I hate gas grills. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. No, hate is the word. While I love gas ranges, and only wish I still had one instead of the electric coils beneath ceramic glass in my new apartment, when it comes to outdoor meat cookery, gas is a perversion and a corruption, effete and decadent. It justifies every jeer we heard from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War: voices that said that America had gotten weak and lazy, and that we had become addicted to our own capitalist comforts, crippled by affluence and the soft life.
Were the commies right? Maybe so. Why would someone spend over a thousand dollars on a machine that does its primary function so badly? Because it’s easier to light? Because it looks cool? Because they don’t like the taste of wood and smoke and the perfume of hardwood fumes? Someone please explain this to me.
What’s so galling about my lifelong war against gas grills is how little they deliver for their Faustian promise. You’re giving up not just flavor, but also the whole feeling and joy and physical connection that a person gets to his food when cooking naturally. Gas is grossly artificial, abstract, a formula for the feeding of indifferent crowds. There are no flare-ups, and no ash to throw away, but there is also no crust, no fire, no woodsy taste or sizzling, succulent fat. Gas is pabulum, Soylent Green, a medium for medicating hunger and killing time. It’s nihilism in a tank, and it has to stop now.
Consider: it’s spring, and June is around the corner. We’ve been shivering in the darkness and cold for six months. Is this really how we will reaffirm life? Grilling, for Americans, is more than a mode of cooking outdoors; it’s a rite of spring, an affirmation of our status as citizens of the land of plenty, free to eat and drink the sunny uplands of human freedom. For that reason alone, gas should be outlawed. It shouldn’t require an expensive appliance to grill. It should be equally within the reach of every American. Moreover, as a free and mobile people, we should be able to grill wherever we want: on roofs, on beaches, in parks, in arena parking lots. But all of these are places your gas grill can’t go. If you want to feed people at your gas grill, they have to go to your house. And how free is that? You are a prisoner of hospitality, charged with cleaning and entertaining, and then getting rid of your drunken guests after the fact.
