Monique Coombs is the director of community programs at the Maine Coastal Fishermen’s Association, where she leads working waterfront and fishermen wellness initiatives. Jordan Rubin is a 2025 James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best Chef Northeast, and was recently honored as one of Food & Wine’s 2025 Best New Chefs.

Mainers talk a lot about our incredible seafood and restaurants, but we can do more to talk about the people behind both. Fishermen harvest seafood from the Gulf of Maine and restaurant owners turn that food into nourishment, community and culture. Both are small business owners, and both operate on thin margins. Both quietly carry extraordinary mental and emotional strain that is essential to acknowledge if we want Maine’s food system to endure.

Fishing and restaurant work share far more in common than most people realize. Neither comes with a steady paycheck. Both depend on markets, labor availability and rising costs largely outside individual control. A fisherman can do everything right and still lose money due to fuel prices, bait shortages and empty nets and traps. A restaurant owner can serve exceptional food and still struggle with rent increases, staffing shortages or disrupted supply chains. In both cases, failure can feel deeply personal, even when the causes are structural.

Mental health challenges in these industries don’t always look like crisis. More often, they show up as exhaustion, irritability, isolation and a sense that there’s no room to slow down. In fishing and restaurants, taking a day off isn’t always a relief; sometimes it’s a risk.

Missing a weather window or a dinner service can mean falling behind on fuel, bait, rent or payroll. That reality keeps people working through hardship because stopping feels more dangerous than continuing.

And when work does stop, when a storm keeps boats moored or a kitchen closes unexpectedly, the impact is never just a pause. Money keeps going out even when none comes in because debt and overhead don’t stop. What looks like a temporary disruption from the outside can be financially catastrophic on the inside.

Fishermen are often described as tough and resilient. Restaurant owners are praised for grit and hustle. Those descriptions aren’t wrong, but they’re incomplete. Toughness doesn’t make people immune to stress, and resilience doesn’t mean unlimited capacity. When mental health support isn’t accessible, culturally relevant or normalized, people suffer quietly. Sometimes they leave the industry altogether.

Access to good food, especially local, wild-caught seafood, is not guaranteed. When fishermen leave the industry, Maine loses more than boats at the wharf. We lose food security, local knowledge and generational livelihoods. When restaurants close, communities lose gathering places, economic anchors and one of the most direct connections between harvesters and diners.

Mental health is not separate from food access. It is foundational to it.

Supporting mental health doesn’t only mean therapy offices and crisis hotlines, though those are important. It also means reducing barriers to care, normalizing conversations about stress and burnout and building systems that reflect the realities of these jobs. Peer support, industry-specific resources and trusted local organizations can make the difference between someone asking for help or suffering in silence.

We also need to think honestly about who comes next. Maine’s fishing heritage and its independent restaurant culture are not self-sustaining. They require a next generation of young people willing to take on the risk, learn the craft and carry these traditions forward. That will only happen if these careers offer something worth stepping into like real support, accessible resources and enough customers who understand the value of what they’re choosing. 

When a fire tore through Custom House Wharf in Portland, it wasn’t just a building that burned. It was gear, income and stability for the fishermen who operate there. In the aftermath, Mr. Tuna and the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association came together to do something tangible: a collaborative T-shirt whose proceeds went directly to support the fishermen affected.

It was a small act in the face of a large loss, but it was the right kind of act, two parts of the same food system recognizing each other, showing up and doing what they could. That model is not charity or sympathy; it’s connection and investment in the people who make Maine’s food culture what it is.

The most direct thing anyone can do is also the most powerful: eat at restaurants owned by people in your community and buy seafood caught close to home. Ask questions: Who owns this restaurant and where does the seafood come from? Choose the places and the products where your money goes to a person, not a corporation, where the owner is in the kitchen, and the fish was on a boat yesterday. 

Maine’s fishermen and restaurant owners are not asking to be rescued. They are asking to be seen, supported and chosen. That is something all of us can do.