Welcome to You Are What You Eat...or Are You?, a mini series about the ways that we project our identities through food.
“I'm revoking your Black card!” That’s one sentence that any community-affirming and self-loving African American hates to hear from another African American. Often said in jest, it’s a signal that one has done something to lessen one’s Black identity and kinship with other African Americans. It comes up frequently with food choices. Some Black folks—like the ones who put raisins in potato salad—deserve it. Yet one “cultural transgression” in particular has a complicated status: eating pork.
I'm reminded of the feelings around pork every time I talk about Soul Food, my history book on the cuisine. Each chapter in the book features a specific aspect of a representative soul food meal, and at book events I detail the meal and invite the audience to voice their approval when I mention something they like. This “call and response” moment starts to feel like church. That is, until I get the loud boos, gasps, and expressions of horror when I mention chitlins, or stewed or fried pig intestines. More on chitlins later, but it’s not the focal point here. A lot of people within the Black community have gone whole hog with their disdain for pork in general. No, it doesn’t help the situation to call pork “the other white meat,” as some folks do.
I'm also reminded of pork disapproval when I turn on the television, read something, listen to music, or watch a movie. The most memorable popular culture references for me began in the 1990s. Who can forget Ice Cube rapping that a good day would start without bacon, or John Travolta praising pork-eating to an incredulous, self-professed, non-swine-eater Samuel L. Jackson in the final diner scene in Pulp Fiction? These days most of the heat comes on social media, usually on Twitter after I post about pork.
It’s not just one type of Black person who’s calling on other Black folks to end their centuries-long, complicated love affair with pork. The unofficial “Just Say ‘Heck No’ to Pork” movement has several constituencies. For one, healthy living advocates urge others to avoid pork for health reasons. They don’t eat meat at all, or they’ve limited their meat consumption to either fish or poultry.
Others avoid pork because their religion advises against it. For Black Jews and Black Muslims, their sacred texts inform them that pork is a taboo food. Though Christians far outnumber in Jews and Muslims in the African American community, Islam has been the fastest growing religion amongst African Americans for decades, particularly with those who are incarcerated. In addition, the influential Nation of Islam, an organization that fuses Islam and Black Nationalism, has been especially vociferous about the evils of pork eating. In my experience, when someone uses the specific word “swine” for pork, that person has been persuaded by the NOI perspective, even if they don’t formally follow the group.
The critique that speaks to the Black identity most powerfully is ideological. Passionately pro-Black activists argue that eating a food that is not part of the African American ancestral diet and that slaveholders forced upon us means literally ingesting and digesting white supremacy. They also argue that many of the chronic disease ills that plague the Black community flow from the pork that we refuse to wean from our diet. Ultimately, a return to the pork-free diet of our West African ancestors is a powerful way to reassert our collective Blackness. This perspective gained momentum in the 1960s, and has been a part of Black culture ever since.
But I’m old enough to remember when pork, and its swine-related synonyms, were unquestionably tied to the essence of African American identity. Pork was showcased at special occasion meals, inspired cultural references about status (“eating high on the hog”), and was a euphemism for sex. Some even believed that heaven was a place where barbecued pigs ran around with knives and forks stuck in them to make them easier to eat. The anti-pork sentiment represents a stunning reversal of cultural and culinary cachet for pigs. Ironically, people have also previously been denied Blackness because they refused to eat pork.
The main reason pork became a dominant protein in African American cuisine is slavery. Prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, pigs were present in sub-Saharan West Africa, but they were not a major part of the indigenous diet. Even if pigs were plentiful, Islam had spread in the region since the 800s C.E., which made pork a taboo food for the burgeoning number of Muslim converts. Centuries later, slavers didn’t care what spiritual practices their human captives observed. Enslaved African Muslims were force-fed salted pork on the weeks-long journey by ship from West Africa to the Americas. The only other option was to starve.
Once in the British North American colonies, slaveholders doled out weekly rations of a couple pounds of dried, pickled, salted, or smoked pork along with a few pounds of cornmeal and a jug of molasses to the enslaved. Slaveholders relied heavily on pork to feed the enslaved because pigs were so easy and inexpensive to raise. One of the high points on the plantation calendar was the annual hog-killing, where numerous pigs were slaughtered, processed, and preserved to provide nourishment throughout the year. If enslaved people wanted another source of protein they had to fish, hunt, or raise livestock during their leisure time, of which they had little. Many still did so to supplement their diet, but pork was the meat the enslaved typically ate.
Even though it was forced upon them, the enslaved eventually embraced pork when they were free to choose what type of meat they were going to eat. After a hog-killing, the various parts of the pig that couldn’t be preserved were relished. This brings us back to pig’s intestines, also known as chitterlings or chitlins. To this day chitlins are soul food’s most controversial dish, mainly because of what they are (“guts”), the funky smell that arises when they’re cleaned and cooked, and their reputation for being something that white people didn’t want to eat. The latter is false. Plenty of white people ate, and still eat, chitlins. As just one historical example, in the 1930s, Willis Woodson of Texas recounted during an oral history interview that his enslaved mother auditioned for the plantation cook position by proving to their enslaver that she was good at making chitlins.
Another beloved pork eating tradition is barbecue. Although anything could wind up over the pit, from the 1600s to the 20th century, barbecue meant cooking a butterflied whole hog over a pit filled with hardwood burning coals. Enslaved African Americans were apt to barbecue any time there was a community gathering, whether that was after church or while just having fun with friends and family. The high-profile, and nearly successful, rebellion led by Nat Turner in the early 1800s is believed to have been planned over a whole hog barbecue. After Emancipation, African Americans became barbecue’s most effective ambassadors and spread this culinary art form around the country and the world. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, pork always had an honored place on African American home-cooked meals and restaurant menus. I have a pile of precious memories from pork-fueled meals with my family, friends, and larger community.
I know that, most of the time, people critique pork consumption out of concern for my physical and spiritual well-being, and they have valid points. That’s fine. The unkindest cuts for me are the critiques seasoned with the idea that eating pork somehow makes me less Black. Truth be told, I’m cutting back on the impressive amounts of pork that I usually eat because doing so has made me, well, kind of porky. Yet, I love swine nonetheless.
All I’m asking for is less judgment while I unapologetically dine on bacon, chitlins, ham hocks, pork chops, sausage, spareribs, and everything but the squeal. Group identity is fluid, especially when it's tied to culture and food. It’s formed by a complicated mix of good and bad things that happen over time. We, as individuals, repeatedly evaluate this mix and then decide how we connect our identity to the larger group’s. When it comes to eating pork, that means I'm just as Black for enjoying it as those who avoid it all together are. In this case, Black cards are for dealing, not revoking.