Store

Pacific Islands Foodways

Regional

⚠ THE LARGEST FEATURE ON EARTH, AND THE FOOD SYSTEM IS THE VOYAGING. The Pacific covers a third of the planet’s surface and its islands were settled by the most accomplished open-ocean navigators in human history, who carried their food with them: the AUSTRONESIAN expansion out of island Southeast Asia from roughly 3000 BCE, reaching Melanesia, then remote Oceania, and finally Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa within the last thousand-odd years. ⚠ THE CANOE PLANTS ARE THE POINT: TARO, YAM, BREADFRUIT, BANANA, SUGARCANE, COCONUT, ti, kava, paper mulberry, and the pig, dog and chicken — a deliberate portable agriculture loaded aboard for a voyage that might fail. The shared techniques: the EARTH OVEN, under a dozen names — umu, imu, lovo, mumu, ahima‘a, hāngī; coconut cream pressed from grated flesh; POUNDED starch pastes; and fermentation pits for breadfruit and taro against cyclone and drought. ⚠ AND THE MODERN FACT: imported white rice, flour, sugar, tinned meat and sweetened drinks have displaced local staples across the region, and the Pacific now carries some of the world’s highest recorded rates of diabetes and obesity. That is a food-system outcome with a documented colonial and commercial history, not a matter of individual choice.

Atlas — where and when

Where in the world

Communities and languages

  • Pacific Islanders community documented

Languages: English, French, Fijian, Samoan, Tok Pisin

What is recorded

  • Pacific island settlement is documented as part of the Austronesian expansion from island Southeast Asia beginning around 3000 BCE, reaching remote Oceania and finally Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa within the last thousand years. The canoe plants — taro, yam, breadfruit, banana, sugarcane, coconut, ti, kava and paper mulberry — together with pig, dog and chicken, are recorded as a deliberate portable agriculture. The earth oven is documented across the region under names including umu, imu, lovo, mumu, ahima‘a and hāngī. Imported rice, flour, sugar, tinned meat and sweetened drinks are documented as having displaced local staples, with the region carrying some of the highest recorded rates of diabetes and obesity in the world. documented
  • The Austronesian expansion out of island Southeast Asia carries the canoe plants — taro, yam, breadfruit, banana, coconut, sugarcane, kava — into the Pacific. documented

Related foodways

This foodway relates to

  • related to Asian documented

    The Austronesian expansion out of island Southeast Asia from roughly 3000 BCE carried the canoe plants into the Pacific.

Recorded as relating to this foodway

  • part of Melanesian Foodways documented

    ⚠ The worst-named of the three: coined from the Greek for "black islands", a classification by the inhabitants’ skin colour, and rejected by Pacific scholars on that ground.

  • part of Micronesian Foodways documented
  • part of Oceanian Foodways — Safety Note documented
  • part of Pacific Food Security and the Nutrition Transition documented

    ⚠ The causes are structural and documented, not personal: the export of mutton flaps and turkey tails, nuclear testing, phosphate mining, plantation economies, trade rules that overturned national bans, shipping costs and climate change.

  • part of Polynesian Foodways documented

    ⚠ An umbrella over sovereign nations, not a cuisine. The three Pacific regions are nineteenth-century European classifications and Pacific scholars have criticised them as such.

Regional cuisines

Recipes

No recipes are filed under this cuisine yet.