Black History Month Highlight: High on the Hog Netflix Series

It's everywhere. Fried chicken, mac and cheese, fried okra, black eyed peas, cornbread, collard greens, and any other soul food item that you can think of, can be found in countless restaurants across the South in the U.S. They're foods that many Americans recognize, love and have enjoyed themselves, but how many know the history behind them? That's exactly what the Netflix series High on the Hog does. 

From the shores of West Africa centuries ago to our Sunday dinner tables in 2024, food writer Stephen Satterfield, leaves no leaf unturned on when it comes to the history of Black American food. Satterfield dives deep into the resilient history behind some of America's  beloved food items. 

Until I started watching High on the Hog, I never put much thought into the food my family cooked. Traditional southern soul food was always there and I grew up watching the women in my family spend hours cooking it for the holidays or Sunday dinner. I never once thought to ponder the history of those foods and where they came from. Nor did my parents, especially when they didn't know much about their own family history past several generations before them. 

To say the least, the show absolutely blew my mind because I didn't even know that a lot soul food items were connected to food in West Africa before the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Sweet potatoes, okra, black eyed peas, and rice were all brought over to the U.S. from West Africa. They survived the harrowing journey across the Atlantic and managed to still be our plates today. To me, that's amazing and made me feel more connected to my history. This show gave me pieces of the puzzle to my ancestry. 

Like millions of Black Americans, we don't know much about our family history. For centuries families in the South were seperated and shipped off to various parts of the country to live a life of misery on a different plantation.