC Chapel Hill sociology professor. The two struck up a "pork-based friendship" after Levine interviewed Reed and his wife, Dale, about their book Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue.

Levine and Reed have mixed feelings about the gentrification of barbecue at such restaurants as The Pit, with locations in Raleigh and Durham, where barbecued tofu and traditional pork barbecue are offered side by side. (So is alcohol, a rarity at most...