That may be the general pattern.  There are lots of exceptions though. Women do a whole lot of farming, including the staples in many societies.  Men do a lot of post-harvest processing, threshing of grains, for example.  In Hawaii men traditionally cooked the sacred staple, taro.  Preparing was forbidden to women, though in fact they apparently did so when there were no men about.

In Mexico, though, although women helped farm, men did not grind.  Absolutely not.  The women who taught me to grind progressed from amazement to nervous titters to outright hilarity when men friends of mine tried their hand at it.

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident.

This from a nice blog post over at The Historical Society by Heather Cox Richardson.  It’s framed as a plea for maritime history but it’s equally relevant to food history.  She continues.

The crisis over the pigs illuminates an ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries.

If you’ve ever wondered how all those eighteenth and nineteenth century navigators and whalers were able to keep going in the deep oceans, particularly the south Atlantic and the Pacific, one of the keys is that they took with them European domestic animals, dropping them off whenever they made landfall.  Here’s my description in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage of the process.  Pigs had been brought to Hawaii centuries before by the orginal settlers. Cattle, horses, sheep and goats had not.

Taking a steer ( Hereford not longhorn) out to ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver sailed H.M.S Discovery into Kawaihae harbor on the Big Island and altered forever the diet of the Hawaiians, for with him he brought six cows, a bull, four ewes, and two rams. It was a tense time. Just 14 years earlier, Vancouver had been with Captain Cook when he was clubbed to death under the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay a few miles to the south. . .

The animals were in sorry shape, having had little water for days and no green forage for weeks as the little vessel plowed its way across the vast Pacific Ocean.   . . . Kamehameha [the chief who using British firearms had captured all the islands except Kauai] oversaw landing the animals. Vanouver’s account does not elaborate, but hoisting cattle, ewes and rams, even in weakened condition, into canoes lined with paddlers must have been quite a game.  The cattle, after all, were longhorns.

Vancouver made Kamehameha promise that the animals woud be taboo (except for the king’s table) for a decade so that they could multiply. He made him promise that women as well as men would then be able to eat the meat as long as it was not from the same animal (a big concession as women were subject to a fierce set of taboos and most appealing food was off limits).

The animals multiplied.

Mexican cowboys (paniolos from espanoles) and their horses  were imported to manage them from California, then still part of Mexico. Native Hawaiians also became fine cowboys.  Hawaiian cowboys compete on equal or more than equal terms with mainland cowboys in rodeos.

On horseback in front of Hawaii's Iolani Palace, 1980s. Rachel Laudan

Whalers over-wintered in the islands. Beef appealed more than fish and taro.

The biggest cattle ranch in the US in the twentieth century was on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded by one of those  New England whalers, John Parker Palmer, who jumped ship in the islands in 1809 at the age of 19.

Winching steer into ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930s. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

Hawaiians became aficionados of cecina (jerky), called pipikaula (pipi apparently their pronunciation of beef). Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers who stayed in the islands became enthusiastic beef eaters, enjoying Chinese oxtail soup and Japanese sukiyaki (and I believe in the latter case encouraging its popularity in Japan via back migration).

In short, I concur with Heather Cox Richardson about the importance of maritime history.  And there’s always a food story to accompany it.

In Hawaii, the question of native Hawaiian heritage has expanded from maintaining taro cultivation, the big topic in the 90s, to include hand pounding taro to make poi.  To all of you out there who suspect that a purple puree can’t be any good, my experiments pounding taro convinced me it is delicious.

This long article by Catherine Mariko Black on taro and poi debates in the Honolulu Weekly puts the emphasis on legalizing hand pounded poi (something that will surely happen given the politics of the islands). To me the problem now, as then, is how to make it economically viable. It’s something the activists are concerned about too.

Practitioners like Anthony maintain that the starchier taro they need to make pai ‘ai [here meaning hand pounded taro] is different from the taro poi millers usually use and is sometimes more labor intensive for the farmer to grow. That’s why he and others have begun to pay double, or even triple, taro’s going price of about 60 cents a pound. It’s also why he can sell his hand-pounded pai ‘ai for $10 to $15 a pound, two to three times more than conventional poi.

