Culinary Heritage: Hawaii Make It Pay
As I thought about it, I decided to make this a separate post.
In Hawaii, the question of native Hawaiian heritage has expanded from maintaining taro cultivation, the big topic in the 90s, to include hand pounding taro to make poi. To all of you out there who suspect that a purple puree can’t be any good, my experiments pounding taro convinced me it is delicious.
This long article by Catherine Mariko Black on taro and poi debates in the Honolulu Weekly puts the emphasis on legalizing hand pounded poi (something that will surely happen given the politics of the islands). To me the problem now, as then, is how to make it economically viable. It’s something the activists are concerned about too.
Practitioners like Anthony maintain that the starchier taro they need to make pai ‘ai [here meaning hand pounded taro] is different from the taro poi millers usually use and is sometimes more labor intensive for the farmer to grow. That’s why he and others have begun to pay double, or even triple, taro’s going price of about 60 cents a pound. It’s also why he can sell his hand-pounded pai ‘ai for $10 to $15 a pound, two to three times more than conventional poi.
Anthony puts great emphasis on the economic health behind this issue.
“My number one question to the kupuna has always been, ‘What do we need most in Hawaii?’ And they all say we need more taro farmers. So I looked at the numbers and at the current farm gate price for taro, which is what the poi mills are paying. I’d have to grow 100,000 pounds of taro to make $60,000 a year. But if I sustainably farm and pound my own taro, I can make $70,000 by selling just 7,000 pounds per year, and all I need is one acre. So the real question is, if we want more taro farmers, we need to figure out how they’re going to make enough money to feed their families.” (My emphasis).
Now I entirely agree that it is important to attend to the economics of any kind of farming. But this is fairly astonishing.
Here’s a quote from a piece I wrote earlier on poi.
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.
That means that if Anthony can sell his product for $10 to $15 a pound, it makes poi twenty four times as expensive as rice.
If I remember correctly, when Hawaiians subsisted on poi with a few seasonings such as fish or limu (seaweed), they needed 4 to 5 lbs a day (which would be about right because if you subsist on bread which is much drier and hence lighter you need about 2 lbs a day). That would be $40 to $60 a day for your basic foodstuff or $18,000 a year.
Or, looked at another way, Anthony is reckoning on making about $70,000 a year from one acre. Of course, I assume he is not counting as one of his costs the price of land which in Hawaii runs from $15,000 an acre (presumably this is dry leeward land no good for taro) to $500,000 an acre. Presumably he can get land set aside for Native Hawaiians. If I am calculating right, that means a return of somewhere between 300% and 14%.
Here, for comparison is a quote on returns in South Dakota (simply because it was the first I ran across).
The net rate of return is a return to agricultural land ownership after deducting property taxes and other land ownership expenses. Appraisers refer to the current annual net rate of returns as the market- derived capitalization rate. Average net rates of return for 2010 varied from 3.9% for non-irrigated cropland to 3.6% for hayland and 2.7% for rangeland, and averaged 3.2% for all-agricultural land. This is the fifth consecutive year that average net rates of return were below 4.0% for all- agricultural land, compared to an average of 5.4% during the 1990s and 4.4% from 2000 to 2005. The practical range of net rates of return to land for 2010 reported by respondents varies from 2.0% to 7.0% for cropland, from 1.0% to 6.5% for hayland, and 1.0% to 5.0% for rangeland. The median net rate of return was 3.5% for cropland and 3.0% for hayland and rangeland.
It would not be the first time that what was once a staple becomes a luxury. Maintaining culinary heritage comes at a price. Not a bad thing. It reminds us of the huge cost of land and, before farming and processing was mechanized, of human time. But it does mean that poi will be a luxury not a staple.
Again thanks to Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia for the link.
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aloha kaua,
so happy to see new articles/blogs on poi / paʻiʻai. here is a few things to think about,
1. One pound of paʻiʻai ($15) is 99% kalo, makes 2-3 pounds of poi, sometimes 4. So actually – hand pounded kalo at this time is the highest quality at the least expensive price.
2. For Hawaii to be sustainable we need to start to farm, not as a choice but a true means of survival. At this time most of the adequate farm land for kalo is controlled by the State of Hawaii – as either ceded lands or under DLNR. The land is there we need better public policy to get the land into the people who want to malama.
3. Not once in your blog did you mention about who is the market. The market for paʻiʻai are people who donʻt live in Hawaii. You can ship paʻiʻai without refrigeration. IF YOU LIVE IN HAWAII, POUND YOUR OWN KALO AND THE POI IS FREE (if your also farming it). If you are purchasing raw kalo from a farmer at $2-3 per pound. Home made poi is half to a quarter of the cost of store bought poi.
4. With over 80 varieties of Hawaiian kalo, you should be able to grow kalo anywhere in Hawaii (btw – that is what our ancestors did).
Please double check your info, the leeward sides of the island (waianae in particular) had hundreds of acres of kalo being farmed at contact.
The main fact you may have over looked is that for the past 100+ years Hawaii has been under the dictatorship of AMERICA, a country who has not done well to protect, maintain, steward or in our words malama aina. We need to start to look outside of western thought and principals to overcome our current social, economic and land management challenges in Hawaii.
Mahalo nui,
daniel anthony
Hi Daniel Anthony,
Thanks to the long response to my post. Anything to do with taro and poi has my interest.
Thanks too for the correction on pa’i’ai. This makes it less expensive than I suggested. But without mechanization, I don’t see how poi can ever be anything but expensive relative to other staples, particularly if it is made with high-maintenance wetland taro. Maintaining taro patches, transplanting taro, harvesting taro, cooking taro, and pounding taro all take time. If you want to to it yourself as a hobby, fine. But to sustain the Hawaiian people, I just don’t see a return to the ways of the past. The world has moved on and I don’t think people want to live as they did 250 years ago.
Which leaves the question of land, American imperialism, and so on. I don’t think land, the basic source of wealth for most of the world’s history, is or was ever really free. Contact with Hawaii set in train a terribly sad series of events. I think the only way to move forward is by confronting them while realizing that backtracking is impossible.
All best with your ventures,
Rachel