Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/February 2007

Bites of Paradise

Rooted in Taro
By Joan Namkoong

Photo: Douglas Peebles TOR JOHNSON/PACIFIC STOCK PHOTO: DAVID BOYNTON

Well over a century ago, Isabella Bird journeyed through the Hawaiian Is­lands and encountered a tropical paradise that we can only dream of today: lush forests, verdant green valleys and landscapes, unspoiled beaches and a congenial and hospitable population that curiously welcomed a European woman traveling alone. She chronicled her adventures in Six Months in the Sand­wich Isles, a travel book that was well received in her native England. Within these pages, a foodie like me can’t help but follow the thread of food and what Bird ate in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1870s. .

As Bird traveled through small towns and remote villages, she viewed trees of mango, orange, breadfruit, alligator pears (avocados), tamarind, banana, rose apple (also known as mountain ap­ple), cherimoya, coconut and mangosteen. Papaya she described as “a perfect gem of tropical vegetation.” In gar­dens, she saw peas, carrots, turnips, as­paragus, lettuce, celery, melons, pine­apples and sweet potatoes. Well-tended fishponds provided a wealth of fish and shrimp. At celebrations, there were count­less pigs and fowl; beef cattle and wild goats also provided protein. Milk and butter were scarce commodities, but there were tins of sardines, biscuits, coffee and tea. Food in the Islands in the 1870s was abundant, much of it growing wild and available for the taking.

She was welcomed into the homes of strangers to share a meal, whatever the time of day or night. Chickens were slaughtered when meal preparations be­gan: There were always sweet potatoes, bananas and breadfruit. Inevitably, at every meal, there were steamed kalo, or taro, and the pounded taro paste known as poi.

The “unfailing calabash of poi” is men­tioned numerous times in Bird’s travelogue. Its abundance and importance on the Hawaiian table are without refute. “A Hawaiian could not exist with­out his calabash of poi. The root is an object of the ten­dersweet solicitude, from the day it is planted until the hours when it is lovingly eaten,” wrote Bird.

Colocasia esculenta, the scientific name of taro, has been mentioned as early as 100 B.C. in Chinese books. It thrived in Egypt at the beginning of the Christian era and was cultivated in Japan, New Zealand and the western Pacific Is­lands. According to Native Planters, by E.S. Craighill Handy and Elizabeth Green Handy, taro “is a plant of unique and distinctive character which was brought by planters to a higher state of cultivation in Old Hawai‘i than anywhere else in the world.”

How did taro get to Hawai‘i, one of the most remote places on Earth, and why did it become so important to Ha­waiian food culture? We know that taro was prominent throughout the Pacific. In Tahiti and Samoa, banana and breadfruit were abundant; in the Marquesas, breadfruit thrived and in New Zealand, sweet potato was the staple for the Maori. Taro was also grown in each of these locales, just as the other foods were cultivated in Ha­wai‘i. But the Hawaiians systematically cultivated taro once it was established in the Islands and it became the starch staple of their diet.

Scien­tists speculate that taro seed could have been borne by birds to the Hawaiian Islands, long before Polynesians land­ed here. But few varieties of taro reproduce from seed. If taro had come as a seed, there would have been more varieties, says William Mokahi Steiner, dean of the College of Agri­culture, Forestry and Natural Resource Manage­ment at the University of Hawai‘i-Hilo. Because seeds are small, the voyagers would have carried more of them, yet there were only eight original varieties of taro introduced to Hawai‘i. Taro customarily reproduces from shoots from the corm. These cuttings would have had to be carefully pre­served during canoe migrations across the Pacific. Over the course of many voyages, animals and plants traversed the Pacific along with people to the Hawaiian Islands. “Taro was one of the canoe plants,” says Steiner. “Cut­tings last a long time.”

When the voyagers reached landfall, they gravitated to areas where rivers or streams came down to the ocean, providing a supply of fresh water. Sites for taro fields and other plants were not a priority during the early years of migration. But as the population grew, with the need to cultivate food plants on a larger scale, the development of planting areas and the diversion of water to ir­rigate plants evolved.

