Candy Barbecue and the Universal Problem of Metric Corruption

Johnny Trigger has won the World BBQ Championship twice. His competition ribs are legendary — glossy, candy-glazed, layered with sugar, brown sugar, honey, and a sweet sauce so thick it catches the light like lacquer. Judges love them. And Trigger himself? "I would never eat these myself," he once admitted on a pitmaster forum. Let that sit for a moment. The best competition barbecue in the world is food that its own creator won’t eat. This isn’t a story about barbecue. It’s a story about what happens when you measure the wrong thing — or, more precisely, what happens when you measure the right thing and then watch it curdle into something unrecognizable. It starts at a smoker in Kansas City, detours through colonial India and Soviet factories, and ends up staring directly at the machines we’re building to think for us. The Sweetening The Kansas City Barbeque Society is the largest BBQ competition sanctioning body in the world. Their judging system is straightforward: score each entry