DR. WESTON A. Price visited the South Seas during the mid-1930s, calling in at the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Nuku’alofa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa and Hawaii. In a separate trip, he visited New Zealand.
On every island he was able to confirm the impressions of early navigators, that the Polynesians and Melanesians were “exceedingly strong, vigorously built, beautiful in body and kindly disposed.” They had broad shoulders, wide facial structure, straight white teeth and graceful, splendid bodies. The Tongans, in particular, were very tall; their queen at the time was six feet three inches. Those living on native foods suffered only about 0.14 percent tooth decay. Price reported that they were magnificent singers: “A large native chorus at Nukualofa, in the Tongan Group, sang without accompaniment ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah with all the parts and with phenomenal volume and modulation.”1
Many early visitors commented on the cheerful, buoyant disposition of the islanders, their tendency to sing joyfully while working, and their frequent festivals; they were harmonious and hospitable, yet they could also be fierce warriors* and in some areas, as reported by Price and many others, engaged in ritual cannibalism. “They especially prized the livers” of their foes, as Price put it.
The South Sea Islanders lived from fishing and agriculture, using tools made from stone, bone, shell and wood. In general, the men engaged in planting, harvesting, fishing, cooking, house construction and canoe building; the women tended the fields and animals (generally pigs and chickens), gathered food and fuel, prepared food before cooking, and made clothes and household items.
The indigenous islanders tended to live in scattered dwellings rather than villages. However, early explorers found complex social structures on some of the islands, with a rigid class system of nobility and workers. Some areas (New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Mangareva) had slaves, and many of the cultures were dominated by land-owning aristocrats, headed by a king or queen.
Life in the balmy, breezy Pacific could be highly ritualistic, with specific ceremonies and taboos linked to the foods they ate. The kava* ceremony, for example, took place at important events, including the installation of new chiefs, with specific gestures and phrases used at specific times. At ceremonial kava rituals in Rotuma, Fiji, the kava was chewed by virgin girls (marked by caked limestone on their hair) before it was mixed with water to make the drink and then served to individuals according to rank.
The South Sea Islanders generally cooked most of their food in iconic underground pits or earth ovens called imu or umu, but consumed mangoes, custard apples and coconut meat raw; they chewed raw sugarcane for its juice. Breadfruit, tubers and roots joined the flesh of pigs, dogs, domestic poultry and wild birds in the ovens, often wrapped in leaves. Liquid foods were baked in the same ovens in coconut shell halves. The islanders consumed fish either marinated or cooked, and consumed some small fish and shellfish raw.
AS NOTED BY Dr. Price, seafood was the main source of protein throughout the Pacific—fish and shellfish of every type, including edible tortoise, crustaceans, sand langoustes, crabs, sea centipedes, sand beetles, sea urchins, sea slugs, octopus and eels. Many islands provided freshwater fish as well. Some seafood, such as octopus, sea crab and sea cucumber, were eaten raw; others were cooked in underground ovens.
Early visitors described ingenious fishing methods, including the use of nets, weirs in streams, poisoning, spearing, trapping and use of fishhooks. Some men could catch fish by hand. One colonist described eels kept in holes two or three feet deep and fed by hand as pets.
Early writers had great admiration for the South Sea fishing nets, some of which were 30 to 40 fathoms (180 to 240 feet) long and 12 fathoms (36 feet) deep, the bottom edges weighted with stones wrapped in coconut fibers and the top edges held afloat with short pieces of dry hibiscus wood.2
Dr. Price was the first colonist to describe the coconut crab,* which migrates in great numbers from the mountains to the sea. The islanders catch the crabs and feed them coconut. “In two weeks’ time the crabs are so fat that they burst their shells,” said Price, who called them “delicious eating.”
In his chapter on the South Seas, Price noted that one French colony was massacred by the islanders in retaliation for cutting off access to the sea. “They believe they require sea foods to maintain life and physical efficiency,” he noted. On the Fijian island of Viti Levu, Price witnessed piles of seashells in the hills.
My guide told me that it had always been essential, as it is today, for the people of the interior to obtain some food from the sea, and that even during the times of most bitter warfare between the inland or hill tribes and the coast tribes, those of the interior would bring down during the night choice plant foods from the mountain areas and place them in caches and return the following night and obtain the sea foods that had been placed in those depositories by the shore tribes. The individuals who carried these foods were never molested, not even during active warfare.3
According to Price, these islanders believed that they needed seafood at least every three months. In the highly stratified Tahitian society, the chiefs tended to eat fish every day, but the common people ate fish less frequently.
