The Foodways of Hawai'i: Past and Present - Paperback

by Hi'ilei Julia Hobart (Editor)

Offering diverse perspectives on Hawaiʻi's food system, this book addresses themes of place and identity across time. From early Western contact to the present day, the way in which people in Hawaiʻi grow, import, and consume their food has shifted in response to the pressures of colonialism, migration, new technologies, and globalization. Because of Hawaiʻi's history of agricultural abundance, its geographic isolation in the Pacific Ocean, and its heavy reliance on imported foods today, it offers a rich case study for understanding how food systems develop in-place. In so doing, the contributors implicitly and explicitly complicate the narrative of the "local," which has until recently dominated much of the existing scholarship on Hawaiʻi's foodways. With topics spanning GMO activism, agricultural land use trends, customary access and fishing rights, poi production, and the dairy industry, this volume reveals how "local food" is emplaced through dynamic and complex articulations of history, politics, and economic change. This book was originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture, and Society.

Author Biography

Hi'ilei Julia Hobart is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Northwestern University, USA. Her work looks at the points of intersection between foodscapes and indigeneity. She is especially interested in the history of commodity ice and refrigeration in the Pacific, the development of new technology in the nineteenth century, the affective registers of comfort and home-making, and indigenous embodiment and environmental knowledge.