Anthony puts great emphasis on the economic health behind this issue.

“My number one question to the kupuna has always been, ‘What do we need most in Hawaii?’ And they all say we need more taro farmers. So I looked at the numbers and at the current farm gate price for taro, which is what the poi mills are paying. I’d have to grow 100,000 pounds of taro to make $60,000 a year. But if I sustainably farm and pound my own taro, I can make $70,000 by selling just 7,000 pounds per year, and all I need is one acre. So the real question is, if we want more taro farmers, we need to figure out how they’re going to make enough money to feed their families.” (My emphasis).

Now I entirely agree that it is important to attend to the economics of any kind of farming.  But this is fairly astonishing.

Here’s a quote from a piece I wrote earlier on poi.

The cost of poi in Hawaii is soaring.  Compare these prices

20 lbs rice go for $8.oo-10.00

3.5 pound bag of poi at Costco $15.00

3oz powdered poi including shipping to mainland $22.00 (with water this makes 13.5 oz poi)

Now you do add water to the plastic bags of poi so that the eating weight goes up but not as much as the weight of rice when cooked.

Bottom line: poi is about 8 times as expensive as rice.  Ergo.  Hawaiians eat rice except on special occasions.

That means that if Anthony can sell his product for $10 to $15 a pound, it makes poi twenty four times as expensive as rice.

If I remember correctly, when Hawaiians subsisted on poi with a few seasonings such as fish or limu (seaweed), they needed 4 to 5 lbs a day (which would be about right because if you subsist on bread which is much drier and hence lighter you need about 2 lbs a day).  That would be $40 to $60 a day for your basic foodstuff or $18,000 a year.

Or, looked at another way, Anthony is reckoning on making about $70,000 a year from one acre.    Of course, I assume he is not counting as one of his costs the price of land which in Hawaii runs from $15,000 an acre (presumably this is dry leeward land no good for taro) to $500,000 an acre.  Presumably he can get land set aside for Native Hawaiians.  If I am calculating right, that means a return of somewhere between 300% and 14%.

Here, for comparison is a quote on returns in South Dakota (simply because it was the first I ran across).

The net rate of return is a return to agricultural land ownership after deducting property taxes and other land ownership expenses. Appraisers refer to the current annual net rate of returns as the market- derived capitalization rate. Average net rates of return for 2010 varied from 3.9% for non-irrigated cropland to 3.6% for hayland and 2.7% for rangeland, and averaged 3.2% for all-agricultural land. This is the fifth consecutive year that average net rates of return were below 4.0% for all- agricultural land, compared to an average of 5.4% during the 1990s and 4.4% from 2000 to 2005. The practical range of net rates of return to land for 2010 reported by respondents varies from 2.0% to 7.0% for cropland, from 1.0% to 6.5% for hayland, and 1.0% to 5.0% for rangeland. The median net rate of return was 3.5% for cropland and 3.0% for hayland and rangeland.

It would not be the first time that what was once a staple becomes a luxury. Maintaining culinary heritage comes at a price.  Not a bad thing.  It reminds us of the huge cost of land and, before farming and processing was mechanized, of human time.  But it does mean that poi will be a luxury not a staple.

Again thanks to Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia for the link.

In 2010, Malaysia kicked off Malaysian Kitchen for the World —a robust gastrodiplomacy campaign meant to create awareness about Malaysia as it creates awareness for Malaysian cuisine and recipes. The campaign has been carried out by the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE) to promote Malaysian cuisine globally, with heavy emphasis on the U.S. and U.K.

The brilliance of Malaysia’s campaign is that it has also combined aspects of cultural diplomacy with its culinary outreach. In this regard, Malaysia has set up night markets in famous landmarks of cosmopolitan cities such as a Malaysian night market in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square. More recently, this public diplomacy campaign touched both coasts of the United States as it set up a night market on Santa Monica’s bustling 3rst Street Promenade and in the hip Meatpacking District in New York City. Such cultural and culinary diplomacy is most effective, as it plays on all the senses, not just taste.

