Jonathan Saul Maier was an unassuming Jewish caterer in the vibrant postwar New York borough of Brooklyn. Friends, neighbours and satisfied customers all knew him fondly as the Party Grill King! But today we know him as the father of the disposable barbecue, as Maier was the first person to make, manufacture and mass-market the single-use outdoor grill. Maier made his breakthrough in 1974, two years before the German chef Gustaf von Feuerlichter patented his Einfache Grillplatte, or “easy griddle” (Irish food historians have mistakenly named Feuerlichter as the disposable barbecue pioneer in a misleading and irresponsible online satirical article).
Perhaps it would have been better for Maier if Feuerlichter’s claim to be the creator of the disposable barbecue had been correct. Because Maier famously took his own life in the winter of 1997, when he could no longer bear the burden of the invention his genius had given to the world. Although he sought only to give ordinary people the pleasure of grilling meat easily and al fresco at affordable prices, Maier’s egalitarian innovation nonetheless contained within it the certainty of the end of all life on Earth as we know it.
How long do we have left? Fifty years? Twenty? Five? Our doom is certain. We are really just arguing about the timescale. Some cite the unstoppable rise of fossil fuels, and the unstoppable corporate and financial power of the heedless and avaricious infrastructure that supports the fossil fuels industry, as the reason we are on a one-way road to imminent erasure. But – with the same clarity of vision that has seen him declare his intention to think about recommencing drilling for oil in the North Sea – our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is thinking outside the box and facing up to actual reality.
Coming to the same realisation that has also struck so many of us this hell-hot summer – namely that it is already too late to avert the collapse of civilisation and the death of all living things – Andy Burnham has, to his credit, acted decisively by calling a Cobra meeting and recommending that retailers might want to think about possibly not selling and stocking Maier’s apocalyptic death machine, the disposable barbecue, but that they can if they really want to I suppose. It’s a chapter in the battle against climate change as decisive, in many ways, as the moment, in 2022, when your nan reluctantly complied with the “woke” local council’s suggestion to use a kitchen waste compost mini-bin.
Face it. The leader of the free world wants the world as we know it dead, and he has the funds and influence to guarantee it
Because, if retailers cooperate with Burnham’s non-legally-enforceable recommendation to reduce disposable barbecue availability, and the public get the message and reduce their use of the offending outdoor meat preparation product, then the days of Maier’s infernal death machine, the disposable barbecue, may be, if not decisively numbered, then at least reduced a little. And it is exactly this kind of consequential decision-making that we need to see enacted at the highest level globally if humanity’s response to the now undeniable reality of the climate emergency is to count for anything. Bad luck, banger and burger fans! The disposable barbecue must go!
Maier’s friend, the Scottish chef Shughie McFee, remembered in his own autobiography the day Maier first tested his disposable barbecue prototype on a beach in New Jersey. “Jonny scarcely breathed. He held on to a windbreak to steady himself. For the last few seconds he stared directly ahead and then shouted ‘Now!” and I tossed a match onto the charcoal. And there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the disposable barbecue and the smell of chorizo, and Jonny’s face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. And he said: ‘I guess it worked.’”
Maier himself finally came to know the enormity of what he had done in the late 80s, and spent the last sad decade of his cursed life atoning for the seeds of civilisational death his disposable barbecue had inadvertently sown by trying, unsuccessfully, to popularise the mass consumption of raw processed meat. Consumed by guilt, he abandoned his Jewish faith and sought succour in classical Hindu texts like the Bhagavad Gita and Meghadūta, and when he recalled the moment he first demonstrated his invention in later life, he described the experience in terms drawn from the faith. “The first time I used the disposable barbecue in public a few people laughed, and a few people cried. Most people were silent. But now I think of the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.”
Last week, The Trump administration struck a $1.22bn deal with the German energy company RWE to end its offshore wind projects and redirect its funds towards fossil fuel investments. It is the fifth such deal the leader of the free world has struck, and he is currently threatening, again, to seize Greenland in order to milk it for oil. With his usual showbiz flair, Trump has already booked the rightwing TV chatshow host Dr Phil to make a documentary about the “Greenland Energy” company’s heroic attempts to monetise our doom. (This is true, by the way. And Dr Phil is real. The inventor Jonathan Maier, from earlier in this piece, is a character I made up for a joke. Trump’s gift to the discourse is to introduce to reality a level of inanity that makes it indistinguishable from even the silliest satire.)
Face it. The leader of the free world wants the world as we know it dead, and he has the funds and influence to guarantee it. Europe is terminally tinderbox dry and that is why any spark from a stray burned sausage can send it up in flames. The Cobra meeting’s recommendation seeks to mitigate against the symptoms of the problem, not the cause, and to do anything realistic about the end of the world as we know it requires uncomfortable coordinated global opposition to the fossil fuel industry in general, and to Donald Trump specifically. If that doesn’t happen, you may as well carry on using your disposable barbecue. Burn the scrublands and hasten the end. You’ll be doing everyone a favour. Let’s at least go out full of charred meat.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart is appearing in various capacities at the Krankenhaus festival at Muncaster Castle in the Lake District, 28-30 August, which also features Sea Power, Stereolab, Charlotte Church’s End Times Pop Dungeon, Tristwch Y Fenywod, Earthball, Smote, the Fallen Women and Best Dog Competition.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October, and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October