Louisiana has a strong community surrounding food. It isn’t a well-kept secret. Many Louisianians have been sent home with a pound of frozen deer meat after visiting extended family, or have gone fishing in the summer and cooked the catch for dinner.
This culture of acquiring food from the earth has a name – subsistence food practices – and in Louisiana were the focus of three years of field work for Helen Regis. An associate professor of anthropology at LSU, Regis co-authored the recently published book “Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana” on her findings.
The project began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, with research focused in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. A lot of the research, she said, came from windshield surveys – otherwise known as stopping on the side of the road after the team saw something interesting.
Subsistence food practices contribute to food needs. In coastal communities like Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, this includes exchanges between gardeners, hunters, fishers, crabbers and shrimpers. Research revealed that people in these areas harvest and process 12 types of fish and 52 kinds of fruits, vegetables and herbs in a single year.
And the term isn’t just reserved for living-off-the-land. Eating tomatoes grown from a neighbor’s backyard counts as subsistence. In fact, Regis concluded that subsistence food practices in Louisiana are both ordinary and pervasive – and they are rooted deeply into Louisianian culture and identity.
The idea that harvesting is connected to family and community in complex ways kept cropping up throughout the whole project, Regis said.
“Subsistence is practiced by people who are first, second or third generation immigrants and people whose ancestors have lived in the state for generations,” Regis said.
While doing field work, she met an elderly Cajun couple who fish two or three times a week to cook the day’s supper and also to store in the freezer.
“They were regularly catching enough shrimp to have a fish fry for their eight children, 25 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren,” she said.
Biological engineering senior Anna Claire Ricks-Boyd’s great grandmother immigrated from the Canary Islands – “first gen Cajun,” she said. Her family started out hunting and fishing for their own food, “then it kind of just spread out from there.”
“It’s the idea that everyone is family,” she said, going on to say that the community supports those going through a hard time by offering food and resources.
It isn’t a rarity to hear an offer like, “We killed an alligator and we have way too much meat, so take some,” she said.
Ricks-Boyd thinks of tailgate culture in a similar way.
“You’ll meet somebody random at LSU and they’ll be like, come make a plate of food, come meet everybody, do you want a drink, do you want to hang out?” she said. “And that’s what I grew up in with food.”
Subsistence built ties in the Terrebonne and Lafourche parish communities that are now fraying as the environment falters. Rapid environmental change threatens fishing, hunting, gardening and sharing, Regis said.
“The land is at risk,” she said, “and people’s ability to stay in communities where they’re able to do this is very much in question.”
A sudden change in subsistence practices goes beyond personal hunting and gathering and actually affects food security, informal economic systems and connections in the entire community of these areas.
One such area is Leeville in Lafourche Parish.
But the small community of Leeville, mostly based in hunting and fishing, has disappeared, said Keith Carruth, who runs a lawn maintenance company in Baton Rouge and fishes in the fall and winter in Leeville.
There used to be camps, he said, where now there are only one or two. Hurricane Ida “totally scrubbed the area.”
“Big ships, upside down. I mean, I’m talking about 100-foot vessels upside down in the middle of Bayou Lafourche from that hurricane,” Carruth said. “Camps were removed from their foundations.”
Carruth said that since Ida, most anyone that comes into Leeville does so in a trailer, and the lack of permanent residences has affected the economy in the area. Insurance companies aren’t writing coverage for property down there, he said, so hurricane relief didn’t do much to save the community.
“When I go fishing down there, I look out to the west: Little Lake, Pelican Pass, Timbalier Bay,” Carruth said. “And I can actually start to see the water, which is chilling. It used to be that you had land bridges, but you can almost start to see the Gulf.”
“So the next hurricane that heads that way,” Carruth said, then stopped. “It’s going to continue to happen.”
For these storm-battered communities, the effects of a changing environment can extend beyond initial impact and affect family and community connections, but also cultural identity.
Subsistence is central to people’s identities in Louisiana, Regis said. “Identity is connected to place, as well as a sense of where you belong and what community you’re a part of,” she said.
“We recognize that there can be multiple meaningful ways of growing and exchanging food,” Regis read in an excerpt from the book, adding, “and in fact, it is crucial that we take these practices seriously as doing things otherwise can provide a vision for the future.”