Hat tip for both of these to Robyn Eckhardt, of Eating Asia, a must read for anyone interested in the traditional culinary scene of Southeast Asia and China.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post for some time.  This ad appeared in Honolulu in a weekly, The Polynesian, in June 1840.  If it’s hard to read the words, here they are:

Good people all, walk in and buy

Of Sam & Mow, good cake & pie:

bread hard or soft, for land or sea,

“Celestial” made; come buy of we.

Now if this ad had appeared in 1880, when the Chinese (Celestials as immigrants were called in the nineteenth century) from Canton began arriving in the Hawaiian Islands in force, when bread making and European foods in general were making inroads across East Asia, it would not be so surprising.  But 1840!  That’s really early.

Bakeries are pretty tricky things, after all, demanding a good bit of equipment and skill.  You have to be able to build an oven and (if you are to bake pies and cakes) have to have various molds and forms.  You have to have some kind of leavening.  Hard to believe there were lots of yeasts floating around in these remote islands just waiting to be capture, but perhaps some microbiologist can correct me.  And few of the plants there (unlike say the maguey that produced pulque that could raise bread in Mexico) would have been suitable.  So probably some kind of sour dough starter.  Or perhaps (see below) some kind of chemical raising agent.

And of course you needed flour.  Don Marin, a Mexican from California (which was of course Mexican then) had tried sowing wheat in the second decade of the nineteenth century, apparently to no avail.

No, in the early nineteenth century flour was shipped round the Cape from the East Coast of the United States. “On opening a barrel stamped ‘Flour’ *said J.S. Green in the Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society in 1852( a chisel and mallet were always put in requisition to prepare the way for sifting, and these even were so ineffectual oftentimes that a pick axe or crow-bar seemed necessary for the work” of breaking up the solid cake.  Usually it was musty and sometimes sour, and often riddled with bugs and worms.  “In those days the demand for saleratus (a naturally occurring sodium or postassium bicarbonate, also imported) was imperious” to alleviate the indigestibility of the flour.

Into this world of weevil-ridden compacted flour come Sam and Mow from Canton, even advertising themselves as being from Canton, as if that had some connection with bakery.  Is that even possible?  Canton, after all, is in the rice-eating south of China.  If they ate wheat products, it was most likely noodles of various kinds.

Even so, a story begins to form in my head. The British in particular had been trading in Canton, porcelain and then opium, for well over a hundred years.  This indeed was the time of the Opium Wars and the attempt to open China to European influence.

Is it possible that the key to this story lies in the third line, “bread hard or soft, for land or sea?”  Ships sailing into Canton would have been running low on ship’s biscuit it may be assumed.  It would have made sense for entrepreneurial Chinese (who had perhaps sailed on British ships and observed bakeries in other parts of the world) to supply this need by setting up bakeries in Canton.  And perhaps the few British residents there, missionaries and merchants, provided the link to the soft bread, the pies and cakes.

And by 1840, there had been links between Canton and Hawaii for over half a century.  There had been Cantonese sailors with Captain Cook when he arrived in the islands in 1778 and others had come in the intervening years on the merchant ships that commonly had a few Chinese sailors, some of whom stayed. Apart from bakeries, they set up rice farms, sugar mills, stores, restaurants, and sold wine and liquor.

And then there’s one last factor to consider.  The market.  Who in Honolulu is 1840 is going to be buying bread?  The population of the islands is overwhelmingly Hawaiian, perhaps 80,000 or so, sadly down due to disease, but still the majority.  Their food was taro, perhaps just beginning to shift to rice.  There are about four hundred foreigners, thirty or forty of them Chinese.   So say 350 Europeans and Americans (including missionaries who arrived in the 1820s) who were most of the other foreigners. Enough just to support a bakery.  But dicey, I would think.

Ah ha. The ocean again.  In the 1820s whalers from New England started wintering in the Islands.  They would have wanted pies and cakes and soft bread.  And hard bread for going to sea again, for the long haul north back to the Arctic or southward home round the Cape. Now there’s a market for Sam and Mow.

