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Located almost dead center in the North Pacific Ocean—2,500 miles west of California—Hawaii consists of a string of 132 coral and volcanic islands extending some one thousand miles from the Big Island to Wake Island. Centuries of volcanic activity have deposited layers of ash that have enriched the soil. Strong sun combined with moderate temperatures and plenty of rain have produced a long growing season in the midst of a tropical paradise—a paradise that lured nineteenth-century European and American merchants and adventurers interested in exploiting Hawaii's natural resources. One result was an economy dominated by King Sugar, which employed waves of immigrants to do the backbreaking work refused by native Hawaiians.

This successive importation of workers left Hawaii with a thriving mélange of cultures, each of which made its own contribution to the twentieth-century phenomenon known as Local Food. A Creole mixture of different cuisines (including Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and American), Local Food is centered on carbohydrates—an ancient Hawaiian quest.

The First Polynesian Immigration

When human beings originally landed on Hawaiian shores between 300 and 500 C.E., having probably sailed roughly two thousand miles from Samoa, they encountered over a hundred species of birds, including large fowl, abundant fish and shellfish in shoreline reefs and lagoons, a few fruit trees at high altitude, ferns, several kinds of limu (seaweed), and nearly a thousand flowering plants. These species had arrived gradually on trade winds or sea currents and had evolved in isolation over hundreds of thousands of years.

But the same geologic conditions—deep canyons, high cliffs, forests, bogs, and a wide variation in barometric pressure, rainfall, temperature, and wind—that produced Hawaii's unique flora and fauna had also limited its native foods. Hawaii's astonishing diversity included almost no edible vegetation and no source of edible carbohydrates. Luckily, the early Hawaiians brought at least twenty-seven kinds of foodstuffs, including the coconut, breadfruit, sweet potato, banana, sugarcane, arrowroot, wild ginger, mountain apple, and taro—much revered by the ancient Hawaiians, who pounded the roots into a paste, poi, that remains a starchy staple today. In addition, they imported pigs, chickens, and dogs. By mistake, they brought along rats.

They lived well on their isolated islands. They ate many foods raw, including some fish. Other food was cooked in imus, earthen pits lined with kiawe wood and lava rock. They prepared for bad weather by drying and salting fish. While they had no distilled liquors, they used the roots of awa (kava) and ti (a lily relative) to brew narcotic drinks.

The Second Polynesian Immigration

The early Hawaiians were legendary seafarers who had sailed thousands of miles using the stars, sun, winds and currents, shifting cloud masses, and bird flights. There is some evidence that they continued to sail their hundred-foot-long outrigger canoes to distant islands in the Pacific, bringing back food, plants, and spouses.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, aggressive, roaming Polynesians from Samoa and Tahiti settled in Hawaii and established a feudal regime overseen by their nobles and priests. The new feudal lords protected the ancient stonewalled fishponds, which yielded five thousand pounds of fish daily, and they enhanced traditional irrigation systems by building elaborate rock terraces.

They allocated property rights fairly widely, enabling most Hawaiians to eat well. The new rulers also enforced many complex kapus, or taboos, some of which helped manage scarce resources. Their system of land division is cited by biologists for its habitat protection. The huge freshwater and seawater fishponds were integrated with agriculture, and river valleys were managed as unified systems. The upland forest, left uncut by taboo, helped supply rivers with nutrients for downstream fields and fishponds. Seasons for gathering or catching scarce food or game were strictly enforced. Some taboos were exclusionary, particularly toward women, who were barred from preparing food for or eating with men. They were not allowed to eat the best foods, such as coconuts, shark meat, and pork. Breaking the taboos was punishable by death.

The Arrival of Westerners

By the time Captain James Cook landed on Kauai in 1778, Hawaiians had developed a comfortable economic system overseen by a feudal government. The Westerners would soon change all that.

Cook was the first of many seamen to use Hawaii as a way station to refuel and resupply ships in the middle of the ocean. He was renowned for having solved the immense problem of scurvy among sailors, which he concluded was due to a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. At every port he sought out fruit (particularly citrus), vegetables (including onions and new potatoes), fish, and meat.

The lush islands had much to offer Cook, who ruthlessly took immense amounts of food on his first trip, exploiting Hawaiian generosity. While Hawaiians had welcomed him with a lavish feast on his first visit, they knifed him to death when he returned in 1779.

