Why do many people eat ham on Easter?

[Act_of_Reparation]

48. That's a common misperception.

According to Canon Law:

Can. 1250: The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.

Can. 1251: Abstinence from eating meat or some other food according to the prescripts of the conference of bishops is to be observed on, of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year of age. The law of fasting, however, binds all those who have attained their majority until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Nevertheless, pastors of souls and parents are to take care that minors not bound by the law of fast and abstinence are also educated in a genuine sense of penance.

Can. 1253: The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in the whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.

This is from the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Our esteemed colleague refers to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' 1966 Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence:

12. Wherefore, we ask, urgently and prayerfully, that we, as people of God, make of the entire Lenten Season a period of special penitential observance. Following the instructions of the Holy See, we declare that the obligation both to fast and to abstain from meat, an obligation observed under a more strict formality by our fathers in the faith, still binds on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. No Catholic Christian will lightly excuse himself from so hallowed an obligation on the Wednesday which solemnly opens the Lenten season and on that Friday called "Good" because on that day Christ suffered in the flesh and died for our sins.

Long story short: YMMV depending on your bishop, but by no means has Friday fasting been eliminated from the books.