High On The Hog Reader
“We planted seeds, we toiled the fields, and we watched as our hard work sprouted gold. We nourished a nation through our cooking and baked our traditions in the cuisines that would define America. Our story is America. ”
Introduction
High on the Hog is the docuseries you didn’t know you needed, and if you pay attention, it will show you the soul of America.
The first time I read High on the Hog by Dr. Jessica B. Harris was a revelation. I was a few years out of culinary school, finding my way as a chef asking myself serious questions about identity. They were questions about how I would fit into a culinary industry that seemed to have a marginal affection for Black foodways and questions about how I would define my culture through the complicated prism of America’s dismissive melting pot mentality. This work of self-discovery was even trickier because, in the food world of 2011, there wasn’t a clear starting point.
Before High on the Hog, I can count on one hand the heavily researched nonfiction books that centered an essential Blackness to American cuisine. Dr. Psyche Forson-Williams’ brilliant book Building Houses out of Chicken Legs was published in 2006. In that book, she offered a beautifully nuanced story of Black entrepreneurship and female empowerment through food service. Dr. Fred Opie had written Hog and Hominy, in 2008 which analyzed the tropes and mythology around Black food culture. While it was a deeply rooted and well-researched book, it was about making sense of cultural diffusion.
There were also the cookbooks. As Toni Tipton Martin showed us in her book The Jemima Code, cookbooks were the principal place where some deference was paid to Black culture even if it was often marginal or, in some cases, grudgingly given. She chronicles 200 years of cookbooks written by Black creatives. There were undoubtedly standouts like chefs and culinary luminaries Edna Lewis and Vertamane Smart-Grosvenor, who were explicit about their heritage. Still, until High on the Hog, there hadn’t been a book that overtly made a case for a wholesale reevaluation of what we considered American cuisine through the lens of the Black experience and often dismissed any expansive narrative of primary creation.
Dr. Harris created a straightforward linear story of how Black culture contributed to this country’s culinary identity. She had already written 12 cookbooks spanning 25 years that had explored the African diaspora. In 300 pages, she introduced a popular non-fiction book on food history that lived outside of the academic setting or the cookbook section, and she did it all in the graceful, relatable, and conversational style she had come to be known for.
A decade later and the media landscape has evolved. With it, room for the new High on the Hog docuseries is made. Executive produced by the Hey Sistah producing team of Fabienne Toback & Karis Jagger in partnership with director Roger Ross Williams and his One Story Up production company, the series explores the first half of Dr. Harris’ book in a 4 act narrative that tracks the Black culinary experience from West Africa through the middle passage to America through to emancipation.
Hosted by the eternally charming Stephen Satterfield of Whetstone Media, the series creates a visual and sonic representation of the book’s spirit while juxtaposing the historic themes with contemporary voices and locations. Through Stephens’s kind and charismatic presentation style, he engaged with a global network of Black creatives that bring the text to life.
High on the Hog has gone from revelatory to prophetic because it has made way for a completely new posture of engaging Black foodways. The docuseries has expanded the possibilities for Black foodways in the space of film and television, to be sure. Still, the book has ushered in a whole new wave of diaspolically centered restaurants like Eduardo Jordan’s Junebaby and Kristi Brown’s Communion in Seattle, Mashama Baily’s The Grey in Savannah, and Erick Williams’ Virtue in Chicago just to name a few. There is also an emerging publishing appetite for Black culinary nonfiction in both print and digital publications like For the Culture, Whetstone, and While Entertaining Magazines, as well as the recently announced creative imprint at Ten Speed Press from Bryant Terry, called 4 Color Books which will have as its first offering the anthology Black Food.
The natural evolution of the argument Dr. Jessica B. Harris made a decade ago about the true soul of American cuisine is at the core of this series. It’s taken two Obama presidential terms, an evolving food media landscape, and a reawakening of social conscience to convince the media zeitgeist she was right. Still, in the lifecycle of culinary evolution, the question is, what will the food world do with this new information? What will Black creatives do with this affirmation? Only time will tell, but if the decade post-High on the Hog is any indication, this is a great time to be thinking critically about Black foodways, and this series will be marked as a watershed moment.
Breakdown of the Reader Methodology
This reader is meant to supplement the docuseries and guide you through using the book throughout the series. Each episode is broken down, offering location context, subject bios, and supplemental reading that will help make each episode richer. There are also culinary suggestions that will add to your viewing experience and will give culinary context to the themes explored in each episode.
