‘High on the Hog’ Season 2 Shows How Food Powered the Civil Rights Movement

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’s 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 descendents 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.