Food in Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. vii, 225 pp. (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5853-7.
As a scholar of Samoa who explores foodways, and in a university on the mainland with a strong student community from Hawai‘i, I was interested in reviewing this book from its title to learn more about the complex context of food politics in Hawai‘i. I teach courses about food identity and labor, to which discussion often turns to the often recited fact that 90 percent of food in Hawai‘i is imported (17). This statistic is toothsome. Toothsome in that it invites thinking, providing an additional layer to Levi-Strauss’ famous turn of phrase, that food (and its statistics) is good to think. The volume successfully invites the reader to consider new perspectives—trans-disciplinary perspectives—that move the conversation of food security and rights to food democracy.
The organizing concept—food democracy—is a fresh way of bringing together scholars from diverse backgrounds to create something new. The term “food democracy” is meant to engage food issues with attention to power, shifting food politics conversations from increasing local food production to issues around “social justice, ecological sustainability, and economic viability” (1). This approach complicates discourses that are often morally laden, calling for an increase in local food production with the assumption that this will automatically create equitable food systems. The authors challenge the reader to value local production not because it can solve the problems of food insecurity, or in the case of Hawai‘i, state-wide dependence on imported foods, but because local production and engagement with local farmers can create forms of citizenship that are valuable for other reasons. Food democracy brings these other values to the fore, showing how critical conversations about food need to move beyond production to politics.
The pace of the volume situates the reader in a conceptual arc, beginning with a primer on food production in Hawai‘i, providing a critical analysis moving through theoretical frameworks to chapters that highlight the lived experiences of food democracy. The arc narrates the political economy of food in Hawai‘i, beginning with the Māhele—a series of policy changes that drastically changed land tenure from Native Hawaiians to white colonists. This transformation of the landscape made possible plantation business, shaping the economy around exports. As plantations dissipated due to increasing labor costs and foreign competition in the 1970s, scholars and activists hoped to fill this vacuum by developing local production to support the population. This volume is about the complications surrounding this transformation given the islands’ enduring political, racial, and gendered histories, particularly as they are articulated through commonly deployed dichotomies.
The first dichotomy that the volume aims to disrupt is the opposition between local/global food, that posits a moral rendering of local foods as good for community, farmers, and the environment and global food commodities as detrimental. However, this neat dichotomy evaporates when applied to farmers markets in Hawai‘i, which Monique Mironesco finds are contradictory spaces. Participants face dilemmas between choosing between improving farmer income while serving low-income communities and developing inroads to the tourist market. Though farmers are limited in their ability to transform food inequalities, Mironesco contends, they are a place to start to develop food democracy. Another common moralized dichotomy is between GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and commonly used agricultural varieties. Hawai‘i is an illustrative place for understanding the politics of GMOs as the University of Hawai‘i, in collaboration with Cornell University, has developed a genetically modified papaya to counter disease that threatened the industry in the 1980s. The story of papaya is enlivened by activist efforts in the early 2000s to challenge the large-scale planting of genetically modified papaya—farms on O‘ahu were vandalized, destroying hundreds of trees—as a method of GMO control. Once these transgenic papaya are planted, they enter the environment in ways that are unpredictable, which anti-GMO activists argue is a form of “contamination” (124). Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka takes this concern with contagion as a critical opening for questioning the seemingly impossible role of biotechnology in food democracy. He highlights the moral fashioning of GMOs as essentially good (from scientific and industrial voices where GMOS can “save” agricultural industries), or essentially bad (from activists, who see them as ecologically, socially, and economically dangerous). This moral positioning reveals an ideal of purity that animates these discourses, and which obscures the possible role of biotechnology in food democracy.
Another way this volume contributes to scholarship on food politics is by attending to the issues of gender, race, and class across its chapters. The first chapter to provide this kind of context, written by Lilikalā K. Kame‘eleihiwa, begins with the provocative point that food activists tend to situate their critique within the twentieth century. This limited focus obscures what might be learned from indigenous foodways, especially given the fact that at the time of contact Native Hawaiians supported a population of nearly a million with their Ahupua‘a (water surface management system). This is particularly significantly given that the current population of the state of Hawai‘i is not much larger than this. Another chapter to foreground power dynamics, written by Aya Hirata Kimura, focuses on the marginalization of women organic farmers. The gendered dichotomy that separates women as gardeners from farmers, or as emotional when compared to men, makes women’s political engagement with food politics difficult. While organic farming provides a space for validation and acceptance, when compared to commercial agriculture, this position on the margins reinforces stereotypes of “hobby” farming and presumed radicalism.
One detail that did stand out to me was the focus on the effects of isolation. This reification of isolation seems to work against the goals of the authors—of changing discourses and creating citizens—as Epeli Hau‘ofa so elegantly argued, smallness, and I would add, isolation, are states of mind (“Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 [1994]: 7).
Overall, the volume provides a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective on a set of interlocking issues around land sovereignty, corporate farming, inequalities, and food security. In fact, the most innovative part of this book is the inclusion of narratives and interviews from practitioners and farmers themselves. This first-person experiential reading moves this book from straightforward knowledge production to engaged scholarship.
Jessica Hardin
Pacific University, Forest Grove, USA