A barbecue (or barbeque, that’s up to you!) is a simple piece of equipment for cooking food with the heat and hot gas of a fire, smoking wood or hot coals of charcoal. You would usually have a charcoal barbecue or gas barbecue. Apparently, most people believe the barbecue come from the Caribbean where the food was either put on a platform above the fire and resting on sticks, or placed in a hole dug in the ground and then covered.

Barbecuing is widespread throughout the world from The United Kingdom to Korea and the United States of America and has various regional variations. It actually tends to be a social event when friends gather and have fun. There is actually a world championship barbecue cooking contest taking place in Memphis in the United States of America every year in May. Cooking meat, fish, vegetables or anything else on a barbecue is more of an outdoor activity as a barbecue would usually create a lot of smoke depending on who is cooking and with what. When cooking food on a barbecue, you should be aware that whether you use wood, charcoal or gas, your food will taste differently. Actually more and more people are buying gas barbecues. As gas barbecues involve the latest technologies such as side burners for sauces for examples, are much easier to clean and use, they are becoming very popular, which is creating a real debate over which kind of barbecue is the best?

Apart form that, you can now find very useful BBQ tools that will be greatly helpful for cooking without burning your hands every time you try to turn a piece of meat and so making a barbecue an even more attractive outdoor activity. You would still have to be careful when cooking food on a barbecue though! People tend to forget that not properly cooked food can get you into trouble as you could have eaten bacteria. So do not forget to make sure you cook your meat properly, wash your hands and the different surfaces really often… Basically, be careful when you cook food on a barbecue and make sure you think about doing it the clean and safe way.

Another interesting debate is to know who is usually controlling the barbecue between men and women? And according to some psychologists, men would tend more to want to control the barbecue as it would allow them to play legally with fire. All this going back to prehistoric times where the fire was such a vital resource.