Cook gave Hawaiians the first specimens of Western flora and fauna—goats, English pigs, and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds. Close behind him came whalers and traders at the end of the eighteenth century, then the American missionaries, mainly Congregationalists, in 1820.

The missionaries introduced the church, school, printed word, woolen clothes, wood houses, and many foods. They sought to clean, clothe, and feed Hawaiians according to Christian standards to make them more responsive to the gospel. Beef was already available because cattle had been imported in 1793 by Captain George Vancouver, who had convinced King Kamehameha to permit women as well as men to eat it, as long as they ate from different cows.

The Congregationalists brought their prized New England foods—potatoes, apples, salted cod, corned beef, butter, and cheese. Food became a vital tool in Christianizing Hawaiians and turning them away from their traditional practices. When Queen Regent Kaahumanu converted to Christianity in 1824, she held a service at the edge of the Halemaumau fire pit sacred to the goddess Pele. Declaring her allegiance to Jehovah, she ate ohelo berries, which were both sacred to Pele and taboo to women. Not a murmur was heard from the volcano goddess.

Dominance by Plantations

Meanwhile, Westerners had also introduced their diseases, which reduced the native Hawaiian population from an estimated 300,000 at Cook's arrival to 60,000 by the mid-1800s and 40,000 by the end of the century. The rapidly expanding sugar industry—many plantations were owned by missionaries and their descendants—imported thousands of Chinese and then Japanese laborers to replace the Hawaiians. Just as the arrival of Westerners nearly wiped out native Hawaiians, the domination of agriculture first by sugar and later by pineapples wiped out the Hawaiian system of small farming overseen by religious laws, which regulated both hunting and farming.

Although wealthy whites received important administrative posts in the Hawaiian government, thereby governing indirectly, they became increasingly unhappy with the monarchy, which they deemed corrupt and inefficient. They wanted secure property rights to build their plantations and they wanted no restrictions on their importation of labor. They overthrew the monarchy in 1893. (Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and the fiftieth state in 1959.)

Between 1852 and 1930, Chinese, then Japanese, Okinawans, Norwegians, Germans, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese, and Filipinos were imported by the immensely powerful factors that supplied plantations with all their needs, including workers. The workers wanted their own food, and the plantation stores procured it from abroad if it could not be grown locally. What could be grown was. Thus rice became Hawaii's third most important crop, after sugar and pineapples. Most immigrants brought seeds with them, though they could not always get them to grow. Manufacturers sprang up to produce tofu, noodles, kimchi, and sake.

Into this diversity came yet another set of missionaries—home economists, most trained by Columbia University's Teachers College. Convinced of the legitimacy of their field, the home economists taught at the newly established University of Hawaii, a land-grant university. Working with the electric and gas companies in the 1920s, they developed recipes that required the new appliances—stoves, ovens, and refrigerators. They promulgated the nutritional messages and agricultural advice of the Extension Services. They catalogued locally grown tropical foodstuffs and analyzed the nutritive values of the Hawaiian diet. They encouraged the consumption of American food, including milk, which many adult Hawaiians were unable to digest properly. They trained school cafeteria managers to produce Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and creamed corn. And they wrote the first cookbooks on Local Food.

The Development of Local Food

Hawaii's sad story of colonial exploitation is tempered by its exuberant ethnic diversity, nowhere to be found more clearly than in food. Calling themselves "locals," Hawaiians call the food they eat "Local Food," a term that most food writers now capitalize. Identified in the 1920s as a distinct phenomenon, Local Food mixes dishes from each of Hawaii's ethnic groups into unique forms, most famously the plate lunch served at diners and lunch wagons. This includes two scoops of sticky rice, meat cooked Asian style, and macaroni or potato salad—all eaten with chopsticks. Local Food includes shaved ice, SPAM wonton, malasadas (Portuguese donuts), saimin (noodle soup), crack seed (Chinese preserved plum), and butter mochi (a rice confection).

Except for indigenous coconut and banana trees, most foods associated with Hawaii are imported. The first immigrants, the Canoe People, brought with them twenty-four different plants. Since about 1800, a large number of additional plants, including pineapples, papaya, avocado, guava, sugar cane, coffee, and macadamia nuts, were introduced. Even the Kiawe tree—a variety of the family that includes mesquite, and is now rampant throughout the islands—was introduced.

