New Year's Food Traditions
Butchering 17 hogs Newberry, Florida, Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
“I don’t care where you are,” writes North Carolinian Reginald Ward, black folk are going to eat “strictly pork” on New Year ’s Day. Tradition calls for cooking “black-eyed peas, hog head, a whole hog head now, pig tails, pigs feet.” He goes on to say, “You can go just about anywhere, and people who were born in the South” cook pork on New Year’s Day. I interviewed Ward for my book Hog and Hominy. Having lived in California in the 1960s, Ward noticed that, “everybody born in the South was looking for pork” on New Year’s. As a result, the price of pork parts in California supermarkets became expensive around New Year’s.
