The story
On a pig, the choicest meat comes from higher up: the loin chops along the back and the hams of the upper legs.
So eating “high on the hog” meant eating the best. The earliest printed example found so far is in the Kansas City Times of November 28, 1919: “We’re all eating too high up on the hog.”
A few months later, in March 1920, The New York Times spelled it out. People eating pork chops and ham were “eating too high up on the hog,” and that, the paper said, was helping push up the cost of living.
From the dinner plate, the phrase spread to life in general. Living high on the hog came to mean living well, with money to spare.
Later came a variant, “high off the hog,” in print by 1946. Ireland has a similar saying, “on the pig’s back,” for being well off, though the two seem to have grown up separately.