Hawaii's premier agricultural product in modern times, the pineapple, is a native of Paraguay. Although introduced in the early 1800s, it was not commercially successful until the early twentieth century, when it was canned and sold to U.S. markets. By the early 1950s, almost 75 percent of pineapple on the world market was Hawaiian, thanks to inspired advertising. Hawaii has no canneries left today. Its entire crop is distributed fresh, accounting for about one million tons of fruit, or one-third of the world's consumption.

The highly prized Kona coffee, imported by Don Francisco de Paulay Marin in 1828, thrived in Hawaii's volcanic soil, enhanced by local altitude and climate. Simultaneously mellow and robust, Kona beans became renowned worldwide after the market crash of 1899, when the large plantations began leasing their lands to families of workers, who greatly improved the methods and quality of production. Many of those families are now in their fifth generation, producing some two million pounds a year. In the 1990s, coffee began to supplant the sugar cane plantings on several other islands, including Kaua'i, Maui, Moloka'i, and O'ahu—which now surpass Kona in total production. Most Hawaiian beans are sold for blends. Coffee marketed as a Kona blend must be at least 10 percent Kona.

Theobroma cacao, a variety of criollo, was able to take advantage of the same volcanic soil and climate and thrive. Though originally equatorial, Hawaiian cross-breed cacao, which has a nutty flavor and low acidity, grows quickly in open sun. (Its equatorial competitors need shade.) Its pods are harvested early—in two years rather than five—and its trees are more productive than elsewhere, averaging a hundred pods each, or five times the world's average. The chocolate is premium grade.

While macadamia nuts were brought to Hawaii as ornamentals in the nineteenth century, they did not become a commercial crop until the 1920s. Because the nut is very hard to crack, it is normally sold shelled. And because its production is labor intensive—one hundred pounds of harvested nuts yield only ten to fifteen lbs of edible meats—macadamias garner a premium price. Hawaii has some twenty thousand acres planted with macadamia trees today. The trees have a fifty-year lifespan.

Sugar cane, now displaced as a commercial crop, was introduced by the Polynesians. In the nineteenth century it became the islands' most significant commercial crop; it was for sugar cane that the Western economic interests eventually overthrew the monarchy.

Bananas were both indigenous and imported. With seventy varieties now grown on the island—and prestige accorded to some—Jean-Marie Jossellin likens the Hawaiians' distinctions among bananas to the Eskimos' distinctions of the varieties of snow.

Making Sense of Tourism

Since Hawaii's resident population of 1 million serves some 6 million tourists annually, the influence of outsiders on Hawaiian food can hardly be overstated. Until the late twentieth century that influence was baleful, with Honolulu having perhaps the worst restaurants of any major Western city. Even once elegant hotels like the Royal Hawaiian serve wretchedly bad meals in the name of traditional luaus—originally religious feasts of genuine importance degraded to farce by commercial exploitation.

But it is also true that many foods thought to be Hawaiian are not. Much of the so-called Hawaiian food served at Polynesian restaurants on the American mainland was invented in California and promulgated by Trader Vic's and other restaurateurs. Fried rice, satays, curries with coconut milk, rum-based drinks garnished with flowers and paper parasols, and dishes named after the goddess Pele or King Kamehameha have no real connection with Hawaii.

Since the early 1990s, however, a genuine Pacific Rim cuisine emphasizing cross-cultural influences but using local ingredients has developed. This has benefited small farmers, giving them outlets for superb fruits and vegetables—Maui onions (comparable to Vidalias), Manoa lettuce, Kahuku watermelon, Waimanalo corn, Kona oranges (a Valencia competitor) and avocados, Puna papayas, and an amazing range of seaweeds and ferns.

Meanwhile, native Hawaiians have reversed their population decline—about one-fourth of Hawaii's resident population of one million at the start of the twenty-first century claims some Hawaiian ancestry. Who is a native? One definition is that a native Hawaiian is someone who eats palu, a condiment made of chopped bits of fish head and stomach mixed with tiny amounts of kukui (candlenut) relish, chili peppers, and garlic. Not many fraudulent Hawaiians are likely to come forward to win this credential.

See also Coffee; Fruit; Pacific Ocean Societies; Sugar and Sweeteners; Sugar Crops and Natural Sweeteners.

Julia Vitullo-Martin