LSU Science Café: Bayou Harvest

Subsistence fishing and gardening in South Louisiana is neither recreational nor commercial and therefore rarely documented. Louisiana’s subsistence foodways rely on exchanges between gardeners, hunters, shrimpers, crabbers and fishers in coastal communities. Citrus, cucumbers, crabs and duck are often shared with neighbors, relatives and friends in ways that help build social bonds people rely on in good times and bad. Join us at LSU Science Café to learn about a research project that started after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and just led to the publication of a new book, Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana, which documents food harvesting and sharing in coastal communities. “Our first task was to figure out how to study it,” researcher and author Helen A. Regis said.

Helen A. Regis is a professor and cultural anthropologist in the Department of Geography & Anthropology at LSU. She has authored several books, including Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam and Medicine in Northern Cameroon, Charitable Choices: Religion, Race and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era (with John Bartkowski) and is a contributing editor of The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis (with Rachel Breunlin and Ronald Lewis). Her most recent book (with Shana Walton) is Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana (2024). As series editor for the Neighborhood Story Project, Regis has helped create a new canon of collaborative ethnography written by and for New Orleanians about their communities. Her publicly engaged scholarship was recognized by LSU in 2023 with the Brij Mohan Distinguished Professor Award.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the speaker.

LSU Science Café is presented in partnership with Campus Federal Credit Union and WRKF.

The event is open to the public and advance registration through Eventbrite is recommended.

If you are attending in-person, please print your registration ticket or have it available on your electronic device upon arrival. Doors open at 5:00 PM. Event begins at 6:00 PM.

If you are attending virtually, access to the live event will be available through Facebook Live. A Facebook account is not required to view the event livestream.

The event broadcast will be closed captioned, and a recording of the event will be made available on the LSU Research YouTube channel shortly after the event.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Varsity Theatre & Facebook Livestream, 3353 Highland Road, Baton Rouge, United States