Looking for a first citation for this or its alternate “high up on the hog.” So far with my somewhat limited archive resources the earliest I’ve been able to find is 1919 . It seems to have really taken hold in a 1920 article where “eating high on the hog” was partially to blame for the high cost of living.
I’ve seen various references that it refers to Antebellum South, where plantation owners would eat the upper parts and the slaves would get the pig feet. Maybe it’s true, but I haven’t yet found a credible contemporary source to push it back that far.
The idea that ‘living high on the hog’ initially meant ‘living the high life’ and eating pork, rather than literally ‘eating meat from high on the pig’, seems plausible but is dealt a blow by the following citation. This is the earliest printed form of the phrase that I have come across – from the New York Times, March 1920:
Southern laborers who are “eating too high up on the hog” (pork chops and ham) and American housewives who “eat too far back on the beef” (porterhouse and round steak) are to blame for the continued high cost of living, the American Institute of Meat Packers announced today.
I find that confusing. Ham is the back of the pig, but chops are taken off the top; both are better cuts than jowls and hocks. Eating pork at all rather than not being able to afford meat might be an indicator: in 1920 hog prices were still wildly high because of the war, more than double what they had been in 1916.
Also, p 211 of the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms states an origin for high off the hog in the “late 1800s”. No cites.
Well, yeah, pretty much what I have found, which is technically correct.
However. . . in accord with the OED, it first appears several months earlier (December 1919) in an article from the “Chicago News” in an anecdote provided by one US District Attorney Charles F. Clyne (Illinois) where he uses it as “high up on the hog.”
He’s relating an anecdote where the speaker is a “negro woman”–who, in explaining her newly acquired fortunes now that she had left her “no account husband” says she’s now eating “furder up on de hog [sic].” This anecdote also makes the connection between eating pigs’ feet (po’ folks’ food) as being what she had to eat when she was with her no-account husband. Clyne’s summation restates it as “eating too high up on the hog.”
I found a 1912 citation that specified the upper part of a hog as the desirable parts.
1912, George S. Jack, Edward Boyle Jacobs, History of Roanoke County, p. 29: With all the tenderloin, spareribs and backbones, we lived “high off the hog”.
Interesting that none of the earliest finds are for “high on”, which seems to be the modern usage.
I did find a precursor, though, that may point to the supposedly discredited inheritance of “high” from British usage.
Earlington, KY, Bee, Aug. 21, 1901, p. 6.
[W]e hitched the hog to the single tree and dragged it proudly home. Maybe you think we did not live high off of that hog.
No mention of which exact parts they ate, but they barbecued, fried, roasted, stewed, and broiled it, so probably everything.