Spam is versatile. The canned meat was introduced to the islands to feed soldiers during World War II, and stayed long after the troops left. Because Hawaii is the most isolated population center on earth, residents must rely on a great deal of expensive, imported food — but not Spam. The staple food is compact, nonperishable, and relatively inexpensive, making it the perfect thing to keep in your pantry. Statistics show that Hawaii 7-Eleven stores go through approximately 70, Spam musubis each week.
Why else would 25, people show up for the annual Waikiki Spam Jam, a crazy celebration of the canned meat that has been popular in Hawaii for so many decades?
Teriyaki and Portuguese sausage flavors were manufactured specifically for the Hawaiian market. But his family lived on Kauai for many generations, and over all these generations, there was a lot of intermarriage.
So I am actually what you'd call a poi dog, or a mutt. Many of our ancestors moved from different areas of the world to work on Hawaii's sugar cane plantations. This is very, very common throughout most local families of Hawaii, there's going to be a great ethnic diversity within one family, and there's going to be a lot of history that involves the plantations. The plantations gave rise to Hawaii's local food. I say "Hawaii's local food" very deliberately, because that includes some Hawaiian food.
But Hawaiian food is a distinct category in itself. Hawaiian is an ethnicity, and of course, there's a cuisine attached to that ethnicity. Everybody else who came later on—the Portuguese, the Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, and all the many different ethnic groups—took on each aspects of each other's cuisines. They cook together, they have to live together, they have to put up with each other, and many of them intermarried. That grew into its own cuisine.
It's not fusion, because nobody came and took different aspects and smashed them together. The food that I grew up on, and the food that is the background of what I serve, exists, as a distinct cuisine. You have Korean Galbi on one plate that very comfortably sits next to macaroni salad, and that's served with rice, of course, and obviously that's a plate lunch.
This is something that has existed for decades, if not longer, and there, we have Hawaii's local food. It's a really interesting dichotomy of saying, "Hawaii's local food. So that, we can call it local. It's looked like different things in the last, I would say, over the course of my lifetime.
When I was a baby, the places to go were places that focused on using Pacific influences with French techniques, and there wasn't, when I was a really little kid, such an emphasis on local ingredients. Maybe on some things, certain fish and certain vegetables. But there wasn't really a very holistic way of looking at Hawaii's resources because we imported and we still import the vast majority of our food from the mainland, which is ridiculous.
It's so expensive. Even now, most of Hawaii's milk comes from the mainland. Most of Hawaii's food does come from the mainland. There's that. It's very hard to condense into just a few sentences. We have in Hawaii this impulse to make other peoples' food our own. You have to remember that, and the way that I approach Hawaii's local food, and Hawaii's food, and my own food, is that it's not a static thing.
It's something that's constantly innovative and interesting, and yes, we have the classics, yes, we have Kalua pig and Spam musubi. These have been classics for quite a long time now. But that doesn't mean that you can't tweak them a little bit, or add your own flair. Because what I find so exciting about Hawaii's food is people encountering it for the first time are like, "OK, Hawaiian food is this. Hawaii's local food is this, these few categories.
I think what a lot of outsiders don't realize about Hawaii is that we love bringing food from one place to another. Bearing food great distances, or even small distances, and sharing food is like such a part of Hawaii's food culture. In Hawaii, a lot of our food culture is influenced by Japanese food culture, but also by Japanese culture in general.
Omiyage is something that you bring home to people from your travels. You always have to show up with a gift, and you always have to think of others when you're traveling and bring something back. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.
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