Bayou Harvest

Helen A. Regis is a cultural anthropologist at Louisiana State University. As board member and series editor at the Neighborhood Story Project, she has helped create a series of collaborative ethnographies written by and for New Orleanians. Regis is the author, with John Bartkowski, of Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era. Shana Walton is professor of English, modern languages, and cultural studies at Nicholls State University. Formerly, she was director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi, program coordinator for the statewide Mississippi Oral History Project, and project director for the Mississippi Civil Rights Oral History Bibliography. She is coeditor of Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century and Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

This highly readable book explores the ways people along the bayous of south Louisiana get food. Regis and Walton, collaborating with a team of researchers, have assembled an impressive array of stories, practices, strategies, and insights into fishing, hunting, gardening, and more. They use this data to show how getting and sharing food is related to socializing children, maintaining kin and friend networks, and building communities. This is ethnographic work at its best, destined to be a classic in the anthropology of food, food studies, and research on south Louisiana and rural America.--David Beriss, professor at the University of New Orleans and editor of FoodAnthropology