The livers, maw, roe and heads of fish, and the nutrient-dense yellow hepatopancreas of shellfish were all important foods. The Maoris prepared a dish of the kahawai fish, during the season when the fish were fattest, by stuffing the cavity with all the organs except the gallbladder.4 In Tahiti, shark livers were stuffed into shark stomachs and hung in the trees to ferment. Each liver yielded about a quart of oil, which the Tahitians consumed as a sacred food, necessary for virility and healthy reproduction.5 According to Price, the men of the islands consumed the male reproductive organs of the shark, while the women consumed the female reproductive organs.*
THE SOUTH PACIFIC hosts only two indigenous land mammals: the flying fox bat and insect-eating bat. But Polynesian colonists brought pigs, chickens and dogs to many of the islands. The predecessors of the Maoris brought the blue rat to New Zealand at least two thousand years ago. Until the arrival of Captain James Cook, who brought the pig, New Zealand had no other land mammal.†
On most South Sea Islands, pigs foraged in forest areas, where the islanders could easily hunt them; the natives—usually women—also raised them in enclosures. Pigs were a festival food, cooked in the typical earthen ovens. The part of the pig one received depended on one’s social standing.
When Captain Cook arrived in Matavia Bay, Tahiti, in 1774, he noted that every hut had a pig or two.‡ It was a time of affluence, in contrast to the less prosperous conditions he had encountered during his first voyage. “Our very good friends the Natives,” he wrote, “brought an abundance of pigs, fresh fruit and roots, including a present from the chiefs of a dozen hogs.”
In Tahiti, the men primarily raised pigs to enhance their social prestige, using them as gifts or as the main dish of feasts. Prayers on important occasions demanded the sacrifice of a pig, the priests making the animal squeal before it was killed by strangulation so as to gain the attention of the gods. In Hawaii, pigs (and dogs) met their end by strangulation or by having their nostrils held shut in order to conserve the animal’s blood.
In the journal Cook kept during his second visit to Tahiti, he provides a detailed account of how a pig was slaughtered and cooked. His Tahitian hosts strangled the pig to death, scalded the skin in the fire, and removed the hair by scrubbing the pig with sand. They then opened the belly, removed the fat, and laid it on a clean leaf. The entrails “were put into a basket and carried away so that I know not what became of them, but am certain they were not thrown away.”* They then carefully drained the blood and put it “into a large leafe,” presumably folded into the shape of a container.
The Hog was now washed clean both inside and out with fresh Water, Several Hot stones were put into his belly which was afterwards cram’d full with clean green leaves; by this time, or perhaps before, the Oven was sufficiently heated, what fire remain’d was taken away, together with some of the Hot stones, the rest were left in the bottom of the hole or Oven which was now covered with green leaves on which the hog was laid on his belly, the lard and fatt, after undergoing some washings with fresh Water was put in a vessel made just then of the bark of Plantain tree, two or three hot stones being put in along with the fat, it was tied up and put in the Oven by the hog as was the blood also prepared in the same manner, round the whole were laid to Bake Plantains, Bread fruit &c then the whole covered with green leaves on which were placed the remainder of the Hot stones and over them more leaves and then any sort of rubbage they could lay their hands upon and lastly finished the operation by well covering the whole with earth.
The interesting part of this description is the fact that the fat and blood were preserved and cooked along with the pig in such a way as to not lose any of either. When the hog was placed before them, so also was the fat and blood, which, according to Captain Cook, “they chiefly if not wholly dined off and said it was mona-mona ta, that is very good and we not only said but really thought the same by the Pork. The Hog weighed about fifty pound, some parts about the Ribs I thought rather over done, but the more thicker parts were excellent, and the Skin which by our way of dressing is generally either hard or tough had by this method a flavor superior to any thing I ever tasted. I have now only to add that during the whole process nothing could be done with more cleanliness.”6
In principle, women were forbidden to consume pig that the men had hunted and prepared, but they could partake of pig they had raised themselves (a rule that was apparently often broken). Dogs, turtles, albacore, shark, dolphin, whale and porpoise were also forbidden to women, at least in some areas such as Tahiti. Dogs were cooked in a manner similar to pigs, and reserved for men during special occasions; Europeans compared the taste to lamb.
