Blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay spiced with Old Bay seasoning. Fresh shrimp off the coast of Louisiana dropped off in kitchens across the bayous and into the heart of New Orleans. Rockfish, porgy, crawfish, and spot, among many other varieties of seafood, are central to the heartbeat of food culture along the coastlines of the South. The commercial fishing industry across the southeastern United States offers an in-depth look into the connection between the current local and craft food movement and the harsh reality of continually operating a business that's livelihood is vulnerable to natural and human disasters. Yet the resiliency embedded in this industry strengthens the social solidarity within these communities that line the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf Coast, similar to the social networks that exist between producers and consumers in the craft beer industry, allowing these businesses to thrive despite pushback from other sources (Borer, 2019). While restaurant chefs are able to highlight their dedication to local seafood through their menus and the self-selecting clientele who are seeking out the associated status conveyed upon those who choose to eat local (Johnston and Baumann, 2010), in this relationship the chef is often the center of attention from both the diner and the media. However, their success is dependent on their suppliers, in this case the fishermen and women who endure hurricanes, oil spills, and various forms of government regulation to provide their customers and local chefs with fresh seafood while also continuing to operate their family businesses, which in many cases have been in operation for multiple generations.

Most of the people watching the Food Network, one of the top 25 television channels in 2019 (Schneider, 2019), or one of the other networks featuring cooking shows, such as Bravo's Emmy awardwinning Top Chef (the network places just behind the Food Network in popularity), are unlikely to ever see the people responsible for seafood production, with few exceptions. Top Chef does highlight commercial fishing or some form of procuring seafood from the water in several seasons, including sea urchin or uni in Santa Barbara, fishing off Montauk, New York, oysters in Seattle, and shrimp each time Top Chef has been filmed in the South— in New Orleans and Charleston. Highlighting the importance of the fishing communities in these popular television shows provides a window into how important these industries are in the coastal South.