How Jessica B. Harris Redefined American Food

Over more than fifty years and 16 books, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has uncovered the ways that West African food, and African American people, have fundamentally shaped American cuisine. Her seminal 2011 book, High on the Hog, brought the connection between African and American food into the culinary conversation, and led to the 2021 Netflix series of the same name. This week we talk with her about her own journey in making these connections, and she offers advice to the new generation of Black scholars and writers exploring these links: “Look ahead. What do you see ahead?”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean, whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. Start the day strong with Quaker protein products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker protein

• 0:42Dan Pashman?

  products give you a variety of ways to reach your protein goals. Oatmeal, granola, bars, and rice snacks in flavors you already love, like maple and brown sugar and blueberries and cream. Quaker protein helps fuel you to start whatever's next. Get your protein with Quaker. Available at a store near you.

• 1:01Dan Pashman?

  So I know your first trip to West Africa was in 1972. What are your impressions of the food on that trip?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  The food was fascinating because it was, at the same time, familiar and unfamiliar.

• 1:17Dan Pashman?

  This is Dr. Jessica B. Harris. She's the author of many cookbooks that focus on African-American food.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  I fell in love with the markets of West Africa. It's a love that I hold dearly. Senegal certainly at that time was only a decade out of independence. It was a country that was sort of proud of itself and straightening its back and doing all sorts of things. I think some of it showed up in the markets, some of it showed up in the people, and some of it showed up in the food. There are all kinds of things that come to memory. I think the most important one is my first taste of chicken yassa. Chicken yassa is a chicken that is marinated in lemon juice with onion and then...

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Grilled? I think my stomach is just growling as I'm talking about chicken yassa. That tells you something.

• 2:14Dan Pashman?

  Yeah. So in other words, the passion is still there.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah. The stomach is going, yes, we need some right about now. Whoops, sorry about that. You know, so anyhow, the chicken yassa. Don't do that again.

• 2:29Dan Pashman?

  It's a safe space for anyone who's hungry, Dr. Harris.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Okay, well, nothing like a mic threat, yeah.

• 2:41Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Since her first trip to Senegal and her first taste of chicken yassa, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has written 16 books, most about African and African-American food. Now she's got a new one that came out just a few weeks ago. It's called Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine. But Dr. Harris is probably best known for writing High on the Hog, which is adapted into a Netflix series in 2021. A lot of her work explores one central idea. Because of the transatlantic slave trade, West African people and their food played a fundamental role in shaping American food. And it's not just about southern cooking.

• 3:24Dan Pashman?

  We can trace that influence from Thomas Downing and his oyster house in 1800s New York to the black cowboys of the West. As Dr. Harris has said of African-Americans and food in America, "We have planted it, harvested it, processed it, cooked it, served it, cleared the table, washed the dishes, and emptied the chamber pot." In recent years, this history has gotten more attention, largely because of Dr. Harris's work uncovering it over the last half century. The link between West Africa and America is one that slave owners and some other white Americans have taken great pains to erase. It took decades of traveling, studying, and writing for Dr. Harris to truly understand it. Today, we'll talk with her about her own journey in making these connections and her influence on a whole new generation of Black Americans in food.

• 4:08Dan Pashman?

  That journey started long before her first trip to Africa, with a love of food that she says comes from her upbringing.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I call my mother my late mother, my culinary secret weapon, simply because she had a most extraordinary palate. She was actually a trained dietitian, so she was trained in food in ways that I am not. She was also just an extraordinary cook. I mean, my mother could bake intuitively, as I can cook intuitively. I mean, so she really was extremely good. And part of, I suspect, my career is kind of an homage to her, because she never got to have that career, because she was of a different time.

• 4:56Dan Pashman?

  Dr. Harris is an only child, born and raised in New York City. She describes her upbringing as middle class, but she writes in her memoir that her friend once said, "There was no real Black middle class. Our standards and aspirations were always upper class." As a child, her parents took her on trips to Europe and North Africa. In high school and college, she fell in love with French and theater, which led her to do a PhD in the French-speaking theater of Senegal. That's when she took that first trip to West Africa, the part of the continent most connected to the slave trade. She visited the markets and ate chicken yassa for the first time. Speaking of which, what exactly was that dish that 50 years later made her stomach growl just thinking about it?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  It's a chicken that is marinated with lemon juice and onion, then grilled, so you get a little of the smoke from the grilling, because it's grilled over wood fire, it would be in Senegal, and then stewed.

