Lillian Brown

I started out as an undergraduate student at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo. There, I worked with local fishers on a project administered by a small NGO. The NGO was interested in subsistence fishing-- what they called "the flow of fish" from ocean to table. I interviewed fishers about subsistence—whether they were fishing to sell or fishing to eat, and what that meant to their survival. What I quickly learned from fishers is that "subsistence" had no singular definition. Fishing to survive meant not only fishing to eat fish but also fishing to sell for money needed to pay rent and buy food from the store, to trade for various household items, simply to have fun and eat a little fish on the side, or to gift fish to members in their community who needed it or had given them something useful in the past. I left this research project wondering what other concepts, like subsistence, get lost in translation between when fish leave the sea and when they land on a plate, or in a can.

July 2013