High on the Hog.
I wrote a piece for the Counter about High on the Hog the docuseries, but really I wrote about Dr. Harris’ book and the ways in which we can use her work as a tool for more rigorous examination of our collective work.
I wanted to share this piece I wrote for The Counter about High On The Hog.
It started as a piece primarily about the Netflix docuseries. I found, though, as the writing process progressed, and the world was beginning to consume the series, that the media coverage seemed to be forgetting about the book.
It felt somehow reductive to jump past a 10-year-old book that has been so instrumental in the shifts in the Black culinary cannon we've enjoyed. Stranger still to not acknowledge that Dr. Jessica B Harris' scholarship has been a 40 plus year praxis that has been clear the whole time, so my piece became more about the content of the series than a breakdown of the episodes, which I'd already done in my reader.
In that way, with a lot of help from Dr. Cynthia R. Greenlee as editor, I evolved the piece's spirit and made it about how I consumed the series and began to process its function. I also wanted to interrogate how Dr. Harris and her books have also been right this whole time.
Ultimately I found that I couldn't contextualize her books without framing the culinary zeitgeist in which she wrote them. In the end, I wrote about why reframing American cuisine through the lens of Blackness may not fix the industry but could make Black food creatives better at our work and collectively better stewards of our culture.
Anyhow, here's what it came to be, im proud of the finished product and I hope you dig it!