It is a great sigh of relief seeing people of African descent producing excellent content about food. Some of the faces are folks whose work I have been following for quite a while.
What is important to me is not that White people are recognizing Black people's food but that Black people are getting economic gain and consuming some of their own content. It's all about power full stop. People will always be nice to a certain extent, but power carries you a whole lot futher.
I almost froze up the first time I looked at the flyer for this Netflix show with mixed emotions. Then my mind traveled back to the lasting image from a slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano. According to Olaudah's account, people in his native region in what is modern day Nigeria owned slaves.
One ended up being a slave due to debt or war. What I found interesting is that the only thing that distinguished a free person from a slave was food. While an enslaved person did the same amount of work for the same duration as his master, he or she had to eat apart from everyone else. In other words, eating by oneself was the mark of slavery.
Upon his capture as and transportation to America, Equiano was sold on the slave market. He was then taken to the plantation of his enslaver. The following morning, he was tasked with fanning his bedridden boss. On his way to the room where the plantation owner layed, Equiano saw an enslaved woman in kitchen with a mouth piece tied around her mouth to keep her from eating the food she was cooking. I immediately went online to research how that mouthpiece looked like. I was horrified at how creative man can be even when the creativity is aimed at causing untold misery. But this was a form of turture that was mind-boggling.
It is quite amazing to me that food has now become an equal opportunity enslaver. Bad food knows no master or slave. Those with power suffer from eating too much of the bad food that has largely put them in power or maintain that power. The dispossessed are suffering from the consumption of processed food made by the powerful as they have been duped to value foreign and processed food and for lack of resources to secure healthy and justice food. Bad diet has become an equal opportunity killer.
One issue that is at the heart of every plate is justice or the luck there of. That is a fact we cannot ran away from. A threat to a plate justice anywhere is a threat to heatlth and sanity everywhere. That sounds like something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr would say.
High on the Hog is content that we will be consuming for a while. It a great time to ask what we intend to accomplish at the end of it. I love seeing familiar Black faces. But my goal is to move the needle of justice forward. I want to be high on legitimate power. High on the Hog can be a metaphor of exclusivity. It leaves out those that don't eat hogs or meat. But legitimate power is something that none has any dietary restrictions to be concerned about. While we all can eat any kind of food without any regard to race, the mouthpiece to power has both racial and class bias. I will be watching closely to see how that will be less so. Hopefully I won't be holding my breath too long. Otherwise, I might find that I can't breath.