Why We Eat Certain Foods for Luck

Across a huge range of cultures, certain foods are eaten not primarily for taste but for what they're believed to bring — good fortune, prosperity, longevity or protection against bad luck in the year ahead. These traditions cluster particularly heavily around New Year celebrations, when the symbolic stakes of a fresh start feel highest, but they appear at other culturally significant moments too, and the specific foods chosen are rarely arbitrary — they usually connect to a visual, linguistic or symbolic association that made sense within that culture's worldview.

In the American South, eating black-eyed peas (often as part of the dish Hoppin' John, combined with rice) on New Year's Day is a long-standing tradition believed to bring good luck and prosperity for the coming year, with collard greens or cabbage frequently served alongside, their green colour symbolically linked to money. The tradition's exact origins are debated, with some accounts tracing it to Sephardic Jewish communities in the American South and others linking it to West African culinary traditions carried through the transatlantic slave trade, but the core association between eating humble, plentiful foods and inviting prosperity is a recurring theme across many cultures' New Year traditions.

In Spain, a very specific and precisely timed tradition involves eating twelve grapes in the final twelve seconds before midnight on New Year's Eve, one grape per chime of the clock, with each grape said to represent good luck for one month of the coming year. The tradition is generally dated to the early 20th century, and versions of it have since spread to parts of Latin America. Successfully eating all twelve grapes in time, without choking, is treated as an auspicious start to the year — and missing a grape or two is, by tradition, taken as a small omen for whichever month that grape represented.

In China, numerous foods carry symbolic significance tied to Lunar New Year celebrations, often based on wordplay — a distinctive feature of Chinese food symbolism given how many Chinese words carry near-homophones with very different meanings. Fish (yú) is eaten because it sounds like the word for 'surplus' or 'abundance', and is traditionally left partially uneaten to symbolise a surplus carrying into the new year. Whole chickens and dumplings shaped to resemble ancient Chinese gold ingots are both associated with wealth and prosperity, while long noodles, left uncut, are eaten to symbolise longevity — cutting them is considered to symbolically shorten one's life.

In Japan, toshikoshi soba (buckwheat noodles eaten on New Year's Eve) carries a related symbolism — the long noodles represent longevity, while their relative ease of cutting compared to other noodle types is sometimes linked to the idea of cutting away the hardships of the old year before the new one begins. In Italy, lentils (lenticchie), often served with cotechino sausage, are eaten on New Year's Eve, their small, coin-like shape directly linked to financial prosperity in the year ahead.

These traditions persist not because anyone necessarily believes eating a specific food will literally alter their fortune, but because food is one of the most accessible and repeatable ways cultures express hope, mark transitions, and connect present celebrations to inherited tradition. Whether or not the grapes, the greens, the noodles or the fish actually change the year ahead, the ritual of eating them together, at a meaningful moment, has its own kind of value regardless of superstition.