‘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

What does it mean to eat “local”? As the flaws and functions of the US food system come into ever sharper focus for its eating public, the local has become a key word for thinking through community health, economic resiliency, diversified employment, affordable and fresh food, and inequality across class, race, and gender differences.¹ For many, improving the local food system works capaciously to address these complex, overlapping issues.² By increasing access to meats, fruits, and vegetables that are produced nearby (however that is determined), the benefits ripple across the micro and the macro, from individual health to the global economy.³ But whether such logic holds true has been the subject of much academic debate, with arguments against the promotion of local food as being elitist, “white,” or inescapably capitalist.⁴ This important discussion finds a rich case study in Hawai‘i, which is often understood as one of the most ethnically diverse, geographically remote, and economically dependent places within the territorial boundaries of the United States.⁵ The archipelago, once a self-sustaining and independent nation, is now disproportionately reliant on the continental United States for its food, economy, and governance.⁶ Despite long being hailed as “paradise”—a veritable tropical Eden with a year-round growing season—the State of Hawai‘i imports an estimated 85–90 percent of its food, thereby driving up its cost of living to make Honolulu rival New York City and creating vulnerability to global food markets.⁷ Not only are Hawai‘i residents challenged to feed themselves affordably, but many struggle for access to fresh, healthy foods.⁸ This profound contradiction between abundance and scarcity is the product of a deeper social and political history, which witnessed a self-contained ahupua‘a system superseded by global capitalism, an indigenous population overtaken by an international labor force, and a Hawaiian monarchy overthrown by the American government at the turn of the twentieth century.⁹

The literature on Hawai‘i and its foodways often parallels its economic development. Over the course of the nineteenth century, its culinary landscape expanded to accommodate new ethnic groups who emigrated and made the Islands their home.¹⁰ These groups comprised, by and large, folks who identify as “Local.” As such, a term that is elsewhere defined as spatial (the geographically local) is thereby iterated in a way that also encompasses ideology and identity (the culturally Local).¹¹ The multi-ethnic groups that have come to understand Hawai‘i as home over the last several hundred years share a common Creole dialect as well as a shared history of oppression by white elites in the Islands.¹²Thus to be local in Hawai‘i is more than just a bodily location: it is a process of placemaking. The term has also attached to the foods that Local people eat—an elaborated cuisine that draws its flavors from multiple immigration waves, Native Hawaiian traditions, and American industrialization.¹³At the same time, however, works that emphasize how Hawai‘i’s food illustrates its social history can sometimes overlook examples of resistance and cultural survival that—as many works contained herein show—continue to abound. While the project of US settlement across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly produced a framework by which one can understand the cultural and ethnic hierarchies of Hawai‘i, scholarship must also account for the complexity with which its residents understand (and perform) their relationship to the Islands through food in ways that are intersectional, at times contradictory, and always historically grounded.¹⁴

These tensions were at the forefront of my mind when, in March 2014, I organized a panel for the Asian/Pacific/American Center at New York University entitled “System+Taste: Food in Postcolonial Hawai‘i.” It took inspiration from a keynote lecture given by Amy Bentley a year prior for Food: The Conference, hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center. In it, she considered the undertheorized role of “deliciousness” in studies of the food system.¹⁵ Its inherent incalculability and subjective nature, she argued, troubled the data-driven field of public health. Her project to re-center taste within a discourse largely about hunger reminded the audience of the many scholars who have shown how culinary desires index not only biology, but also personal and genealogical histories: that food choices perform identity.¹⁶ With this in mind, then, how does one account for emotionally based senses of taste when trying to determine how a community eats best? How does taste and identity help to shed light on the unevenly deployed benefits of the American food system? The question, with no clear answer, continued to trouble me as I worked my way through literature on settler colonialism and indigenous foodways.