Geographically, taro culture was well suited to the fine nu­trient-rich volcanic soils present in the valley floors, where streams could be diverted to irrigate lo‘i, or flooded terraces. A semiaquatic plant, an excess of fresh water was es­sential to its success. It also could survive a drought and thrive in a variety of altitudes, humidity levels and growing conditions. Early Hawaiians worked hard at taro cultivation, constructing elaborate ditches to flood leveled areas where taro was planted, taking into account the seasonal variations in rainfall. The taro farmer was a civil engineer, systematically grow­ing the crop that became a nation’s staff of life.

Taro’s prominence in Hawai‘i is rooted in its mythological origin and its relationship to the ancestor of man. As the legend goes, the first child born to Wä­kea died and from its burial spot sprang a taro plant. Wakea’s second child, Ha­loa, be­came the ancestor of the Ha­wai­ian people. As the elder brother, taro had a higher status than man. Taro became an important part of Hawaiian life, both as food and as the plant around which life revolved.

The taro plant itself is a metaphor for the Hawaiian family. ‘Oha is the shoot that emerges from the base of the taro plant, and is replanted for reproduction. ‘Ohana means offshoots, and it is the Hawaiian term for the family unit, growing from the parent stock. Taro sym­bolizes the family, its offspring and its future as new shoots continue to emerge.

In Hawaiian society, taro was cultivated by men. They plant­ed, harvested, cooked and processed it into poi. Taro cul­­tivation took longer and required more labor than sweet potatoes, a crop cultivated by women and men that re­quired less work since it could be grown in a variety of dryland locations. Sweet potatoes were harvested more often than taro, which took more than a year to mature.

More than 300 varieties of taro were cultivated over time, each requiring different climates and growing conditions. Some were grown especially for poi-making, while specific varieties favored for their flavor and color were reserved for the ali‘i, or chiefs. Other varieties were grown for their edible leaves. Still others possessed specific medicinal qualities and some were grown for ceremonial activities.

“A square mile of kalo will feed 15,000 natives for a year,” wrote Bird in her travel book. Indeed, taro was an intensely cultivated crop, prized for its role in Hawaiian culture, as well as for the basic sustenance it provided for the Hawaiian people. Even today, taro and poi are im­portant foods in Hawai‘i. Growers are highly esteemed for carrying on a centuries-old food tradition in much the same manner as their ancestors worked the taro patches.

Taro growing has many challenges. Having sunk my feet ankle deep into the fine, silty mud of a taro patch in Waipi‘o Valley on the Big Island, and tugged at the water-buried corm to raise it from its growing bed, I know that it is backbreaking work. When the corm surfaces, it could display craters formed by pocket rot, a fungal blight similar to one that led to the Irish potato famine. Or the corm could be eaten away by apple snails, whose voracious appetites often overcome young shoots before they have a chance to grow.

When a taro corm is harvested, it must be steamed to cook away the calcium oxalate crystals that can make the human throat and mouth itch. Cooking also releases the starches that give poi its distinctive texture and flavor. Each corm must be peeled and clean­ed, then ground into a thick, starchy paste. Today, machines do the pounding and mashing that was once done by men with poi pounders.

Now, of course, we eat taro in a mul­titude of ways. It is incorporated into breads and rolls, used like potatoes in side dishes, sliced and fried into chips, mixed with seasonings for dips, flavored with fruit for snacks. Poi, thick and starchy, grayish in color and sweet when it is fresh, is especially good with kälua pork and lomilomi salmon, other staples of the Hawaiian table. It’s one of the few foods that can make newspaper headlines when it is in short supply.

Of the four main staples of the South Pacific diet—taro, breadfruit, sweet po­tato and banana—taro is in most de­mand in Hawai‘i, simply because there isn’t enough produced. Sweet potato and bananas are amply supplied by Island farmers and Mainland sources; breadfruit somehow never gained prom­i­nence past the 19th century. As for the other fruits, vegetables and proteins that were once so plentiful in the Islands, little is now produced here except for papaya, pineapple and bana­nas—certainly not in a quantity that could sustain today’s population. The abundance and variety of food that Isabella Bird experienced more than 125 years ago was indeed the fruit of a tropical paradise.

Hawai‘i-born and -raised, JOAN NAMKOONG is a foodie, a free-lance writer and an organizer of farmers’ markets and food events. She is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Honolulu, Go Home, Cook Rice, and Family Traditions in Hawai‘i.

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