One last question.  What is the green sprig that the Celestial is holding?  Tea?  Any thoughts?

I don’t have conclusive evidence of any of this but that is the story I tell myself.  But what a way for bread to come to Hawaii.

Cover Thanksgiving Luau

After my post on the invention of the tourist luau, Henry Voigt (who has a wonderful collection of menus that was written up in Gastronomica) sent me scans of this luau menu and asked for some background.

The story behind it is so poignant, it has had me gripped all day.  I’m simply going to tell it here without commentary and without placing it in a more general history of the luau.  I’ll leave that for another post.

On July 7th 1898 President McKinley signed a resolution ordering that Hawaii, then an independent kingdom, be annexed as a territory of the United States.  The news arrived in Hawaii a week later, to the delight of the annexationists (mainly Americans) and the despair of the native Hawaiians.

On August 12th, the transfer of power took place. In Honolulu American troops marched to Iolani Palace (the Hawaiian name). The resolution was read. The Hawaii anthem “Hawaii Ponoi” was played for the last time as the anthem of an independent nation and  the Hawaiian flag was lowered.  The Stars and Stripes was raised and “The Star Spangled Banner” played.

The Pacific Commercial Advertizer reported. “To the Hawaiian  born it was pathetic. As the last strain of Hawaii Ponoi trembled out of hearing, the wind suddenly held itself back.  The Hawaiian flag as it left the truck dropped and folded, and descended lifeless.  The American flag climbed slowly on its halyards, and just as it reached the truck, the trade wind breaking from its airy leash, caught it in its arms, and rolled it out to its full measure.”

The First New York Volunteers had arrived in Honolulu being cheered on by the American public that gathered at railroad stations all the way from New York to San Francisco where they had embarked for the islands and their post in the shadow of Diamond Head at one end of Waikiki beach.

Private Booth wrote home “The natives are a funny lot, half negro half malay they are intelligent and honest.”

I suppose NY Volunteers were then sent to the Big Island (Hawaii) for R & R.  There  C.C. Kennedy and Laura Kennedy invited the officers and men to a Thanksgiving luau at Waiakea Plantation, one of the big sugar plantations on the windward side of the island.  They thought it sufficiently important to have this menu printed.

C.C. Kennedy was the manager, with a reputation for being  charitable, kindly and strict with the workers (mainly Portuguese and Japanese at this stage).  Managers were the powerful and wealthy on that part of the island, so distant from Honolulu. His wife Laura Kennedy was parks commissioner, and used her own money to convert the old Hawaiian fish ponds in Hilo into Lili’uokalani Park.

The men at least must have looked forward to the luau because as Private Booth reported earlier from Honolulu.

We are not allowed much liberty so when we do get our we generally look for some fun or some one that can give us a feed as our food has been something fierce since we have been here. We steal all we can but but the Colonel has gotten on to our racket and has put mounted guards on all the roads leading from camp.

Luau Menu

Here’s what they had at the plantation.  The menu is in Hawaiian on the left, in English on the right and it consisted of

Fish from the fish ponds

Pig wrapped in Ti leaves

Sweet potatoes

Breadfruit

Beef

Kukui nut (this would have been ground with salt to make a relish)

Rolls

Turkey

Poi

Kulolo (translated as Hawaiian pudding, coconut milk and taro mixed to a solid paste, very good)

Fruits

Soda Water

Lemonade

As I said, it’s so poignant to think of those New York boys sitting in one of the most remote spots on earth, Hilo, Hawaii, eating a Thanksgving luau of largely Hawaiian foods in the wake of the annexation of the islands.

You’ve probably seen some of the few photos that have filtered out of the private annual congressional White House picnic that took place last Thursday.

Barack Obama invited Alan Wong from Hawaii to prepare a Hawaiian luau, strewing the White House grounds with   straw huts and tiki lamps.

When I saw these photos, a little shiver went up my spine. Almost exactly six months ago, I gave a talk in Hawaii on “How to Create a Regional Cuisine,“  sponsored by the admirable Hale Aina Ohana, an organisation dedicated to promoting culinary education.