Chicken and other fowl served as food for children and women. Native rats were eaten on some islands but not on others. So the South Seas diet contained abundant protein from land and sea; but carbohydrate foods were abundant as well.
LUSH GROWTH COVERS all of the South Sea islands, but surprisingly few native plants provide food. With the exception of mineral-rich seaweed, most of the food plants that have nourished the healthy islanders over the centuries were actually brought in by ancient colonists. These include sweet potatoes, yams, taro, breadfruit, banana and coconut—all cultivated in gardens throughout the South Seas. (Sugarcane, mangoes and custard apples grow wild on many islands, as do a variety of green vegetables.) In fact, the inclusion of seafood and pork notwithstanding, the South Pacific diet is relatively high in carbohydrates compared to other native diets, these carbs coming chiefly from roots, tubers and fruit—foods allowed on the paleo diet—rather than grains and legumes. In fact, in Fiji, Hawaii and Tahiti, the word “food” refers to starchy foods like taro, yam, sweet potato or breadfruit, while a “meal” is a starchy food plus an accompanying item such as meat, fish or coconut.7
The islanders recognized the role of these carbohydrate foods in promoting weight gain, as they used them for deliberate fattening, especially in women and young people. Women often removed themselves from society to put on weight and lighten their skin—rather like a prolonged visit to a spa. Their end goal was not to become tan and slim, as is common today, but rather to reenter society pale and pudgy. Fruits, bananas and breadfruits mashed and mixed with water until semiliquid were the preferred fattening foods, fed by servants to indolent women who remained in the shade and as inactive as possible. Thus, lack of sun and exercise, plus a high-carb diet, was the recipe for fattening. Likewise, teenagers of both sexes were systematically fattened using the same method, lying indolent in dark sheds and consuming the high-carbohydrate foods brought to them. According to D. L. Oliver, author of Ancient Tahitian Society, after the fattening period, the fattened ones made a parade to the priest for a blessing, after which admiring bystanders would “rush forward with a lot of clatter and yelling and rip off the parti-colored girdles, leaving the fattened ones with only their breechclouts on.”8
LIKE THE EARLY COLONISTS in the Americas and Australia, early visitors to the South Seas assumed that the islanders lived passively in an uncultivated Garden of Eden. As one early observer put it, “And what poetic fiction has painted of Eden, or Arcadia, is here realized, where the earth without tillage produces both food and cloathing, the trees loaded with the richest of fruit, the carpet of nature with the most odiferous flowers.”9 Writing as late as 1935, another observer assumed that the islanders did not engage in agriculture: “As every part of the Island produces food without the help of man, it may of this country be said that the curse of Eden has not reached it, no man having his bread to get by the sweat of his brow nor has he thorns in his path.”10
According to an important 1999 article in Ethnohistory by archeologist Dana Lepofsky, “The notion of the Tahitian Garden of Eden so colored people’s observations that acts of hard labor were diminished or overlooked. As a result, the details of the drudgery of Maohi [Tahitian] production are often missing from these early ethnohistoric accounts.”11
Indeed, on the islands with a stratified social structure and large population, such as Hawaii, Tahiti and Tonga, intensive agriculture carried out by laborers was the norm. According to Lepofsky, these cultures were “characterized by a complex, hierarchical society in which rigidly defined strata permeated political, economic and social spheres. Production was primarily at the household level, but chiefs owned and/or controlled the land. Surplus production, controlled by the status elite, was used for their aggrandizement at feasts, war ventures, and other public events. Large quantities of food and goods were paid to the chiefs in the form of first-fruit rites and as levies imposed on the commoners by the chiefs.”12
The Europeans admired the neatly tended, fenced gardens of the aristocracy, but assumed that the inland and hillside plantations of tree crops like coconuts and bananas were wild rather than cultivated. Intensive taro and yam production tended to occur inland from the coasts, in areas where the early European colonists neglected to visit. “No countrey can boast such delightfull walks as this,” wrote a visitor in 1769. “The whole plains where the people live are coverd with groves of Breadfruit and cocoa nut trees without underwood; these are intersected in all directions by the paths which go from one house to the other, so the whole countrey is a shade than which nothing can be more gratefull in a climate where the sun has so powerfull an influence.”13
Nursery gardens for kava and the highly valued paper mulberry (used in tapa, or bark cloth, production) were located within the aristocratic household compound and “consisted of permanent plots with raised beds that were regularly weeded and mulched, neatly planted, and fenced.”14 Tree crops of bananas, coconut and other fruit, especially breadfruit, grew in the elite gardens as well as in hillside orchards. Swidden culture, where plots were cleared, often by fire, cultivated for a year or two, and then left fallow, were the norm for staple crops like yam and sweet potato. As with the Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans, use of fire to clear the brush was widespread. Taro requires moist soil and was planted in irrigated fields or cultivated in swamps.
