“Discovering the North Carolina coast has felt like coming home, and its food and the fishing community who make it possible are at the heart of that homecoming.”

We’re going coastal in this issue. Coastal food politics, cultures, and economies have always been a complicated mélange of people competing to utilize changing lands, waters, plants, wildlife, fish, and climates. Defining—and sometimes divisive—issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity undergird all histories and narratives in the South, and so it goes with our region’s evolving coastal foodways. A talented collection of writers and documentarians explore these issues in the pages that follow. A critical theme that these essays reinforce is the volatility— and vulnerability—of traditional seafood and fishing industries and cultures in the American South.