I invited two scholars working on food and Hawai‘i to New York in order to join Bentley in an extended discussion that, I hoped, might tease out some of these contradictions by applying the idea to Hawai‘i specifically. Kaori O’Connor, a Kanaka Maoli raised in Waikīkī and now Senior Research Fellow at University College London in the Department of Anthropology, gave a paper discussing the anthropological and historical context for the development of taste and cuisine in Hawai‘i; Ashley Lukens, Director of the Hawai‘i Center for Food Safety, theorized tactical community food activism as a tool for food system development within a settler state. My colleague in Food Studies at NYU, Kelila Jaffee, prepared food tastings that underscored the content of the talks: paʻiʻai from Oʻahu, limu from Hawaiʻi Island, commercially produced Hawaiian Sun Lilikoi Passion juice that allowed the audience sensory engagements with Hawai‘i as the last gasps of a New York winter lingered outside on the Washington Mews. The rich discussion that followed made clear that there was a larger project at hand deserving of a special journal issue.

From traditional to contemporary contexts, Hawai‘i offers a fruitful site from which we can locate emergent and critical themes around placemaking, local food economies, and identity construction that are of central concern to the field of Food Studies today.¹⁷ Because of the diverse communities that view the Islands as either home or homeland, solutions for improving its food system variously grapple with indigenous erasure and resurgence, histories of land privatization, natural resource conservation, culturally appropriate foodways, affordability, and corporatized agricultural practices. Just as Hawai‘i’s complex history scaffolds social relations in the Islands today, it also shapes the food system’s ship-to-table system. As a critical discourse builds around the alternative food movement, the “local” thereby articulates food justice, and the geographic and social particularities of Hawai‘i amplify (and, I argue, clarify) questions about whom local food serves best in both material and ideological ways.

This shared sense of “Local” belonging—undoubtedly fraught—also underscores debates both public and academic that have sought solutions for ameliorating the fragility of Hawai‘i’s food supply.¹⁸ To that end, the increasingly popular rhetoric of aloha ʻāina, or caring for the land, draws productively upon native orientations toward sustainability, even though it is at times operationalized in a way that elides the material realities of indigenous displacement.¹⁹ As such, specific visions of the Islands loom large: as a vacationer’s paradise, as an ancestral homeland, and as a cultural melting pot. These different ideas of Hawai‘i are often celebrated and symbolized through its food (think, for example, about the complex meanings of some of its icons like the tourist’s luau, the kalo plant, and the SPAM musubi). Indeed, if this special issue had been written ten years ago, its content might have stayed focused on the symbolic cultural importance of each dish and the multicultural groups who enjoy them. However, as important as these symbols are to understanding the culture of Hawai‘i, they become ever more significant when one considers the political and economic infrastructures from which they emerge (or which they resist), including American empire, settler colonialism, and the monocropping of sugar and pineapple for export.²⁰ It continues to be a great irony that a place with such ecological abundance no longer grows its own food.

The essays included in this issue are linked by a common focus on Hawai‘i, but from there take on a full scope of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and subject matter in order to grapple with ideas of what local food has, might, or could look like in the Islands (or anywhere else for that matter). As a reflection of the multiple subjectivities that define Hawai‘i’s community today—insider and outsider, settler and native, and everything between that upsets these binaries—this collection features scholars writing from various geographic and genealogic vantage points. For a place whose written history has been long dominated by non-native voices, delineating what perspectives are represented here constitutes a necessary part of the collection’s introduction. The authors of these articles are both indigenous and haole, local and non-local, and writing from within and outside the geographical boundaries of Hawai‘i. All have a relationship to the place they study that is at once intimate and academic, but by no means uniform. Readers will see these multiple identities reflected in both content and form: Hawaiian-language words are employed throughout the essays and, depending on the author’s orientation toward Hawaiʻi, will be variously roman or italicized or shown with or without diacritical marks. These editorial choices were left to authors as a matter of personal politics (for example, Native Hawaiians might not italicize because the language is not foreign to them or their subject matter, though their meanings have been glossed for readability). As a result, the works presented here can be used as standalone pieces. However, together they might also serve as a model for what an intensive, collective study of a single place might look like when different relationships to place are honored and acknowledged as part of, rather than incidental to, scholarly practice.

