Poi and the Vegefication of the United States
Poi, as anyone who has been to Hawaii knows, was the staple food of the Hawaiians pre-Contact. Now it’s often the butt of jokes. Who would want to eat purple slime?
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.
You know I love my garden, but you are oh-so-right, little local gardens aren’t going to solve any hunger issues.
However, the 12 year old geek in me wants to know: do they really use a laser to level the fields?? That is sooo cool!
Actually it would probably cut down on wheat dust related health issues. Have you ever seen the amount of wheat dust that gets into the air when it’s harvest time? It’s pretty scary.
No sure, it seems to me that Taro/poi has moved from the position of staple food stuff to fringe food/novelty food. Not sure I have a problem with that, unless it really is being put forward as a viable model for feeding the world.
There seems to be a lot of taro in the world, why isn’t imported to Hawaii? We even have it in our local supermarket here in Melbourne.
You might be interested in the “Pacific Island guest worker scheme” that is just started in Australia (based on a New Zealand model), basically is a temporary work visa for “unskilled” migrants from Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Tonga to pick fruit, a job that seems like nobody in Australia wants to do. Until the recent economic down turn, now there is a number of vocal groups essentially saying “Australian jobs for Australians, even if they were jobs that we didn’t want to do a few weeks ago and were happy to let Pacific workers do at a wage significantly less then would be allowed for an Australian citizen”.
Adam,
I think the problem is that taro comes in incredibly diverse forms. In Hawaii, neither Chinese nor Samoan nor Japanese kinds of taro made decent poi. They were all sold in Hawaii and used by all these different groups. But the size, cooking time, mode of cultivation, and taste of the taro was quite different. That said, there’s no reason why Hawaiian taro could not be mechanized like all these others.
Judith, the laser is simply used as a surveying tool to alter the profile of a field, not for zapping down the harvest. Essentially you use it to produce a field without any bumps of dips (you take soil from a bump and use it to fill in a dip). This gives you an even, gentle slope with good drainage, especially good for flood irrigation methods (there a problems with using this technique though).
Or if there is a sufficient market, grow the Hawaiian forms elsewhere at a cheaper rate and import it. Although I believe that this isn’t a popular practice now.
Even this is problematic. Hawaiian taro does not ship well. I’m still trying to figure out how they got it to Hawaii in the first place. But now once harvested the corms rot in a couple of days. So given the distance between Hawaii and the mainland it would probably have to be airlifted. And it’s very heavy.