Hawai’i — A New Construct for Local Food
I just returned from Honolulu Tuesday night, after a week away for the Les Dames d’Escoffier annual conference and a few days of vacation. Les Dames is an organization of women leaders in the food, beverage and hospitality industries and membership is by invitation. The Hawaii chapter staged a brilliant conference that included a luau at the Bishop Museum and a trip to Kualoa Ranch, where we toured the gardens, learned all about poi, and boated in the ancient native Hawaiian fish ponds. This is land familiar to fans of Jurassic Park, LOST and other productions.
During any downtime, I was busy getting my fix of local foods — saimin, shave ice, plate lunch, malasadas, laulau and a Hawaiian breakfast — Portuguese sausage, eggs and rice drizzled with soy sauce. I also needed to fit in breakfast on the veranda of the historic Moana Hotel, tropical drinks with paper umbrellas, dinner at Alan Wong and 3660 on the Rise, and time for family and Honolulu friends.
But this isn’t a story about my trip. It’s really about a thoughtful presentation by the conference’s keynote speaker, Rachel Laudan, a culinary historian and author of The Food of Paradise, a book that had been recommended to me 12 years ago by Zanne Stewart, who was then executive food editor of Gourmet magazine. Laudan’s speech aligned perfectly with my craving for the local foods of my Hawaiian culinary heritage.
Laudan pointed out that originally, Hawaii was not a food paradise. She itemized the miniscule food sources available to the early Hawaiians (13 edible food plants, chickens, pigs…) and how each wave of immigrants — the early Hawaiians, Europeans/Americans, and Asians — did not find a natural bounty. The food culture was created with “human effort and ingenuity,” she said.
Now living in Mexico City, Laudan recalls her befuddlement when she first moved to Hawaii. Why was “Hawaiian” food not “local” food? She learned that Hawaiian food is the native food of the ethnic Hawaiian people; local food is the essential shared food of all the early immigrants to Hawaii, “creating community crossing ethnic boundaries and all other kinds of other boundaries — in an incredible construct.”
Of course, I knew all of that. But here’s where she gave local food new meaning. She credits the evolution of local food to courage. With immigrant laborers from around the world toiling together in the fields, “What did it take to share your lunch bucket on a plantation?” Where often “food is the butt of jokes, of division and discord,” the various peoples of Hawaii rejected divisiveness and made food inclusive. She called it a “most amazing symbol, creating a harmonious society. It is “food to promote peace, understanding and harmony.”
Laudan’s other important point: When we advocate eating locally, we might want to rethink the definition beyond geography to culture. In the case of Hawaii, local food may come from thousands of miles away, from Asia or the U.S. Mainland, but these specific dishes are entrenched in the culture and they are, in every sense, local.
INSIGHT: Food is the tie that binds. In Hawaii food is a powerful — and delicious — shared link of all the people. “Local” expands the boundaries of geography. A shared culinary heritage makes us all local people, no matter what the ethnic group, no matter where we live. Even in San Francisco.
