I’m Fixing to be Eating High on the Hog

I’m fixing to be eating high on the hog.

You’re probably asking, “Well, how can you do that in these lean times?” It’s easy, and I’ll share it with you because it’s just a state of mind.

But first we have to understand the origin of the phrase. One aspect of it comes from eating, as “Eating High on the Hog,” which refers to the fact that the best and most expensive cuts of meat on a pig come from the back and upper leg, as in pork chops and ham, and that rich folks eat those cuts while “poor folks” are left with pig feet, chitterlings, maws, neck bones and pork belly.

It’s pretty easy to conjure up the vision of a bunch of fat rich folks sitting around a long dining room table covered with fresh linen and sparkling silverware. They would probably have a couple of servants wearing starched white jackets hovering over them while they were setting the table with steaming dishes of smothered pork chops and two big pink hams, one smoked and the other covered with pineapple rings.

The opposite of that image is a two-room dank pheasant hut near the damp swamp, instead of high up on the hill where the lords and ladies are eating high on the hog. This scene entails a bare table where the family has gathered to feast on fried chitterlings and turnip greens cooked with pig knuckles.

I never heard of the phrase “Eating low on the hog,” but that’s what the poor folks were doing.

But wait! Since the poor folks, besides getting all those less desired cuts of the pig, they also got all the scraps. And they learned to make sausage, liverwurst, streak-of-lean and smoked bacon, and as soon as the rich folks discoverer how tasty these items were, they agreed to swap a few pork chops and a few slices of ham for some of them.

I searched and searched for ancient literary references to “eating” or “living” high on the hog, and it couldn’t be found in the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer or the like. Why, when people had eaten pork for millennia, it did not originate before the 20th century, is a difficult question to answer. In fact they aren’t found in any form of print until the 20th century, and them it was in the good old USA, rather than Europe.

The earliest printed reference of the phrase I could come across was from the New York Times in March of 1920, when the American Institute of Meat Packers announced the high cost of living was due to Southern laborers who were “eating too high up on the hog.”
Besides “eating high on the hog” there’s also the phrase “living high on the hog,” which more than likely refers to dining in fine restaurants, partaking of expensive spirits and generally living the high life.

I knew I was fixing to be eating high on the hog when I smelled that pot of Pork Chop Soup simmering on the stove. You make it kind of like you do vegetable soup, except that after you’ve got your vegetables going good, you drop a few batter-fried pork chops into the pot and let them cook till they fall apart among the vegetables.

I used end-cut pork chops because I don’t want any of y’all to think I’m fixing to be eating too high up on the hog.