My two examples were the Hawaiian luau and French Regional Cuisine.  And Alan brought his staff along to listen.

I know. It sounds mad.  What in the world could the Hawaiian luau have to do with French regional cuisine?

A lot, it turns out.  I can’t give all the details here, nor the terrific illustrations, but here’s the outline.

1. Both were created in the 1920s and 30s.  Yes, yes, Hawaii had luaus before that but they had almost nothing in common with the tourist luau, and that’s what we are talking about here.

2. Both were designed for tourists

3. Both involved the construction of hotels and other places to stay

4.  Both involved new eating utensils, furniture etc.  In France regional pottery, tablecloths, furniture;  in Hawaii coconut shells, picnic tables, tiki lamps (these come a bit later, but they’re there at the White House).

5. Both involved new costumes. In France quasi medieval costumes for Burgundian wine groups, in Hawaii, the sarong.

6. Both involved new dishes.  In France, things like beef bourguinon, in Hawaii things like lomi lomi salmon and mai tais.

7.  Both had a massive tourist literature pushing them.

8. Both involved creating a story, a romance actually, for the tourists.

Afterwards Alan and I had a great chat about how that experience (and it went beyond France and Hawaii) almost a hundred years ago might or might not be relevant today.

So there was Alan providing a tourist luau as created in the 1920s and 30s.  These are lots of fun. And of course, this one was updated for US politicians by Alan’s inimitable talent in the kitchen.

And I can’t help but wonder what passed through his mind.

_________________________

Here’s Alan’s first book. He has another on the way, so watch out for it.

For more on Barack Obama and Alan Wong,  see my posts here and here and here and here.

The illustration at the top of this post is a classic in the islands, created for the Matson Company whose steamers brought tourists to Hawaii in the 1920s and 30s.

Yet there are so many lovely books that are never entered, often books of the heart, books that had to be written, whether or not they were attuned to the latest fads and fashions of the fickle food market.

And here’s one of my nominations: The Island Plate: 150 Years of Recipes and Food Lore from The Honolulu Advertiser.  Of course having spent a decade in Hawaii I am alert for any cookbook that opens new perspectives on the culinary history of these islands, one of the greatest culinary laboratories in the world.

And of course the author Wanda Adams, formerly features editor of the Honolulu Advertiser throughout the 1990s, holds a special place in my heart.  I’d read her columns in the paper for years as I secretly worked to figure out Hawaii’s always surprising, often delicious and always convoluted cuisines. When I finally plucked up the courage to get comments on my manuscript, I turned to Wanda.  We met in some restaurant that was trendy at the time, in a dark, dark booth.

“You’ve written my book,” said Wanda, “I can’t be your friend.” And without a second’s hesitation urged me forward.  Such generosity is something you never forget.

Now Wanda’s written her book. It’s the book I wished for when I arrived in the islands in the late 1980s, a cookbook that loved Hawaii, understood Hawaii, and did not judge Hawaii.

Wanda’s stroke of genius was to take the hundred and fifty years archives of the Honolulu Advertiser and use them as the basis of her book.  She adds historic photos, some hilarious, some heart wrenching, and contemporary food photography.  Even this has a twist.  How many food stylists have carefully arranged crackers doused with milky coffee in a a bowl to illustrate the traditional poki wai/kanaka pudding/sopa?  She carefully corrects common errors.  The elements of the plate lunch don’t encompass all the peoples of Hawaii–Portuguese, Okinawans, and Puerto Ricans get left out.  Spam did not become popular until well after World War II.

So who is Wanda? She grew up in the Iao Valley on Maui and like so many Locals went to the mainland for a while, getting a degree from the University of Washington and working as food editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Then she returned to the islands and by her own account ended up  marrying  her high school sweetheart.  Between them they now have five children, birth, step- and hanai children. (Hanai children are those who are willingly gifted to and accepted by some different part of the family, still a rather common custom).

In the few moments free from her work at the newspaper, as she puts it, “she researched Portuguese food in Hawaíi and began the Great (unfinished) Portuguese American novel.”

Maybe she should finish it because listen to her.

On saloon pilots.