• 5:49Dan Pashman?

  Oh.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  So when you start to talk about infusing flavors.

• 5:53Dan Pashman?

  That's a flavor on a flavor on a flavor.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  You've got layers upon layers upon layers of all kinds of astounding flavors, and then it's served with white rice. And there's a little bit of heat that comes from, what I now know as a habanero chili. And all of that is just that wonderful sort of savory with a little bit of smoke and then that zing from the lemon. And of course, you know, onions that just melt in your mouth. So it's not a bad thing.

• 6:21Dan Pashman?

  So clearly you were struck by the deliciousness of that dish. But was there something that you connected with on a deeper level?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think the thing was that I knew onions. I knew lemons. I knew barbecue and grilling. I knew chicken, but this was a whole nother way of combining them. That was at the same time familiar and yet very, very different. And with a sophistication that we don't necessarily think of as the food of the African continent in the States. And I think that was another aha thing was realizing just how sophisticated the traditional food was. That wasn't French food. That wasn't even necessarily French inflected food. It was traditional Senegalese food. And that, I think, was extraordinary.

• 7:16Dan Pashman?

  During this period of the 70s, back in New York, Dr. Harris fell in with a crowd of black intellectuals, including the poet Dr. Maya Angelou and singer Nina Simone. Looming especially large in this group was the writer James Baldwin. You tell a story in your memoir of him reading an early draft. You were sort of in a small group together. He read an early draft to the group of If Beale Street Could Talk to you and the other guests. Then he read it again because Toni Morrison arrived, which like, that seems like the right thing to do in that situation. But he, he made popcorn. Mm hmm. And there's a million questions I have about this night, but this is a food podcast. And I guess I, obviously I never had the experience of meeting James Baldwin.

• 7:59Dan Pashman?

  But I think of popcorn as such a sort of a

• 8:03Speaker 01

  mundane and prosaic.

• 8:05Dan Pashman?

  But also very joyous.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Well, absolutely.

• 8:08Dan Pashman?

  I love popcorn. I love making it. I love the experience of listening to the kernels and seasoning them and eating them. It's one of my favorite foods and it is, I think the day you stop loving making popcorn, it's like

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Something has gone out of your life.

• 8:22Dan Pashman?

  You have lost all joy. And I really enjoyed thinking about James Baldwin, who's someone who, from my distance, I think of as someone very serious, doing something that I think of as so joyful.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but I think anyone who has seen any kind of image of Baldwin smiling.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Understands that extraordinary capacity for joy that he had. You know, and so I'd never connected popcorn with joy, but it is absolutely appropriate.

• 8:58Dan Pashman?

  Did he have a special recipe? Can you tell me, do you remember the popcorn?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  No, honestly, I don't. I was not witness to the making of the popcorn. I was just there for the consuming of the popcorn.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  But I, you know, it was a time before microwave, so I'm, I'm thinking, you know, heavy pot oil kernels that puff up in the pot.

• 9:22Dan Pashman?

  At this point, Dr. Harris was teaching French at Queens College in New York, and she was branching out into writing and editing. She wrote theater reviews, book reviews. Then she became the travel editor at Essence magazine. While her job wasn't explicitly about food, her writing and her travels allowed her to eat all over the world. She even had a regular column called The Go Gourmet, and she saw culinary connections up and down the Western hemisphere, from the US to the Caribbean to Brazil, all places where enslaved Africans had brought their cultures. In Puerto Rico, Dr. Harris found lechon, a roast suckling pig, which has ties to whole hog barbecue that you'd find in the American South, which uses cooking methods that come from West Africa.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I think the Caribbean was for me a connector, and the food in Puerto Rico was, again, the familiar and yet the different. One of the things in Puerto Rico, I had a half a girlfriend named Patricia Wilson, who is actually Canadian, but was raised in Puerto Rico. And you will find no more Rican person than probably Patricia. And she and I used to do wicked things like, um, medalla is the beer of Puerto Rico, one of the beers in Puerto Rico. And we'd put two medallas in the cup holder of her car, which was purple and was named Barney. So we'd put. Medallions in Barney's cup holders and head to the hills with kind of like our noses

• 10:45Speaker 01

  out of the window sniffing to see if we could find le chon. That's just amazing.

