Overview
- Cracker Barrel said it is operating with its standard menu on New Year’s Day, ending a past practice of offering black-eyed peas that many Southerners treat as a holiday staple.
- Black-eyed peas are linked to luck and coins, collard greens to paper money, cornbread to gold, and pork to forward progress, as codified by Southern food historian John Egerton.
- Texas restaurants are keeping the custom alive, with West Side Cafe serving bowls of black-eyed peas on Jan. 1 and Irving’s Po Melvin’s continuing its decades-long focus on the dish.
- A widely told origin story says Union troops left black-eyed peas as animal feed during the Civil War, helping Southerners survive and anchoring the peas’ association with good fortune.
- Recent data tie the rituals to regional agriculture, with North Carolina ranking third in collard greens (about 1,300 acres on 325 farms in 2022) and sixth in cowpeas (784 acres on 228 farms), while 2025 reports note higher poultry exports and processed-turkey prices.