About this graphic
Popular writing puts North Carolina’s barbecue divide 'west of Raleigh' and then declines to draw it. NCpedia says flatly there is no clear dividing line2. So this map draws what the county-level research found: Eastern (whole hog, vinegar-and-pepper sauce with no tomato, white slaw) across 47 counties, Lexington (shoulder, a tomato-and-vinegar dip, red slaw) across 45, and a seven-county hybrid band between them. I-95 was the first draft of the boundary, and it was wrong: Wilson, Johnston and the rest of the corridor cook squarely Eastern, and Wake is Eastern too.
The band is not an empty no-man’s-land but a third practice: Piedmont shoulder with an Eastern sauce. Bob Garner, the one authority who locates the boundary with any precision, calls Orange and Alamance 'a sort of in-between, nether region', and he draws separate lines for the meat and the slaw about 50 miles apart3. The dots are pits, most of them from the inaugural class of the North Carolina Bar-B-Q Hall of Fame, inducted in Mar 20244. Mecklenburg is labeled 'brisket, probably', which is a joke, not research.