Eating Hawai'i: local foods and place-making in Hawai'i Regional Cuisine

Abstract

In this paper, we look at what it means to 'eat Hawai'i' and examine how Hawai'i Regional Cuisine (HRC) imagines, produces, and consumes place through particular constructions of local foods. The term 'local' attaches to foods as a marker of numerous positive attributes such as seasonal, sustainable, and community-based. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research on Hawai'i Island, we examine spatial and discursive constructions of local and how this particular cuisine places itself in local food networks while simultaneously using place to localize itself within the Island's food networks. Using a case study approach to carefully contextualize localness, we show how Merriman's Restaurant and HRC complicate notions of alternative and local food systems in its discursive and material production and reproduction of Local food and locally grown food.

Deliberate identities: becoming local in America in a global age

“…The microbrewed beer, the locally grown tomato, and the small local bookshop have become the equivalent of the flag or the national anthem of this new localism, symbols of this new local identity. Like all such symbols, they are vague, and they contain a wealth of ideals, contradictions, and contestations (Costa and Besio 2011). The ''local'' has become, in the famous phrase of Benedict Anderson, an ''imagined community,'' a socially constructed identity (Anderson 2006).…”

Losing it in Hawai‘i: Weight Watchers and the paradoxical nature of weight gain and loss

“…3 Musubi 2 chicken with gravy all over. (Kamakawiwo'ole in Carroll 2006, 169) Kamakawiwo'ole's love of Local Food was well documented and widely commented upon as his size grew, and what this excerpt suggests is that Local Food, place, and identity are deeply intertwined (Costa and Besio 2011). For a 'Local boy' like Kamakawiwo'ole, food was an important part of social life, much as it is to people everywhere, and organizations like WW are always already contending with social factors that influence what people eat.…”

“…For many Hawai'i residents, Local Food is a defining cuisine of the State. The upscale version of it, Hawai'i Regional Cuisine, owes much of it inspiration to chefs like Choy, who brought his knowledge of this 'people's food' to the global movement for fresh market cuisine (Costa and Besio 2011;Heckathorn 2011).…”

Food tourism policy: Deconstructing boundaries of taste and class

“…To distinguish place through taste relies on embodied knowledge, or embodied cultural capital, that enables individuals to distinguish 'good local food' from 'bad global food'; a process that works to enact a certain social positioning. Tourism is a crucial dimension in promoting understandings of the taste of place (Costa & Besio, 2011); constructing a unique taste around a specific destination to localise and authenticate cuisine is a marketing strategy that has been utilised by restaurateurs since the nineteenth century (Spang, 2000). Paradoxically, the desires of middle class tourists to 'taste place', and the class differentiation that necessarily follows, are wrapped up in globalised gentrification processes, which bring into question facile dichotomies between local and global, good and bad.…”