This weekend, thousands will gather at the Flora-Bama, a weathered roadhouse that straddles the Florida-Alabama state line, to see who can hurl a dead fish the farthest.
The Interstate Mullet Toss is an old and odd tradition in Perdido Key, where the mullet is a kind of symbol for a landscape — and a culture —in flux.
On a recent Monday at Perdido Bay Seafood, with the toss just days away, the only mullet in sight was on a T-shirt.
Teresa Pitts, better known as “T.C.,” runs the place. Her family’s been in the seafood business for generations.
"All the time people call," she said. "They ring that phone off the hook: 'You guys got mullet?'"
These days, the answer is usually no.
Mullet is a silvery, bottom-feeding fish once central to working-class life along the Gulf. Like the haircut of the same name, the mullet has long been a symbol of Southern grit.
"Back in the day, I mean, the mullet were everywhere," Pitts said "… And there weren't as many houses all over the waterway. Any Joe Schmo could go down to the water and throw a cast net and catch some mullet, fry them up right there on the beach, invite all their friends."
These ideas about abundance and generosity are central to understanding the meaning of mullet. Michelle Zacks is a historian at Yale University who is writing a book about the species and its connection to what she calls “the coastal commons.”
“Mullet has a kind of gift-giving element inherent to it," she said. "… Because you harvest it in abundance, people are able to give it away — and are happy to give it away — to take care of each other.”
But these days, that’s less and less the case. Gina Alvarez, a state fisheries biologist, said that, over the past 5 years, the mullet harvest has fallen to its lowest level since the 1990s.
“We need further analysis in order to really determine what is going on,” she said.
She said it could be that there are fewer mullet in the water, or it could be that there are just fewer people fishing for them. What is clear, though, is that mullet is no longer as central to Gulf Coast culture as it once was.
Even as this iconic fish has faded from markets and menus, there are still plenty to go around at the Mullet Toss this weekend. And if you want to know what to do with them, all you need to do is ask Sherry Fundin. She’s been a fixture at the toss for nearly three decades.
She’s 72 now, and the walls in her Pensacola home are lined with more than twenty awards, each a testament to her fish-throwing finesse. She won’t be tossing this year due to a back injury.
Some might call that Karma.
"You break its back and fold it over," she said on a recent weekday, as she demonstrated her winning technique on a freshly caught mullet. "Throw it like a baseball—with an arch.”
Fundin started tossing mullet in the mid-90s, but, even in all those years, she’s never actually eaten one.
“I’ve had the opportunity," she said. "I’m just not a big fish person.”
These days, fewer and fewer even have the opportunity to try mullet. And, yet, as tastes change, the toss somehow endures.
Throwing a dead fish across the state line might seem absurd. But for many who do it, it’s a reminder of a time when there were fewer borders in the sand, more boats on the water—and always enough mullet for everyone.
