Can you spear me now?

Kimi Werner wants the food world to start thinking like a spearfisher

Kimi Werner can hold her breath underwater for four minutes, 45 seconds.

She may need to go without oxygen for that length of time four times a week, at least, which is how often Werner dives into the waters off the north shore of Oahu. Unlike the regular denizens of that part of the Big Island’s coastline, however, Werner isn’t a regular surfer: she’s a spear fisher, torpedoing her body below the surface of the Pacific on a regular basis for minutes at a time not for sport, but for food.

“Sometimes, it’s just diving and checking in on the fish stocks,” Werner says over the phone from Hawaii on a recent Sunday evening. “I probably don’t need to hunt more than once a week. Depending on where the weather is good, I try to look for whatever it is I want to eat, or for if I have friends or family who have put in special requests. It’s kind of like grocery shopping.”

Werner, who will be in Toronto on May 11 to speak at the annual Terroir Symposium, has been spearfishing for a decade, but the practice is in her blood: her parents kept livestock when she was younger and her father was a spearfisher who let her tag along on his sub-aquatic grocery trips beginning when she was five years old.

“It was his way of putting food on the table,” she says. “At first, he’d pull me on a boogie board, but I’d always end up swimming. I never spearfished as a kid. I just loved being in the water, I loved being in there with my dad. I’d just watch and delight as he went down and got my fish for me. Those were the most magical moments of my life. That’s what led me back to this lifestyle.”

The 34-year-old Hawaiian and her family strayed from living off the land, she says, for a desire to achieve “everything we thought was progress”: When her parents made enough money, they moved to a subdivision, bought a house and started shopping at grocery stores. Werner always had a fondness for food, though, and eventually went to culinary school. It was there, surrounded by food-minded individuals cooking “fish wrapped in plastic, sitting on Styrofoam,” that Werner started to feel something was missing.

“I went to a BBQ and some of the guys that came brought some fish that they had caught themselves,” she remembers. “I just watched it as it hit the grill. It inspired so much passion.”

It was at that time that Werner revisited memories of her father, and decided she’d try her hand at spearfish- ing. She had no idea if she could do it.

“I tried to look for people to teach me, but most of the time, they didn’t take it seriously,” she says. “So I just got a spear and went for it. I caught a few little sunfish — nothing that would seem impressive to your average fisherman, but it meant the world to me. It was the most satisfying thing. I fell in love. I just went again and again and again and got better for it, and I started bringing my fish to BBQs.”

Now, Werner is a champion spearfisher (she won a U.S. National Spearfishing Championship in 2008), has nearly 40,000 followers on Instagram and works as an ambassador for the outdoor living brand Patagonia.

She speaks about her lifestyle in a way that’s dismissive of its specialness: Ask her about a 2013 video that captured the diver swimming alongside a great white shark, and she laughs it off as “one of the scariest moments of my life.” She also explains how she survived: “In the wild, if you’re prey, you won’t swim toward a predator,” she says. “So I swam toward (the shark) to let her know: I’m a predator, you’re a predator.”

Werner refers to herself this way consistently — as a predator. It’s as jarring as it is refreshing to hear a fellow member of the species of Homo sapiens so at one with the animal kingdom. For Werner, this mentality is part of what makes her a good hunter, understanding the dynamic between herself and a fish, reading its signals and knowing when to pounce, but it’s also a way of demonstrating gratitude and respect for an ecosystem that has not only provided sustenance, but family.

“If I gave a fish away, I found that I wold get bananas left at my door,” Werner says. “Or chickens. I started to get venison from hunters, greens from people who had gardens. I’d be catching that one fish and sharing it, and now I’m fed all week.”

“It took me back to remembering what it was like growing up in a family-oriented community, and that this can still exist in a modern world,” she continues. “Just through practising sustainability, even if it wasn’t my intention, I created a community.”

In Toronto, Werner will speak to this year’s Terroir Symposium theme, which is “Pioneering Change.” It’s an idea that, for Werner, means looking to the past and applying ancient wisdom and age-old practices to our current way of living. Not everyone has to be a spearfisher, she says, but you can at least think like one.

“I think the philosophy of living simply is just like so many things in life: we get so caught up with progress that we forget the lessons of the past,” she says. “I think that going back to a simple life is not a step backwards, because so many answers to sustainability and keeping happy are there.”