Friday Find: Going Whole Hog with Dr. Howard Conyers

The NASA engineer talks barbecue, farming, and more on The Bakari Sellers Podcast

Bakari Sellers is a New York Times best-selling author, attorney, and political commentator who was elected at the age of 22 to the South Carolina House of Representatives, serving the 90th District from 2006 to 2014. He now serves as a political analyst for CNN and also hosts The Bakari Sellers Podcast on The Ringer Podcast Network.

In this podcast episode, he interviews fellow South Carolinian Dr. Howard Conyers to discuss his work as a NASA engineer, how he got into barbecue, and the future of black farming (which he is not so optimistic about). In terms of barbecue, Conyers grew up around whole hog barbecue but became interested in digging into its origins in recent years as a historian. That eventually led him to begin writing a book that started out as a coffee table book but sounds like he is in the process of expanding into a full book. Conyers also gives Sellers, a relative newbie to barbecue, a brief primer on the history of barbecue and the difference in styles across the regions.

In addition to his barbecue research and job as a NASA engineer, Conyers is also getting into commercial moonshine bootlegging at his farm in Manning, SC and hopes to have distribution in 2024. According to him, barbecue and bootlegging go hand in hand and he hopes to continue carrying on both of those traditions in the black community today. Stay tuned for what looks to be a lot more in 2024 from this renaissance man.

Monk
Co-Founder, Barbecue Bros