This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. This Labor Day, millions of Americans are headed out to the grill for one last summer barbecue, and will likely indulge in the National Pass time of eating lots of meat.

But in 1946, the barbecues wouldn't have been as plentiful. The price of meat was sky high, and so were Americans anxieties.

You have restaurant owners jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge because they have no meat to serve their customers.

Today on backstory, we're cooking up a history of meat in America, from colonists who reveled in a land of abundance to the meaning of small game to the nation of Islam.

You need to turn away from anything that is associated with the slave diet, the slave mentality and slave regime.

Coming up on backstory, a history of meat in America don't go away.

Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys.

Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm here with Peter Onif.

And Ed Ares is with us, Hello, Domen.

Today's show is about meat, so we're going to kick off the hour by asking you, our listeners, to imagine a suburban Labor Day weekend in the 1950s.

There's likely a manicured lawn, casually dressed neighbors, and of course, a grill and a den.

Glowing coals, giant asbestos gloves, oversized tongs.

This is Lauren Mould, a librarian at the University of Virginia, Glasgow.

Smoke wafting over the neighbor's fence and is a dooring family waiting for the grill to get just right for that giant hunk of meat that's going to go on there in sizzle and spit and taste like Saturday in America.

It's an idyllic image, and Mould says it's completely choreographed.

Grilling was an antidote to problems that psychiatrists and family experts saw in the American middle class two decades before in the mid 1930s.

These experts thought fathers were too absent from the home and worried about the development of American children.

So Mould says in journals and magazines across the country, there was a call for men to have a stronger presence in family life to balance out the effects of overmothering, to be a great role model for their children in order to ensure that their daughters know who to look for in a man and their sons know what a good man is.

But if experts wanted dad to be around as a manly role model, he couldn't just rush to a dust pan and broom.

Household chores were women's work.

Dad needed a space for distinctly masculine projects.

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