Start the New Year right!

If you’re southern, chances are you have some kind of greens cooking up with some cut of pork, along with a pot of black-eye peas and a skillet of cornbread. Maybe your black-eye peas are part of a Hoppin’ John dish, which is mixed with spices and rice. It’s a New Year’s Day tradition and believed to bring good luck.

There are other traditions, worldwide, but I grew up with the southern version. I resisted it, too, until my adult years when I discovered the food tasted good together. Legumes and leafy green vegetables are healthful, so eating them on New Year’s Day starts off the year on a positive note, at least nutritionally. But where did the ideas that such cuisine brought good luck originate?

Who knows for sure. There is a theory that because the pig digs with its snout in a forward motion, the pig symbolizes progress…