My Pen Is Mighty
Black Foodways, Black Women, and Netflix’s ‘High on the Hog’
Want to understand how African American cuisine transformed America? Ask a sista.
Jessica B. Harris is having a moment. It’s been exactly 10 years since she wrote High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. Now it’s back on the New York Times Best Sellers List.
This is due to the rousing success of Netflix’s High on the Hog travelogue series on how Black foodways have heavily impacted American cuisine. While the series dropped in late May, its historical context and poignant storylines will resonate with viewers for years to come. Women figure prominently in this series.
It begins, of course, with Harris, a PhD whose award-winning book inspired the show’s deep dive. The esteemed culinary historian, who appears in “Our Roots,” the first episode of the four-part series, guides host/narrator Stephen Satterfield through the markets in Dantokpa, Benin, in West Africa. She discusses with him in great detail how soul food staples such as okra, black-eyed peas, rice, and yams (sweet potatoes in the U.S.) traveled centuries ago from West Africa to the United States to nourish the newly enslaved Africans. According to Harris, their captors packed these native foods on the boats.