The intended result is a broad collection of works that explore the multiple historical, cultural, and political registers of Hawai‘i’s foodscape. Arguing for why Hawai‘i is a model for understanding global food history, Rachel Laudan revisits the authoring of her James Beard Award-winning The Food of Paradise, which has long served as a primer for the complex grammars of “Local” cuisine. In this issue she contextualizes her landmark work against challenges of legitimization—for local food in Hawai‘i, which had not always been viewed as a “legitimate” cuisine, for studying food, which had not always been a “legitimate” field of research, and for being a University of Hawai‘i visiting faculty outsider allowed to “legitimately” write about the history of food in Hawai‘i. Laudan’s assertions that Hawai‘i’s food is worth scholarly study paved the way for studies like my own, which examines the naturalization of ice and a taste for coldness within Hawai‘i’s foodscape. Focusing on the earliest importation of ice to Hawai‘i by ship in the 1850s and 1860s, I show how culinary engagements with the very cold by Honolulu residents performed an ambivalent relationship with the United States as its economic relationship with Hawai‘i strengthened in the midcentury. The arrival and naturalization of foreign foodways to Hawai‘i is also illustrated in Clare Gupta’s study of the historical legacies of the dairy industry—once “local” to Hawai‘i, later imported, and now (once again) re-localized. As values of freshness and sustainability gain greater importance for consumers, milk articulates the different “agrarian imaginaries” used within the local food movement. Indeed, as she shows, the local food system is fraught with differing ideas of where and how local production should exist; and that a desire for Hawai‘i dairy does not always dovetail harmoniously with the material realities of living near a dairy farm.

While concepts of the “local” shift across time, community, class, we find in Mehana Blaich-Vaughan and Adam Ayers’ study of customary fishing practices in Haleleʻa, Kaua‘i, that other facets of localism are timeless. Fisherman who employ ancestral knowledge and foundational concepts of reciprocity with natural resources display cultural resiliency despite land privatization and legal restrictions to traditional hukilau (surround-net fishing). Similar strains can be found also in Hokulani Aikau and Donna Kamehaʻikū Camvel’s richly narrated analysis of contemporary wetland kalo cultivation and poi production in Heʻeʻia Uli. Attending closely to the pleasures and challenges of embodied cultural practice, they draw through lines between ways of doing and ways of knowing; struggle and resiliency; the restoration of hāloa and the Kanaka body. For both of these pieces, native epistemologies are linchpins in Hawai‘i’s sustainability efforts, where indigenous core values comprise the foundation upon which a politics of the local can be equitably built.

Traditional food practices are often and resolutely constrained by the capitalist economies in which they are embroiled, and the final two articles address two poles of Hawai‘i’s current agricultural economy: the small-scale farm and the biotech industry’s GE (genetically engineered) seed and crop research and development fields. Developing a typology for farmers in the South Kona area of Hawai‘i Island, Noa Kekuewa Lincoln and Nicole Ardoin articulate the personal and economic drivers behind small-scale operations in order to assess the potential for strengthening the self-sufficiency of Hawai‘i’s food system. Their metric importantly shows that rising popularity in “leisure and hobby farming” by groups seeking residential space (a significant portion of which are relatively new to the Islands) emerges as one particular factor threatening the development of robust and diverse agricultural production in Hawai‘i. From small-scale to large, Andrea Brower draws a historical through-line between the sugar oligarchy that once dominated Hawai‘i’s economy and the agrochemical oligopoly that has “taken seed” in the Islands today. Reading deeply into histories of indigenous dispossession, Brower suggests that the local/global binary may no longer be a sufficient axis for thinking through the colonial present. Rather, alternative futures for Hawai‘i’s food system must account for the systemic inequalities that have long characterized both its agriculture and society-at-large.

As food issues articulate locality—people, politics, and geography—they also make visible the potential for transformation. Inflected by its particular brand of “Local,” Hawai‘i’s food system represents the myriad issues that challenge communities in the continental United States and beyond, from the GMO debate, to land-use, to commodity exchange. The seven works presented here offer fresh perspectives on localism that are both deeply emplaced and critical of its construction, showing Hawai‘i as more than an idea(l) of paradise, agricultural bounty, and racial harmony. Instead, they map its complex social landscapes in order to offer nodes for thinking through resistance and change. Returning, then, to the original question animating this issue about the place of identity (or the identity of place) in mitigating food system inequality, I introduce a collection committed to seeking answers by engaging diverse theoretical frames and intellectual traditions. By drawing upon the specificity of Hawai‘i, these works are brought to bear on the central concern of place within Food Studies today.

Notes on contributor

Hi`ilei Julia Hobart is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Indigenous Studies at Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Email: [email protected].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.