When Netflix’s High on the Hog released its first season in 2021, the docuseries was praised across food and entertainment worlds for its history of Black food in America. “High on the Hog is an incredible reframing of history that reintroduces the United States to viewers through the lens of Black people’s food,” wrote the journalist Osayi Endolyn in The New York Times, discussing the Peabody Award–winning show’s journey through centuries of slavery and emancipation, as well as a history of Juneteenth. It was “a visually stunning pastiche of Black foodways, oral traditions, and celebrations,” writer Chala June put it in Bon Appétit.
Nearly three years later, High on the Hog has returned on for a second season. With a new batch of four episodes airing November 22, the season picks up immediately where the first one ends, highlighting the role that food played in the Reconstruction era, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South into Chicago and New York, and the civil rights era. The journalist Stephen Satterfield returns as the series’ host and narrator, accompanied by his friend and mentor Dr. Jessica B. Harris, who wrote the eponymous book the show is based on.
Much like the first season, the new High on the Hog tells its stories over a series of meals with prominent Black thinkers and chefs like Nia Lee of the queer dinner series Stormé Supper Club, Yardy World founder (and Bon Appétit contributor) DeVonn Francis, and the New York food collective Ghetto Gastro. Unlike the first season, season two’s 20th-century survey allows many of its subjects to tell their own stories. Satterfield tells Bon Appétit that he and his fellow showrunners wanted to highlight these “living elders,” such as a former Pullman porter—a service worker for the Pullman railroad company, one of the first middle-class jobs available to Black men and also the first unionized Black workforce in the country. The show also spotlights a former sharecropper, organizers of Atlanta lunch counter sit-ins in the ’60s and ’70s, early Black Panther Martin Gordon, and descendants of Black food visionaries like Queen of Creole Cuisine Leah Chase.
Satterfield and Dr. Harris spoke with Bon Appétit about food, struggle, and family in the four new episodes, the decision to expand High on the Hog from a limited series into an ongoing show, and what the future of the docuseries might look like.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Bon Appétit: How did you decide to bring back High on the Hog, this time focusing on Reconstruction and civil rights?
Dr. Jessica B. Harris: It was always my hope and desire that we'd be able to get a second season. And we were fortunate enough to do it, and it resulted in some compelling storytelling by some of the folks who were actually alive at that time in history.
Stephen Satterfield: A big theme for me in the second season is what I’m calling “living elders.” It is quite a different experience to be among folks who have made history themselves. That was the biggest difference in coming to a modern-day dialogue around Black foodways.
BA: This season felt much more personal than the last, with snippets of both of your personal biographies scattered throughout. Dr. Harris, you speak at length about your grandmother’s garden, and Stephen, your grandfather, who was a Pullman porter, gets brought up throughout the season. How did it feel to directly incorporate your narratives into this history?
JH: The past is present. I think the past is universal. It's not just Stephen's story. It’s not just my story. It’s the story. Our stories as they relate to a general narrative that is the story of Black people in food in this country. And so, although I know Stephen fairly well, it was extraordinary hearing his family’s connections to so many parts of the story that I wrote in my book without knowing Stephen at the time.
SS: It just happens to be that my own personal story as a Black American really tracks so closely with that of so many other Black Americans. These parts of my own history are known to me through intergenerational storytelling. These are things that have always existed around me, so much so that it’s like oxygen. I have lived with it. But actually being on a train with a Pullman porter or being in my hometown of Atlanta and talking to the brilliant student organizers about their tactics of staging a sit-in—these were the richest parts of telling this story.
BA: A big through line this season is labor—the compensated labor of sharecroppers and Pullman porters and the uncompensated labor of women like Georgia Gilmore, whose underground pie business helped fund the Montgomery bus boycott. What do you want viewers to take away about Black labor as it relates to food?
JH: When you look at African Americans in food in the country and beyond, you are talking about something that originates in forced and unpaid labor through slavery that then morphs into underpaid labor that ultimately, with the outcome of some of the Civil Rights Movement, becomes paid labor that’s still negotiating for parity.
It also becomes a women’s rights issue. If you peel the surface back, it’s always women who are underpinning social movements. And I think that that is demonstrated by the ladies in our episode about the Civil Rights Movement: the celebrity chef Lena Richard, the cookbook author Edna Lewis, all of those folks who did it, as the saying goes, just as well backwards and in high heels.
SS: And it’s not like Black women didn’t have their own money and their own enterprises and their own social groups and modes of resisting and organizing that often were overlapping with Black men’s and Black folks’ in general. But I think a lot of what I wanted to celebrate are the parts of that story that are a mode of protection and creating their own sense of independence. Thinking about the ways that Black women have used food to build wealth and legacies and throw fabulous parties, such as the millionaires and socialites Madam C. J. Walker and A’Lelia Walker, it’s hard not to fall in love with that part of the history.
BA: The season’s civil rights episode is phenomenal. It focuses in part on the sit-in at the segregated Magnolia tea room in Rich’s department store in Atlanta. Why did you choose to center food in that history?
SS: To me, the real story is about enlightened and well-organized young people using restaurants, where people gathered to eat food, as a target for civil disruption of polite Southern segregated society. Food plainly is not only a necessity of humans, but something that really underscores the absurdity of segregation. It causes indigestion, if you will. And, of course, it didn’t just start in Atlanta, where our episode takes place. But that specific movement, that specific brand of resistance, happened in places where food was served, like at the lunch counter or at the restaurants in Rich’s department store. I think it's all right there, why those spaces were so intentionally chosen.
BA: What other moments of history would you want to explore in a future High on the Hog episode?
JH: There are places that I would like to see more of. I’m partial to New Orleans. I have a house there. In the future, I would love to see a little bit more of its foodways and the whole creolization. I think Mississippi and the Black Belt play a role in Black food history that we haven’t really seen in the series yet. Also, in the new season, we get Harlem, we get Chicago, but we only get Harlem and Chicago in relation to the Great Migration. We don’t get the North as a multigenerational place.
I think the show ends with us saying there are so many stories. We haven’t really looked at Black caterers, and there’s a whole area of history there. And Stephen, I believe, is working on a book on Black vintners. There’s also family food, the family table in and of itself, the regionalities of African American food. There’s a lot of stuff.
SS: After the last season, I came to appreciate how hard it is to consolidate the history and pick individual stories out of the big picture. The stories about Black food are limitless and unlimited and that’s part of the overarching story of the second season: that it’s impossible to escape our stories and our contributions.
All four episodes of the second season of ‘High on the Hog’ begin streaming on Netflix on November 22.