One early January afternoon in 2016, flames erupted from the Edwards Virginia Smokehouse, causing $2.5 million worth of ham and sausage, as well as the buildings and three generations of history, to burn to the ground. In 2019, the family that owns Edwards, the third generation in a business opened in the 1920s along the banks of the James River in Surry, Virginia, just across the river from Jamestown, still had not rebuilt. Although the business is still operating through a succession of other people's smokehouses in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri, the farm-to-table chain the Edwards family had created around their ham products had not been rebuilt. The family sourced local heritage breed pigs raised on a specific peanut feeding system unique to the Virginia region where the original smokehouse was located, and where peanut farmers are plentiful; however, without the Surry smokehouse the cost of shipping pigs from Virginia to other states is prohibitive. Almost three years after the fire, the first batch of Surryano ham, the most iconic of Edwards products, was released, but it is not the same. The unique aspect of dry-aged or cured country ham is the specific combination of bacteria and yeast present in each smokehouse; it is the terroir of the country ham business that makes each brand unique. The popularity of Surryano ham extended far beyond the Tidewater region of Virginia: it featured prominently on the menus of award-winning restaurants in Washington, DC, and New York City, including David Chang's Momofuku (Stolberg, 2016; Korfhage, 2019).

The Edwards fire occurred three years after the largest country ham producer in Virginia and one of the largest in the United States, Smithfield, was bought by a Chinese company. This international purchase followed a series of consolidations that brought most of the Surry and Smithfield area country ham producers into the giant Smithfield conglomerate, which is known for its unique Smithfield hams that are protected under Virginia law in the same way that Greek feta is in Europe. In 2018, the company completely closed down its country ham production and smokehouse (Schneider, 2018).