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June 24, 2005
Confession: there's a 20lb bag of rice and a 1 gallon container of soy sauce in my kitchen
Even more than the beaches, Hawaii ex-pats miss their food.
"Local food." Local food is not the same as "Hawaiian food." It is not something with pineapple on it. It is not organically-grown natural produce.
When uttered by someone who grew up in Hawaii, those words conjure up a world of plate lunches, crackseed, spam, and lavish potlucks. Sure, sushi is Japanese, manapua is Chinese, and laulau is Hawaiian, but they're still all "local food." It's a designation that covers a multitude of ethnic foods and their resulting combinations, a cultural hodgepodge impossible to distill into completely separate categories.
Let's consider, for example, the "plate lunch." My pet theory is that the "plate lunch" emerged when a Japanese wife realized that the diminutive, artfully arranged bento (boxed lunch) did not have enough food to satisfy her larger, Chinese-Hawaiian husband. Today's plate lunch is similar to a bento on cross-cultural steroids. Arriving in a partitioned styrofoam carryout box, it consists of three main components: the meat, the side, and rice. The meat is a heaping serving of anything from Chinese sweet sour pork to Korean barbecue ribs or Filipino chicken adobo. The side is macaroni salad, an inexplicable cultural anomaly that has nonetheless become an iconic part of the plate lunch. Finally, there's the rice: two exceedingly generous scoops of sticky white rice. The plate lunch has no discernible ethnicity. It's just "local."
Local food emerged from a blended community and continues to fuction as a kind of cultural glue. The test of acceptance for a mainland visitor is whether or not he will try the poke (raw, seasoned fish) that we offer him. For those of us who went to school on the mainland, homesickness was battled by eating bowls of rice and nori (dried seaweed) or digging into a stash of dried fruit or candy sprinkled with li hing mui (Chinese five spice, salt, and sugar). When I meet another displaced local, the conversation inevitably drifts to the foods that we miss. And you'll understand, then, if I find the mainland potlucks (read: casserole row) a little disheartening.
That said, Fridays will be my self-indulgent day to revisit my culinary roots and encourage Chattanoogans to find that neglected and often understocked "Asian" section in their grocery store. And I promise I won't include any recipes where spam *must* be used.
Confession , Grub , Hawaii | By elissa | 04:31 PM
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