After reading this:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFA ULT

Sooie! Alabama college students eat BBQ for grades
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.

They've eaten sweet sauces and dry rub, ribs and sandwiches, cole
slaw, potato salad and banana pudding. "You want sweet tea with that?"
a waitress asked at Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa, stop No. 17 on
the journey.

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."

Barbecue is sacred food in the Deep South. It's worshipped in roadside
chapels with neon signs, outdated calendars and cramped booths.
Friendships are forged - and strained - by discussions over which kind
of sauce is best: vinegar-based or tomato-based?

A big fan of barbecue, Richey, of Russellville, 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. The small liberal arts school's
Web site says projects have included overseas travel and topics such
as investigating jazz music and compiling an oral history of homeless
people.

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.

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.

"That's how we knew we were on to something, when we threw out the
idea and were just covered up with recommendations," said Lee, who
designed the Web site.

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."

At Mozer's urging, they also expanded their focus beyond what was on
the plate, capturing the uniqueness of a place like Dreamland, with
concrete floors painted crimson, bare light bulbs and walls covered
with old license plates and autographed photos of football players.

Vaughan swept through each restaurant taking photos, Richey edited
video for YouTube and Foster did most of the blogging.

"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."

Many colleges allow such self-designed courses, and they're most
likely to be found at schools that allow individualized majors, said
Terrel L. Rhodes, vice president of quality, curriculum and assessment
with the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

"Of course, many faculty object to such courses because they feel that
they may lack academic rigor, but the contract nature of the courses
is what is supposed to address those concerns," he said.

The barbecue guys had few problems along the way. Birmingham-Southern
gave them a $700 grant for gasoline, and most nights they slept with
friends or relatives.

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

"Two days later I was eating pork again," he said.

Foster's pants are fitting a little tighter - he thinks he gained as
many as 7 pounds - but 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?"

---

On the Web: http://www.southernbbqboys.com