I am a second-year student at the University of Montana, and will be reporting on food security and its relationship to culture in Bangladesh, with a primary focus on fishing.

Much of my time before college was spent in restaurant kitchens, and I spent two summers at a restaurant on a working farm near Burlington, Vermont. I was always interested in the supply and demand of food, but experienced it on a very small, local scale.

While I will be mainly reporting on smaller rural fishing operations, I will also be looking at parts of a greater, near-national supply chain.

Fish have long been a staple of the Bangladeshi diet, but the impacts of climate change on the efficacy of fishing throughout the country have become an increasing worry for both rural and populated areas.

Lack of resources is putting a strain on the expanding urban communities, and rural fishermen are having to find different work due to a significant decrease in fish population.

How does a country stay resilient and preserve its culture when basic resources — that have a deep cultural identity of their own — become unreliable?