‘Local’: Contextualizing Hawai‘i’s Foodways

Abstract

Within contemporary concerns about the overall health of the US food system, the “local” has emerged as a key concept for strengthening sustainability, community, and access to affordable and fresh foods. For Hawai‘i, the local is more than a geographic category; it is also a core identity by which its residents mark their relationship to place. This double use of localism thereby underlines the personal—and political—stakes of “eating local” in an increasingly globalized food system. This introductory essay for a special journal issue on Hawai‘i’s Food Systems offers the island archipelago as a case study for understanding how these systems-in-place interact with, respond to, and reinforce histories of colonialism, migration and settlement, monocropping, and importation. By attending to critical discourses about localism through the geographic and social particularities of Hawai‘i, themes of place are highlighted as a central concern to the field of Food Studies today.

Keywords:

• Hawai'i
• local food systems
• multiculturalism
• settler colonialism
• indigenous foodways
• alternative food movement

Notes

1. Robert Feagan, “The Place of Food: Mapping out the “Local” in Local Food Systems,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 31, no. 1 (2007): 23-42, Steven M. Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 30, no. 1 (2013): 55-89, Amy Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

2. Some landmark work that catalyzed this thinking within popular American culture are Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Also see C. Clare Hinrichs and Thomas A. Lyon, eds., Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), Gary Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food (New York: Norton, 2001), Francis Moore Lappé, Diet For a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972) and Joan Dye Gusso, The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978).

3. Safania Normann Eriksen, “Defining Local Food: Constructing a New Taxonomy: Three Domains of Proximity,” Acta Agriculturae Scandinavica, Special Issue: Local Food—A Step Towards Better and More Environmentally Friendly Products, vol. 63, supp. 1 (2013): 47-55.

4. Laura B. Delind, “Of Bodies, Place, and Culture: Re-Situating Local Food,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 19 (2006): 121-146, Teresa M. Mares and Devon G. Peña, “Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow, and Deep Food Systems,” in Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, eds. Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 197-219, Rachel Slocum, “Whiteness, Space, and Alternative Food Practice,” Geoforum, vol. 38, no. 3 (2007): 520-533, Julie Guthman, “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice,” Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 4 (2008): 431-447.

5. The conflation of these factors (which are not without their caveats) are often used to identify Hawai‘i’s particular vulnerability to a globalized food system. See Todd Woody, “Food Independence Could be a Matter of Survival for the U.S.” Most Isolated State,” TakePart.com, 29 June 2015, accessed 3 May 2016, http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/29/hawaii-local-food.

6. This overarching idea is more carefully articulated in Davianna McGregor, Nā Kuaʻāina: Living Hawaiian Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Manulani Aluli Meyer, “Hoea Ea: Land Education and Food Sovereignty in Hawai‘i,” Environmental Education Research, vol. 20, no. 1 (2014): 98-101.

7. Matthew K. Loke and PingSun Leung, “Hawai‘i’s Food Consumption and Supply Sources: Benchmark Estimates and Measurement Issues,” Agricultural and Food Economics, vol. 10, no. 1 (2013), accessed 3 May 2016, doi: 10.1186/2193-7532-1-10. Importantly, high cost-of-living indexes push Hawai‘i to the top of their lists in part because they factor in the cost of groceries. Anita Hofschneider, “Is Hilo the 5^th Most Expensive City in the Nation?,” Civil Beat, 14 October 2014, accessed 3 May 2016, http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/10/is-hilo-the-5th-most-expensive-city-in-the-nation/. For more on the ideological creation of Hawai‘i as a paradise, see Janeen Arnold Costa, “Paradisical Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Marketing and Consuming Hawai‘i,” Consumption Markets & Culture, vol. 1, no. 4 (1998): 303-346.

