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Critics roast anti-grill column that urged Americans to celebrate July 4 in the kitchen: 'This is hate speech'

‘Admit it: Grilling is bad,’ a Business Insider columnist wrote

Fox News
July 2, 2021

Business Insider columnist Josh Barro prepared for July 4 weekend by declaring that "grilling is bad," but critics swiftly condemned his opinion on the beloved American pastime.

The column, "Admit it: Grilling is bad," was published on Thursday as Americans across the nation prepared for Independence Day barbeques.

"Who doesn't like a backyard barbecue? Me, that's who," Barro wrote. "There's a reason you do most of your cooking inside: Grills are impossible to keep clean, they lack good temperature control, and they make worse food than what you can prepare in your kitchen."

The columnist then suggested that Fourth of July celebrations should be shifted indoors.

"Celebrate American prosperity with your fine kitchen appliances and make the food for the cookout indoors," Barro wrote. "Your grill is filthy. The very first time you use a grill, it's delightfully clean. Then food touches it. Grills run at high heat, and food burns onto the grates. Like with pots and pans, burned-on food is tough to remove from grill grates."

He noted that if a frying pan was cleaned with a grill brush people would refuse to eat from it and call the cook "disgusting," so he doesn’t understand why the same logic doesn’t apply to outdoor cooking.

"Every time you grill, you're putting your new food right on top of the burned old food from last time, so it crusts onto your new food. Ew," he wrote before adding that grills have "poor temperature control" on top of his cleanliness concerns.

"Meats need to be seared to develop flavor. Grills do this, but not as well as a heavy skillet on a hot burner does, since the skillet contacts more of the meat's surface area. But once you have achieved a sear, more high-heat cooking is just a way to toughen and dry out your meat," Barro wrote. "Indoor recipes involve strategies to avoid this."

Barro went on to call it "stupid" that grills have a heating element underneath the food because he is alarmed by grease that could possibly drip down and cause a flare-up. A broiler is a "superior tool," he wrote.

"You secretly agree with me about grilling," Barro added. "You may talk a good game about how you like to grill, but where do you do most of your cooking? Almost surely in the kitchen, where cooking is easier and cleaner and produces more consistent results."

The story was behind a paywall, so many critics presumably didn’t actually get a chance to read it, but Barro was roasted when he took to Twitter to promote his work.

"Your grill is filthy, has poor temperature control, and for some idiot reason has the heating element *below* the food so fat drips into it and catches fire. There’s a better way to cook: In your kitchen," Barro wrote to accompany a link to the article.

The responses poured in and it doesn’t appear that many readers agreed. Barro’s tweet was met with thousands of comments, ranging from mocking the article as "clickbait" to grill enthusiasts who seemed legitimately offended:

Read all the responses here

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"There's a reason you do most of your cooking inside: Grills are impossible to keep clean, they lack good temperature control, and they make worse food than what you can prepare in your kitchen."

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This is like saying forks are bad because you can use them to stab youself in the eye.

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Originally posted by parabellum:
Remember Gersh Kuntzman, the girly-man who said shooting an AR-15 was like firing a bazooka? He got PTSD from the experience, you know. I know this, because he told us.