• 10:50Dan Pashman?

  Oh, yes.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  We always found it. You know, my stomach is getting ready to growl again. You know, but that that love of of of the almighty pig was something that that certainly Patricia and I shared and we would go off looking for it. So all of those things, again, the markets. Patricia introduced me not to the large market, but the little market that is in San Juan, not in Old San Juan. And we'd go there and, you know, eat our way around it, meet people and see vegetables. And I'd poke and prod, you know, I mean, I know one year I came back with sort of like three foot long cinnamon sticks.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I am now, I think, known to the world as a market junkie. I am.

• 11:38Dan Pashman?

  What is it about those markets that you find so compelling or attractive?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think of market in almost the Greek sense of agora. It is a meeting place. It is it is a place where you go for the news. It is a place where you go to find what's going on, to really center yourself in a community, because the market is the center of the community.

• 12:02Dan Pashman?

  Dr. Harris seeks out the center of a place because she's always looking for connection points, the ways people are linked together. So when she traveled back to West Africa, she was interested not only in the food, but also in connecting with the painful history of slavery. More than one of these trips took her to Gorei Island, off the coast of Senegal.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I went to La Maison des Esclaves, which is one of the places from which, you know, enslaved Africans were sent to the United States. And it's a house. It's a house with a very sort of interesting kind of horseshoe shaped stairwell in the courtyard. And under the stairway, you can look through it and see what is called the door of no return, which goes out to the sea from whence people were put on to what would have been the sailing ship that was at anchor.

• 12:53Dan Pashman?

  Enslaved Africans were held in several places like Gorei Island's Maison des Esclaves. Many people didn't make it out of these houses. They died at the hands of their enslavers before they could even attempt the horrific journey across the ocean. When Dr. Harris visited, she was the only black person on the tour. Everyone else was white.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  It was just so extraordinarily moving that I, you know, really broke down. And a lady who I have maybe not seen or heard of or from in at least 50 years, whose name was Yaya Mbupai, I will never forget her name, said, "You need to be with your people."

• 13:37Dan Pashman?

  Yaya took Dr. Harris to the house of Soulemane Keita, a Senegalese painter who was born on the island. He and his wife Elaine were hosting a few other Americans.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I ended up that night spending the night on Goré. But when the last ferry leaves, it's a very different community. It was so quiet. People wore a lot of flip flops, so you'd hear this feet on the sand because nothing was really paved. You smelled the wood fires, the wood smoke of the fires in various people's houses as they were cooking over wood. It was just an extraordinary moving thing. So I always think of Goré in that kind of bittersweet way. It was, it was just an amazing place for any number of reasons. And incredible, absolutely incredible.

• 14:32Dan Pashman?

  Dr. Harris wrote about that experience for Essence in 1976. She also kept writing her Go Gourmet column, which eventually formed the foundation of her first cookbook called Hot Stuff, a cookbook in praise of the Pecant, basically a love letter to spicy food. Then in 1989, after decades of traveling and observing, Dr. Harris published her next book, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking. This is the first book where she crystallizes the idea that enslaved West African people brought their food to the Americas.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  When I started to write Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, which was in the late 80s, somewhere along there, I realized, hmm.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  There is a continuum. There is something that goes from this place through other places to this place where I am. And I think that was conscious and formulated. And in fact, is part of that introduction to Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons. How there's an umbilicus that connects the African continent with the American hemisphere, if you will. And so I think that all of that is part of what happened. But I think it was more organic than aha.

• 15:53Dan Pashman?

  Over the next 20 years, Dr. Harris would develop her ideas one step further. West African people and food are not only connected to American food. They form the basis of it. That's coming up. Stick around.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads.

• 16:19Dan Pashman?

  As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean. Whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. There's nothing quite like Aruba. The white sand beaches are truly unlike anything you've seen. But what really stands out is the food. Because Aruba's not like other Caribbean islands.

• 17:03Dan Pashman?

