From Food to Trash: An Ethnographic History of the Mullet Fishery of Southwest Florida

This paper explores the social and cultural history of southwest Florida’s mullet fishery from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. By examining the everyday life histories of people who inhabited and worked the fisheries of this region, I map the evolution of ideas about this fish—as food, as income, as prey, as bait, and as trash. This study views seascapes as cultural spaces rather than marine realms clearly separate from terra firma. Thus, determinations of overfishing and sustainability are derived from the conjunction between environmental change and varying cultural expectations of what distinct ecosystems ought to produce: food, income, aesthetic pleasure, leisure, luxury.
Trading circuits for mullet (Mugil cephalus) radiating from Florida’s southwestern coast linked that region to people and economies southward and northward before and after statehood in 1845. Following the Spanish colonization of the peninsula, the development of multi-ethnic creole identities were developed partly through everyday subsistence and occupational behaviors, including the harvesting, processing and consumption of mullet. After centuries of being an essential “bread and butter” food fish, mullet ultimately shifted to becoming a “trash” fish associated with African American and creole lower classes. The paper reconstructs the changing nature of mullet fisheries while investigating the power relations that shaped historical decisions about conservation, sustainability, and food security.
Individuals involved with territorial reincorporation, expansion, and scientific exploration provided observations of everyday lifeways in the Spanish territory of Florida. My analysis of those documents suggests that as the peninsula was being incorporated into the post-Civil War United States, local, historical relationships between common people and mullet in Florida complicated nascent nationalist ideals. Cross-cutting class and ecology, this is a local history inextricably tied to the changing nature of the resource itself.