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I am one of only 26 living members of the BBQ Hall of Fame. My hardbound book, "Meathead, The Science Of Great Barbecue and Grilling" was a New York Times Best Seller and named "One of the 100 Best Cookbooks of All Time" by Southern Living Magazine right alongside of Julia and Jacques.
My biz card says I am the BBQ Whisperer and Hedonism Evangelist behind AmazingRibs.com, the world's most popular BBQ & grilling website, by far. The Roman god Bacchus is my paragon.
Dad was the first to call me Meathead after watching Archie Bunker and now everyone calls me that. No offense taken. It fit, especially as I got into BBQ. It's better than what my editors and my wife call me. If you've read this far, you're my buddy and you can call me whatever you want.
I've had the privilege of judging barbecue and other foods and drinks from Italy to California. I have been a judge at the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue, at the Kingsford Invitational, at the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition, at the World-Wide Mustard Competition, and the World Championship Steak Cook-Off. I have served as Chief Judge of the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition and Chief Judge of the College Football Hall of Fame Kickoff Riboff, and I founded and directed for many years the World Wine Championships, World Beer Championships, and World Spirits Championships.
Along the way I have tried to share my love of the sensory world with words and pictures. I was a journalism major at the University of Florida and I have written hundreds of articles about food and drink as a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.
I've been helping folks learn about food and drink online since 1990 when I started Wine & Dine Online as part of LAOnline, long before anybody typed "w" three times in a row. I then hosted the Food & Drink Network on America Online from 1992-2000, built Tastings.com in 1998, and built AmazingRibs.com in 2005.
I lectured for more than a decade on wine at Cornell University's famous School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, NY, and I was an adjunct professor at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago for three years. As founder of the Beverage Testing Institute I produced seven books on wine, beer, and spirits.
As an undergrad I studied photography with the brilliant Jerry N. Uelsmann and picked up the world's first Masters degree in Art in Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under Sonia Landy Sheridan. I have since studied with John Paul Caponigro, Harold Ross, and Dave Black.
My interest in cooking began when I was about 10 and Mom and Dad opened a restaurant and I got to be a real jerk, a soda jerk. They named the place after a beautiful flower, the Oleander. We later learned it was poisonous, and eventually the restaurant failed. If you ever hear that I'm opening a restaurant, hunt me down and shoot me.
In my senior year of high school my science project was setting up a test plant to measure the oxygen output from algae, and then harvesting it for food to see if it could be used in space travel. I developed my first recipe: Algae cookies. They needed a LOT of chocolate chips. It won a prize from NASA at the 1967 Florida State Science Fair. I just showed pictures of the cookies because if the judges had tasted them they would have kicked me out.
I first discovered real barbecued ribs, smoked over wood, at a rickety joint named YT Parker's Bar-B-Q in Gainesville, FL, when I was at the University of Florida. YT let me hang out around the open air pit with him and his pals. My parents had warned me that smoking marijuana would lead to harder stuff. Well, they were right. I gave up weed and took up smoking pork.
Since then I have become an omnivore, eating and drinking for a living since 1970. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. And I've got wine and sauce stains on all my shirts and the well-marbled waistline to prove I do it well. My goal is to improve the world one cook at a time and one meal at a time.
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