Is Gullah Geechee cuisine the next big thing in Southern food?

Southern Kitchen associate editor Mike Jordan has a prediction: Sometime in 2018, whether you've had it or chatted about it before or not, you will be talking about Gullah and Geechee food. And while it's certainly not new — Gullah Geechee might literally be the most not-new Southern food to ever exist — he believes the cuisine's time to be fully appreciated has come.

The Gullah Geechee people can directly trace their lineage back to the first African-Americans to arrive in the U.S., during the transatlantic slave trade, from Sierra Leone and other West African countries. Theirs is a way of life developed over generations of living in isolated communities from North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, mostly in the Sea Islands and low country area of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.