A note from Mecca (Med) Howe, PhD: This blog article was written for an undergraduate class assignment for my Food, Culture, and Nutrition class (Spring 2026) at UNC Charlotte. The course explores food and nutritional anthropology through a biocultural lens to understand why we eat what we eat and how food makes us human. For their final project, students were asked to write a blog article on a topic from the course that resonated with them. The assignment encouraged them to combine lived experiences and self-reflection with evidence-based research to tell a compelling story, ultimately building skills in writing for public audiences. I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did!
Harmony Bynum
UNC Charlotte
Pig’s Feet in the Afternoon, Chittlins with Dinner
As a toddler, my great-grandmother would hand-feed me just about anything on her plate; to this day, she’ll tell anyone how much I would eat as a baby, how I would always make a specific pointing motion to my mouth whenever I saw a relative eating (something she does with every retelling of the story).
There was a particular day I had waddled up to my great-grandfather, who was most likely watching a gunslinger show as he ate his chitlins over rice with greens and cornbread… I, of course, made my little motion and, without a moment’s thought, my grandfather fed me to my heart’s content. This would all be disrupted by my grandmother, who rushed in with a panic. She thought what he was feeding me would kill me and that she would need to call an ambulance. If you assumed it was the chitterlings she was afraid of me eating, you’re dead wrong; it was the hot sauce on them.
In their company, not one part of the animal was seen as unseemly or invaluable. Sure, we didn’t eat the eyeballs of our fish catches, but they didn’t scoff at chicken feet and frog legs being sold in stores. I grew to eventually dislike chitlins; my disdain for them resided in their smell while cooking. I didn’t learn what they truly were until the age of 16. However, I still loved pickled pigs’ feet just as much as I loved anything pickled: pickled sausages, pickled eggs, and of course, pickles! I’d wait on the curb on hot summer days with my great-grandmother and sisters for a routine red pickup truck that would go through our neighborhood every summer at noon. In the back, the driver would sell handmade snowcones and ‘freezie-pops,’ but unlike my sisters, all I wanted was a giant pickle and a pig’s foot just like my grandmother.
I didn’t feel the true stigma around these foods until I had heard the comments of other people, be it family or not. I had to be alone or in the company of people who didn’t sneer if I wanted to enjoy pig’s feet. These foods were ‘backwater trash’ to my relatives who did not grow up eating off the plates of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather.
A Brief History
The commonly believed weekly ration of enslaved people, being ‘a peck of cornmeal (8 dry quarts), 3.5 pounds of meat, and some molasses’, neglects the variation seen in the real diets of enslaved people. Over time and across different spaces (states and plantations), the amount of meat and type of meat given to enslaved people in the United States varied greatly, not unlike its documentation. The majority of accounts regarding meat quantities for enslaved people were not large; some listed the skin of pork, small amounts of meat, or a few fish. The personal accounts of enslaved people like William Grimes support this experience. “Sometimes we had a little meat, or fish, but not often.”¹
There were several moving elements surrounding the access to pigs as a food source for enslaved people, for example, a plantation owner named James Goodloe remarked that “a slave who owned chickens or pigs would not run away.”² The structure of control over an
enslaved person’s life extended to not just the literal state of enslavement but also their access to nutrient-dense food, which was meant to tether them to their enslavers. Meat was both a prison and a luxury to some extent in the South. For example, Cincinnati by the 1810s was the center of pork production. Before pork was sent to other states, it was graded based on its quality. The highest cuts were sent to the Northeast, less desirable parts to the South, and finally, “bulk pork” (heads and feet of hogs) was often sent to markets in New Orleans, where enslavers would purchase the meat.³ However, pigs’ feet, along with other now ‘undesirable’ parts, were consumed by both poor white and black people, both in the south and nationwide.
