Having been born and raised in the South, I am intimately familiar with the tradition of eating collard greens and black-eyed peas on New Year's Day.  It is a good luck tradition long-honored in my home.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned from Bloomberg that over all of these years and generations of Walkers we had been omitting one of the key components of Southern New Year's Day superstition-driven eating:

Superstition across the [South] holds that eating HOG JOWLS, collard greens and black-eyed peas on Jan. 1 makes one healthy, wealthy and wise for the next 12 months (emphasis mine).

I had never heard about eating hog jowls on January 1 until this Bloomberg article and, given the health, wealth and wisdom of the many Walkers who have neglected to eat hog jowls on January 1, I am sure that eating hog jowls is not, in fact, something that needs to be done on New Year's Day.

Deeper in the article you can see that the evidence to support the hog jowl eating tradition isn't quite as strong as the bold proclamation made at the beginning of the article:

The tradition of eating collard greens and black-eyed peas on New Year's Day probably began in Africa and dates back at least 200 years. . . .  Southerners adapted recipes from slaves AND LATER ADDED THE HOG JOWL because it was widely available during peak slaughtering times in October and November (emphasis added).

The article doesn't explain how late Southerners "later added the hog jowl" to the tradition, but I'm guessing it occurred at about the time someone in the marketing department at Smithfield Foods came up with the idea.

Anyway, if any of you think I'm wrong, please speak up while there's still time to buy hog jowls.