“The saucer-size crackers, which produced a hailstorm of crumbs the moment you bit into them and had almost no discernible flavor beyond a hint of burnt toast, were always close at hand, along with the butter dish (which probably held margarine, since who could afford butter?) and the guava jelly jar. Islanders believe there IS no better vehicle for butter and guava jelly.

Your grandfather, like mine, might have considered milky coffee and crumbled saloon pilot crackers the breakfast of the gods. Your mother, like many here, might have used rolling-pinned saloon pilots to extend her meatloaf.  And the tall, rectangular tin can, like a cat, had multiple lives–first as a container for crackers, then (after Dad had done some tinsmith magic on it) as a scoop, a dustpan, a candle lantern or some other practical utensil.”

On a glut of avocados, guavas and mangos.

“Remember when you used to duck into the house quick, so your neighbor wouldn’t see you, then leap over the mock orange hedge with yet another bag of mangoes to bequeath?”

On laulau, salt fish and pork wrapped in leaves.

“Why did God invent pressure cookers? So you wouldn’t have to dig up the back yard for an imu when you wanted laulau.”

On the politics of Hawaii.

“Most of us here grew to accept as gospel that anything that was good for sugar, pineapple, tourism or tropical agriculture was good for us all. Life here was a team sport, and all the ohana were on the pep squad.”

And my favorite, on the difficult relations between the peoples of Hawaii and the tourist image, this time in the 1950s.

“Hawaii is a place of layers–like the kaona, the hidden meanings, in Hawaiian songs; like the temperature layers in the ocean, touching but never quite mingling. So even as this cheerful Pineapple Poo Poo madness was being carried out,  local people were quietly going about creating their own dishes. Their party grounds wasn’t the terrace at the Royal Hawaiian, or the lanai of a seaside Kahala home; it was the carport, or a tarp-shaded corner of a public park.  And while pineapple was not unknown, these potluck dishes have deeper, more authentic roots.”

And then there are the recipes that instantly transport you to the Islands.  This one for oxtail soup summons up all those lunches in humble places where slurping the broth with my spoon, snagging the peanuts and getting the meat off the bones with chopsticks, and digging into the bowl of rice on the side, took my mind off work and  sent me sailing into my afternoon classes at the University.

By the way, Wanda points out that the Islands are among the largest consumers of oxtail in the US (so it’s not just Spam).  It has Chinese origins but the cattle that overran the Islands give it beefy twist.

Oxtail soup

2 pounds small, meaty oxtails

2 whole star anise

1/2 lb raw, skinless peanuts

1 three-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled

1 medium onion, peeled and cut into wedges

1 piece dried tangerine peel

Salt to taste

2 carrots, peeled and diced

Chinese parsley (cilantro) for garnish

Rinse the oxtails in hot running water. Place them in a large, heavy pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil;  skim surface foam.  Add anise, peanuts, ginger, onion and tangerine peel. Bring water to a boil again, add salt, then turn heat down and simmer about two hours, until meat is tender. If the broth reduced too quickly, add water as needed to cover oxtails.  Add carrots and simmer for about another one-half hour. Remove anise, ginger and tangerine peel and discard. Garnish with Chinese parsley.

Wanda, you’ve written your Hawaii book.  I can’t wait for the Great American Portuguese novel.

_____________________

Google doesn’t show the first volume of the Island Plate. But Wanda has published a second volume.

And here’s Wanda on Portuguese Bean Soup, on which she had very decided opinions.

Well, before you screw up your nose, it’s worth realizing that the poi now served in Hawaii is the poi equivalent of Wonder Bread.  Taro (the corm from which poi is made) smells like chestnuts as it cooks.  And when the cooked corms are freshly pounded they are sweet and delicious.  It’s very digestible and many would like more poi.

Not likely. The cost of poi in Hawaii is soaring.  Compare these prices

20 lbs rice go for $8.oo-10.00

3.5 pound bag of poi at Costco $15.00

3oz powdered poi including shipping to mainland $22.00 (with water this makes 13.5 oz poi)

Now you do add water to the plastic bags of poi so that the eating weight goes up but not as much as the weight of rice when cooked.