  French pastries, Spanish paella, Peruvian barbecue, papardelle that has no business being that good that far from Florence. Not to mention the local fair. Aruba's food scene pulls you in with its astonishing variety of cuisines and beyond satisfies you with its unexpected flavors. So plan your escape to culinary delight at aruba.com. Your taste buds will thank you. Start the day strong with Quaker Protein Products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker Protein Products give you a variety of ways to reach your protein goals. Oatmeal, granola, bars, and rice snacks in flavors you already love like maple and brown sugar and blueberries and cream. Quaker Protein helps fuel you to start whatever's next.

• 17:47Dan Pashman?

  Get your protein with Quaker. Available at a store near you. I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American Cheese. And now, Lando Lakes Cheese and Butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes Cheese and Butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad Thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 18:25Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I spoke with Mackenzie Chung-Fagan, a relatively new restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. She recently wrote a bombshell article, and we get into that story. She went to the famed restaurant, The French Laundry, and she wanted to go undetected because she's a restaurant critic. So she had a friend make the reservation. She gave a fake name when she arrived, but she quickly realized she'd been spotted. And Thomas Keller, the superstar chef and owner, wanted to talk to her.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  And then, the general manager approaches the table and he says, "Will you follow me?"

• 18:59Dan Pashman?

  Just to you, not to everyone.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Just to me. And so I get up from the table and I say to my dining companions, "If I'm not back in 10 minutes, send a search party."

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Like, you could write that, you know, like, very, very foreshadowing and the filmic adaptation of it.

• 19:15Dan Pashman?

  What are you thinking in that moment?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Well, I know at this point I've been recognized. I'm thinking that maybe Thomas Keller is there that evening and, you know, just wants to say hello.

• 19:27Dan Pashman?

  But he wanted to do a lot more than just say hello. What ended up happening was one of the strangest encounters in Mackenzie's career. She tells the whole story in last week's episode. Check it out. Okay, back to the show. After Dr. Harris's book, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, came out in 1989, she continued to explore West Africa's influence on America and much of the Western hemisphere. She wrote a few more cookbooks, diving deeper into African-American food. And then, in 2011, she published High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America. This was the book that cemented her ideas about the role that African-Americans had played in creating American food. In it, she writes of black Americans involuntarily taken from a homeland, molded in the crucible

• 20:10Dan Pashman?

  of enslavement, forged in the fire of disenfranchisement, and tempered by migration. "We all too often remain strangers in the only land that is ours. Despite all this, we have created a culinary tradition that has marked the food of this country more than any other." High on the Hog does include a few recipes, but it's mostly a blend of deeply researched history with Dr. Harris's own personal narrative. I asked her why she chose not to do it as a cookbook.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Because I think writing a recipe is the thing I hate most in the world.

• 20:41Dan Pashman?

  But I also get the impression that you had been interviewed, you said something to the effect of that cookbooks don't get the same level of respect.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I don't even remember saying that. But I mean, you have obviously read more about me than I've read about me. But my thing is really, I don't cook with recipes. So trying to codify something is not what interests me. That's not what razzes my daz. I'm interested in the backstory. And one of the reasons that High on the Hog happened was because the headnotes, the backstory for the recipes, got longer and longer and longer. And it was finally like, well, maybe I should just tell the story.

• 21:31Dan Pashman?

  So that's what she did. The first part of the book is an exploration of West Africa, where Dr. Harris visits the markets, of course, and sees okra, watermelon, leafy greens, and starchy porages, many of the ingredients we now associate with the American South. The rest of the book focuses on specific African American communities and people. She writes about black cowboys, about the enslaved people who brought rice to the American colonies, and many more. You tell the story in the book of several black entrepreneurs. Thomas Downing, who built an empire with oysters in New York City. There's Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was a hotel owner, one of the richest black women in 19th century California. Barney Ford, who ran the People's Restaurant in Denver.

• 22:15Dan Pashman?

  It's incredible to think of what they accomplished, the obstacles that they overcame, and also, like you say, the fact that so little of them is known today. When you first started reading about the work of these black Americans in food throughout the centuries, what impact did hearing those stories and learning more about them have on you?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Gosh, I really, I don't know. I mean, I think my spine may have straightened a little bit more. I might have, you know, walked a little taller and been a little bit prouder. I think that this whole notion of hidden heroes, and we've got so many hidden, or stolen, or strayed, or

• 23:02Dan Pashman?

