Steven Raichlen doesn’t know exactly how the first humans began smoking their food, but he has an idea. “We were probably sitting around a fire with strips of meat posted on sticks downwind of it, because we’d realized flies don’t like smoke,” he says. “And when we tasted that meat, not only were there no flies on it, but it had this amazing flavor, too.” He admits it’s pure conjecture, but having written the book on smoked foods, Raichlen is qualified to conject. It was in the late 1990s, after…