The sentiment of pigs’ feet (also known as trotters, pettitoes, and crubeens) and chittlins/chitterlings (the small intestines of pigs or other animals, which are usually boiled or fried) as unclean, for the poor, and generally disgusting, did not appear out of thin air. These portions of animals were not seen as ideal, due to the status of poverty being tied to them. The increased availability of other ‘better’ parts of animals left poorer people as the main consumers of offal, including feet, tails, ears, offal/organs, or neck bones. These people were often also enslaved or formerly enslaved people.⁴
It took an extreme amount of effort to adapt what foods they were able to eat into not just edible meals but culturally infused, delicious ones. This practice of adaptation during not just the times of enslavement but following eras encompasses Soul Food as we know it today.⁵ The stigma surrounding foods under the Soul Food umbrella can be partially attributed to the media that depicted black people and outsider narratives about our food and culture. The division of consumption came from who was prospering economically and who was not; ‘undesirable’ cuts of meat remained with those who couldn’t afford ‘better’.⁵ To this day, the consumption of pigs’ feet and their intestines is not limited to Black Americans or White Americans; it appears in many cultures, American and not!⁶ Ironically, offal, including sweetbreads (which are not sweet or bread, but typically the pancreas or thymus of a lamb or calf), can be found in fine dining restaurants today.
In Defence of Pig’s Feet and Chittlins
Trotters/Pigs’ Feet are great sources of collagen, which is found in the thick skin and connective tissue of the hooves.⁷ Collagen contributes greatly to our body’s protein, in our skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and so on. Collagen replaces dead skin cells and adds a protective layer for our organs.⁸ While one could go out of their way to pay a higher price for a collagen treatment or supplements, they could also try to add an occasional pickled pigs’ foot to their diet, or other forms of consuming pigs feet which exists in many cultures and fashions such as the Polish Jellied Pigs’ Feet (also known as ‘cold legs’)⁹, Paksiw na Pata a fillipino classic¹⁰, and many more. There is a whole world of ways to cook trotters, which very well might exist in your culture as well!
Organs/Offal contain many beneficial components for nutrition, depending on which part is consumed, such as higher levels of iron, protein, vitamins (like B, A, E, and D), minerals (such as zinc, selenium, and magnesium), and more! Organs of animals, despite the stigma surrounding them, are generally safe to eat; the consumption of organs like pigs’ feet is best in moderation and in context, like any other part of our diets.¹¹
A Reflection
These days, I don’t eat pork as often as I used to for the sake of warding off headaches (it may be caused by a sensitivity or tyramines and histamines, which commonly affect blood vessels), but on the off chance that I do, I don’t stray from a pickled ‘trotter’, especially on my summer trips to South Carolina. I find that there is something so fulfilling about consuming a part of an animal that would otherwise be wasted. I see it as a small respect for their life, in the same way one might clear their plate.
Through this writing journey, I have found a new love and appreciation for not just the animals it takes to make these foods I choose to eat, but also the innovation it took to make these foods delicious classics for so many people, and important to me and my culture. While I still have an aversion to chitlins because of their preparation and cooking smells alone, I recommend that anyone who is feeling adventurous visit their nearest Piggly Wiggly, Butcher’s Shop, or any other store that carries cuts of an animal they’ve been put off by or scared to try!
That’s all, folks!
1. Matthew C. Greer, More Complicated Than Meal, Meat, and Molasses: Historicizing Enslaved Rations in the Southern United States (Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 14, 2025), 50–69.
2. Kathleen Hillar, Slave Consumption in the Old South: A Double-Edged Sword (Organization of American Historians, 2017).
3. Jerome Dotson, “The Republic of Porkdom”: Pork Consumption, Kentucky, and the Cotton South (Journal of Arizona History, Volume 64, Number 3, 2023), 359-376. 4. Edward C. Payne, An Offal Way to Signal Status: Food and Cultural Capital (University of Idaho, 2025)
5. Stephanie L. Tyson, Soul Food Journey (John F. Blaire Publisher, 2015), Introduction. 6. Crystal A. Johnson, The Worldwide Consumption of Chitterlings (Multi-Cultural Cooking Network, 2011).
7. WebMD Review Board, Christine Mikstas, Are There Health Benefits to Eating Trotters? (WebMD, 2024).
8. Cleveland Clinic Review Board, Collagen (Cleveland Clinic, 2022) 9. Judi Strauss, Jellied Pig’s Feet (Charmed Kitchen, 2022).
10. Vanjo Merano, Paksiw Na Pata Recipe (Panlasang Pinoy, 2024).
11. Julia Zumpano, The Pros and Cons of Eating Organ Meat (Cleveland Clinic, 2022).
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