  Erased.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Erased African Americans in all realms, not just the culinary, that deserve, that cry out for reestablishment.

• 23:15Dan Pashman?

  Yeah, I don't know if you've ever heard of this gentleman. So I grew up in New Jersey. I moved out to Long Island, near where my wife grew up, when we left New York City. And we landed up in this small town called Green Lawn that we didn't know very much about.

• 23:33Dan Pashman?

  The one thing Green Lawn is known for, if it's known for anything, besides being the birthplace of Mariah Carey, is pickles. And there is a pickle festival every fall. Well, it turns out, the reason why Green Lawn is known for pickles is because there was a gentleman named Samuel Balton, who was enslaved and escaped slavery, broke his wife out of slavery. They walked from Virginia to New York. And settled in Green Lawn. And he was such a talented farmer and expert in agriculture that he grew more cucumbers for pickling than anybody else in the area. He set the record and he was nicknamed the Pickle King.

• 24:18Dan Pashman?

  And he used the money from selling the cucumbers to pickles and became a landowner in Green Lawn, an entrepreneur, a business owner. He built houses that are still there to this day. When a blight attacked cucumbers in the area, he was the one who identified which strain of cucumbers would be resistant to the blight and not only grew them himself, but taught others in the area which one and how to grow it. And he is now getting some recognition in this small, mostly white town in the suburbs of Long Island, which is not a place that I like, not a place I would have thought of to have found that story.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I think the thing that's so fascinating is that he is in the suburbs of Long Island. But because if, I mean, if you begin to think about it in those terms, when we start talking about these hidden heroes and so on and so forth, that if they can be found in this town, Green Lawn, in Long Island unexpectedly, then how many other stories are there? I mean, and I think that that's the thing that was so astounding for me. I also like the fact that he did pickles because pickling is something that African Americans were noted for. Abby Fisher, who for many years was thought to have written

• 25:42Speaker 01

  the first African American cookbook, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Southern Cooking, was a pickle maker in California. So that that whole notion of pickling and preserving is something I haven't looked into, but that I may be looking into in the future.

• 25:58Dan Pashman?

  It's just amazing to me. One of the things that I learned when I read Michael Twitty's book, you know, when I was growing up, my understanding of the way slavery worked, I had this idea that like, these boats pulled up to the beach in Africa. A bunch of Europeans jumped off the boat and threw a giant net over the closest Africans they could find and put them in the bottom of the boat. I had no understanding of what a methodical

• 26:26Speaker 01

  and diabolical.

• 26:27Dan Pashman?

  and diabolical system it was.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Economically based.

• 26:31Dan Pashman?

  Right, but the people who were running the slave trade understood how much expertise the African people had and preyed upon and used that expertise. That it wasn't just, we need strong people to lift things and plow things.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:45Dan Pashman?

  It was, we need expertise to grow these industries.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Well, it's all of it. It's all of it. It's all of it intertwined together.

• 27:00Dan Pashman?

  In the years since High on the Hog, Dr. Harris has started to get more recognition for her work. In 2019, she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame. That was the first time, more than 30 years into her writing career, that the foundation recognized her. In 2021, the Netflix adaptation of High on the Hog premiered. This four-part travel doc is hosted by Steven Satterfield, a writer and entrepreneur. Here's Steven in the opening minutes of the show.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Benin, West Africa.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  It was strange to come home to a place I had never been.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Fragments of a lost memory were everywhere. And the sounds and smells and tastes.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Deciding to trace the origins of the food that had come to define America was one thing. But being on the continent and feeling it, that was completely another.

• 28:01Dan Pashman?

  Dr. Harris appears in the first episode. She visits Benin with Steven, acting as his guide. First place she brings him, of course, is the market. She literally holds his hand as they amble through.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  One of the largest open-air markets in Western Africa.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  And my feet are on the ground here and it feels incredible.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  This is where you come to be in the center of the kind of throbbing life of the place.

• 28:27Dan Pashman?