8. Stephanie Lee, Melissa Oshiro, Laura Hsu, Opal Vanessa Buchthal, and Tetine Sentell, “Neighborhoods and Health in Hawai‘i: Considering Food Accessibility and Affordability,” Hawai‘i Journal of Medicine and Public Health, vol. 71, no. 8 (2012): 232-237. The concept of “food miles” has not been without critique, but is used here as a useful gloss for the distance the majority of Hawai‘i’s food travels from the U.S. continent. Steven Schnell, “Food Miles, Local Eating, and Community Supported Agriculture: Putting Local Food in its Place,” Agriculture and Human Values, vol. 30, no. 4 (2013): 615-628.

9. This history is incredibly complex and has been chronicled by many. Here I draw particularly on Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: Univeristy of Hawaii Press, 2002), and Lilikalā Kameʻelehiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992).

10. Arnold Hiura, Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Watermark Publishing, 2009), Kaori O’Connor, “The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Trasngression, Transformation, and Travel,” Food, Culture & Society, vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 149-172, Judith Midgley Kirkendall, “Hawaiian Ethnograstronomy: The Development of a Pidgin-Creole Cuisine,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 1985).

11. This tension is elegantly illustrated in Judy Rohrer, Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racism in Hawai‘i (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). Also see Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “The Kēpaniwai (Damming of the Water) Heritage Gardens,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

12. John P. Rosa, “Local Story: The Massie Case Narrative and the Cultural Production of Local Identity in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal, vol. 26, no. 2 (2000): 94. Scholarship on local identity has stemmed largely from a University of Hawai‘i undergraduate student’s senior thesis, Eric Yamamoto, “From “Japanee” to Local: Community Change and the Redefinition of Sansei Identity in Hawai‘i,” (Senior thesis for Liberal Studies Program, University of Hawai‘i, 1974). Also see Jonathan Y. Okamura, “Aloha Kanaka Me Ke Aloha “Aina: Local Culture and Society in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal, vol. 7 (1980): 119-137.

13. Rachel Laudan, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawai‘i’s Culinary Heritage (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 18.

14. As exemplified by the sharing of multiethnic foods by Hawai‘i’s 19^th century plantation workers. Hiura, Kau Kau, 57.

15. Amy Bentley, “The Poetics and Pragmatics of Deliciousness,” (keynote presentation, Food: The Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 5, 2012).

16. To begin, see Diner, Hungering for America (1991), Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Champain, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998), Pilcher, Que Vivan los Tamales (1998).

17. It is important to note here distinctions between “local” and “place,” which have been described as sympathetic, but not equivalent terms. Clare Hinrichs, “Fixing Food with Ideas of “Local” and “Place,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2015): 1-6, accessed 3 May 2016, doi: 10.1007/s13412-015-0266-4.

18. Ashley Lukens, “Theorizing Food Justice: Critical Positionality and the Political Economy of Community Food Systems,” (Phd dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2013), Margo Machida, “Devouring Hawai‘i: Food, Consumption, and Contemporary Art,” in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, eds. Robert Ji-Song Ju, Martin F. Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (New York: New York University, 2013), Amy Reddinger, “Eating “Local’: The Politics of Post-Statehood Hawaiian Cookbooks,” Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2010): 67-87, and LeeRay Costa and Kathryn Besio, “Eating Hawai‘i: Local Foods and Placemaking in Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine,” Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8 (2011): 839-854.

19. For statistics on health, nutrition, and racial disparity in Hawai‘i, see K. Kromer Baker, J.P. Derrickson, and S.A.K. Derrickson, Hunger and Food Insecurity in Hawai‘i: Baseline Estimates. Hawai‘i Health Survey, 1999-2000 (Honolulu: State Department of Health, Office of Health Status Monitoring, October 2011). For a discussion of Aloha ʻĀina activism, see Clare Gupta, “Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha “Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-Based Food Sovereignty,” Globalizations, vol. 12, no. 4 (2015): 529-544, and for how the concept can be taken up in ways that does not account for indigenous struggles, see Costa and Besio’s section on Terroir, ʻĀina, and Local foods in “Eating Hawai‘i,” 844-845.

20. Krisnawati Suryanata, “Diversified Agriculture, Land Use, and Agrofood Networks in Hawai‘i,” Economic Geography, vol. 78, no. 1 (2002): 71-86.