Bottom line: poi is about 8 times as expensive as rice.  Ergo.  Hawaiians eat rice except on special occasions.

Now why the difference?  Rice is grown in huge fields in California, leveled by laser, and harvested by machine.   The quality is excellent.

Taro is grown in paddies in Hawaii.  It is the subject of much enthusiasm–so many varieties, so tied up with Hawaiian history and legend.  So far so good.

The trouble it’s done on a very small scale.  No machines are used. And very few people want to work full time in muddy water bending to plant or harvest taro.  It’s usually done by new immigrants from Samoa or Tonga.   Even with their low wages, the taro is bound to be expensive.

Two points.

1.  Taro is typical of what human diets depend on: carbohydrates.  And so the cost of taro or rice or wheat is the most important thing for most humans.

2.  It’s difficult to produce inexpensive carbohydrates the taro way, that is on the scale of the vegetable garden. Try gardening wheat.

Yet increasingly in the US, an idealised form of vegetable gardening is held up as the model of agriculture (of course vegetables for the market are overwhelmingly produced on large farms and mechanized as far as possible).  Small scale, labor intensive farming is what lots of food activists are pushing for. Just this weekend the NYT had yet another article dismissing large-scale industrial agriculture. (It would be nice if for once they had a serious article addressing, say, the problem of milk prices).

This is not serious.  It’s that kind of farming that allows me to sit here posting and (I venture) you to sit there reading.  It has problems.  That’s no surprise.  But as taro shows, vegefication–that is, treating vegetables as the most important food and small scale vegetable gardening as the model farming should aspire to–would be plain silly if it weren’t also so irresponsible.

In charge of the kitchen (I assume) you have Wade Ueoka who got his training at Zippy’s.  Obama must have gone to Zippy’s as a teenager.  But it seems unlikely that he and Wade chatted about Zippy’s.

And masterminding everything you have Alan, from Leilehule High School in Wahiawa who worked in the pineapple fields in the summer.

Kirk (who uses what he learned about food growing up in Hawaii to very good effect in his blog on the food scene in San Diego and much more), wrote in his comment.

“Both of my Grandparents picked pine, as did both of my parents during their younger years. I picked pineapple one summer while in school, swathed from head to toe in several layers of clothes, a thick hat to protect from the sun, netting to protect ones eyes from the sharp spike of the pineapple. Bending and twisting…..living in a barracks for six weeks, waking when the whistle went off a 5am. It was during this time that I decided that perhaps an education wasn’t a bad thing at all.”

And Kirk wasn’t the only one who decided that an education beat picking pine.  Gary Okihiro, now Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, has a book coming out with Universityof California Press called Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones.  He dedicates it to his family–”Three Generations of Workers in Hawaiian Pine.”

For those who have grown up in the islands, the names alone tell a whole story: Kame Kakazu, Kashin Kakazu, Alice Shizue Okihiro, Ellen Kiyoko Nitta, Edward S. Kakazu, Joyce Ayako Kakazu Villegas, Gary Y. Okihiro, Faith Okihiro Lebb, Karen N. Oshiro, Stephen R. Oshiro, and Alan K. Oshiro.

I don’t think Obama ever picked pine.  He probably drove through the pine fields near Wahiawa.  Everyone does when they go to the North Shore and the North Shore is a favorite outing for people who live in Honolulu.

Obama lived in leafy Manoa and Makiki and he went to Punahou School.  Holly Hadsell-El Hajji’s posting on the Punahou Carnival is one more point of entry to that school.

And I think about that Obama meal at Alan Wong’s.  How much do Michelle and the accompanying journalists and FBI agents get of all this?  Are all menus as laden as Alan Wong’s?   For me,  a big part of the pleasure was how Alan Wong had so deftly woven his past and the past of others in Hawaii into a meal that could stand by itself.  Should the menu come with footnotes?

And of course, as Karen Resta points out in her comment, just after my last post Alan Wong was nominated again for a James Beard Award.  His food stands by itself.  But the footnotes give it a whole new flavor.