  The Netflix show tells some of the same stories from Dr. Harris's book, and it adds new stories from a new generation of Black Americans in food. There's Omar Tate, who's recreating the dishes made by Black caterers in the early 20th century, Juneteenth-inspired cakes created by Jerrel Guy, and Ben Harney, who's selling oysters on the streets of Harlem. Food writer Osaii Endalyn wrote in The New York Times that the show, quote, "Does what so few have been willing to do, give Black people space to explore and express our own joy." The series also brings together different generations of Black Americans to talk with each other about their history. At the end of the first episode, they travel together to a place in Benin similar to Gorei Island, another place where enslaved Africans started their journey across the Atlantic.

• 29:10Dan Pashman?

  As they stand there together by the shore, Stephen begins to weep, just as Dr. Harris did on Gorei Island. She comforts Stephen, hugs him, talks him through the experience. I asked her how she felt being there with him and how that relates to her role in helping the next generation continue her work.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't think I'm inured to the emotion of the place or the time, but I have been to many of the places. And I had certainly been to that place in Benin at least three or four times prior, so that there was, I can't say, an emotional disconnect. You cannot help feel something there. It's palpable. But with all of that, as Yaya Mbup was there for me, there is always a kind of necessary imperative

• 30:12Speaker 01

  that someone help someone through it. And then maybe you get your help the next time. If everybody breaks down, no one can get anywhere because we're all just heaving masses. So I think that's part of what was driving my reaction there. It's not at all that I am... Stoic by any stretch of the imagination. I have cried there. I have wept there. I have placed some of my father's ashes along the beach there. I have communed with that place.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  And so it was time for me to help Stephen.

• 30:58Dan Pashman?

  You write in the introduction to High on the Hog that you quote, "know that the food of the African continent and its American diaspora continues to remain a culinary unknown for most folks." How much do you think that has changed?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I think it may be changing now. I'm not sure that it has changed. I think people are more sensitized too. I think people are, and you know, God bless Netflix and the series, are coming to a kind of realization of some things. You know, I think that that really is not something that has changed as much as one might think it might have. I like to hope that it will.

• 31:41Dan Pashman?

  I know that there are a number of black Americans today who are working in similar directions in terms of getting more recognition for the contributions that have been made. What advice would you have to the next generation of people who want to pursue a similar path?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I guess my advice would be do your work. Don't do mine. Do your work. Don't look at, you know, left and right. Look ahead. What do you see ahead?

• 32:21Dan Pashman?

  The expression "high on the hog" comes from a folk tale about an enslaved black man named John and his master. Story goes that John helps the master slaughter hogs and his payment is the pig's head, feet, and ears. In other words, the least desirable parts of the animal. But then John gets his own hogs without the master knowing, so John can eat spare ribs, pork chops, all the best cuts. The next time the master asks John to help him, John first wants to know what he'll get paid. The master says, "I'll pay you like I always did. I'll give you the head, the ears, and the feet." John says, "No, thanks. I'll pass." He tells the master, "I'm eating higher on the hog than that now." I asked Dr. Harris why she chose that expression as the title for her book.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It, you know, it spoke to a need and a desire and something that John actually gets by his own wit and wisdom, because the reason that he's eating higher on the hog is because he's gotten three hogs of his own. Interestingly enough, they have translated it in a variety of different ways in the 32 different languages that it seems to be available in. And the French translation is la part de lion, the lion's share. And I'm not sure I agree with

• 33:43Speaker 01

  that. So, because it speaks to a slightly different way of looking at that. I don't necessarily want the lion's share. I want my share. I just want to be higher on the hog.

• 34:14Dan Pashman?

  That's Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Her new book is out now. It's called Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine. Next week on the show, the story of a street vendor who sells hot dogs in one of the most coveted pieces of real estate in all of New York City. In fact, so coveted that he sleeps in his van next to the spot every night so no one can take it. In fact, he's even gone to jail to protect his turf. That's next week. While you're waiting for that one, check out last week's show featuring the story of one restaurant critic's very unusual encounter with a famous chef. That one's up now. Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does

• 34:59Dan Pashman?

  your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres With editing by Tracy Samuelson. And engineering by Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Kate Crehan from Richmond, Virginia, reminding you to eat more, eat better, eat more better.

• 35:47Speaker 06

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