GREG MORAGO PHOTOS : CHRONICLE A beef brisket is in the smoker at Foodways Texas and Texas A&M’s barbecue summer camp.

The first thing we taste at barbecue summer camp is defeat.

But if you’re going to get a sobering barbecue reckoning it might as well come in the form of the smoke-burnished brisket at Martin’s Barbecue in Bryan. It is here — the first stop in a three-day immersion into meat and smoke that I signed up for at Texas A&M – that my fellow campers and I realize (as we fill our mouths full of glistening ribs, brisket and chicken) that as amateur barbecuers we’ll never equal the skill of a Martin’s or iconic pits such as Louie Mueller, Snow’s, Southside Market, Smitty’s, Kreuz or City Market. It’s rather cruel, this first lesson; akin to rolling in a Lamborghini to freshman auto mechanics class.

But deliciously humbling. We come to this camp – an experimental first collaboration between Foodways Texas, a year-old organization designed to promote the food culture of Texas, and A&M’s Meat Science Department – to better understand the mechanics of barbecue. We are a diverse group that includes a software developer, attorney, real estate appraiser, CPA, oil and gas man, teacher, construction worker and salesman, to name a few of the professions that make up our meat-loving student body. The class of this inaugural Barbecue Summer Camp consists of about 40 men and one brave woman who possess varying degrees of barbecue skill ranging from none (that would be me) to plenty (intense enthusiasts including some on barbecue teams).

But we all share one thing in common: passion and respect for meat that’s been made long, languorous love to by hot, heavy smoke. We wanted to understand how to take protein from hanging on the hook to falling off the bone. We hungered to understand barbecue. And to eat it.