Later, after dramatic declines in population from infectious and venereal disease destroyed the class system and reduced the pressure to produce foods for the elite, the islanders became more casual about food production, forgetting the accompanying rituals that ensured a good harvest and abandoning many inland and hillside plantations.
THE COCONUT IS AN OILY FRUIT with many important uses. One of the earliest descriptions of the coconut comes from the Italian Antonio Pigafetta who, as a member of Magellan’s expedition, visited the Philippines in March 1521: “Cocoanuts are the fruit of the palmtree. Just as we have bread, wine, oil, and milk, so those people get everything from that tree.” Pigafetta described the production of palm wine from the sap and of cords “for binding their boats” from the coconut husk: “Under that husk there is a hard shell, much thicker than the shell of the walnut, which they burn and make therefrom a powder that is useful to them.” He described the flesh of the coconut as having “a taste resembling almond,” usually eaten raw or dried and made into “bread,” and the clear, sweet “water” from the center. “When that water stands for a while after having been collected, it congeals and becomes like an apple.” He marveled at the extraction of coconut oil “like butter,” and the production of vinegar from the water and milk from the coconut flesh. He continued, “This kind of palm tree is like the palm that bears dates, but not so knotty. And of these trees will sustain a family of ten persons. But they do not draw the aforesaid wine always from one tree, but take it for a week from one, and so with the other, for otherwise the trees would dry up. And in this way they last one hundred years.”15
Throughout the South Seas, the natives often mixed coconut with other foods, such as pounded taro root, to make a pudding. Islanders of Pukapuka consume a pudding called mawu, which takes over three days to prepare. Day one involves gathering, peeling and grating the taro. Day two focuses on gathering coconuts and making coconut cream. On the third day, the mixture of taro and coconut cream is wrapped in banana leaves and baked twice in an underground oven.16
A typical sauce combines soft immature coconut meat immersed in salt water with raw, even nearly rotten, crustaceans.17
Pacific Islanders also used coconut oil on the skin, even considering the practice a source of nourishment. Weston Price mentions with disapproval the fact that the missionaries obliged the natives to cover their bodies: “This regulation had greatly reduced the primitive practice of coating the surface of the body with coconut oil, which had the effect of absorbing the ultra-violet rays thus preventing injury from the tropical sun. This coating of oil enabled them to shed the rain, which was frequently torrential though of short duration. The irradiation of the coconut oil was considered by the natives to provide, in addition, an important source of nutrition. Their newly acquired wet garments became a serious menace to the comfort and health of the wearers.”
Coconut oil presents a dilemma to modern investigators because it is a highly saturated fat; yet South Sea Islanders consuming native diets are remarkably free of chronic disease, including heart disease. In one important study, published in 1981, researchers compared two populations of Polynesians living on atolls near the equator, those of Tokala and those of Pukapuka.* Oily coconut and coconut oil provided the chief source of calories for both groups. Tokalauans obtained a much higher percentage of energy from coconut than the Pukapukans, 63 percent compared with 34 percent, so their intake of saturated fat was higher. The serum cholesterol levels were higher in Tokalauans than in Pukapukans, but vascular disease was uncommon in both populations. The researchers concluded, “There is no evidence of the high saturated fat intake having a harmful effect in these populations.”18 Thanks to the recent revelations about coconut oil’s many benefits—from weight loss to protection against pathogens—it has found its way back into many diets deemed traditional, even the paleo diet.
YAMS VARY IN SIZE from that of a small potato to over 130 pounds! A staple food in the South Pacific for thousands of years, they keep a long time in storage, making them a very valuable source of nourishment during the wet season, when other food is scarce. For eating, yams are typically peeled, boiled and mashed, or dried and ground into a powder that can be cooked into a porridge.
An important 1974 paper on yam cultivation in Guadalcanal, British Solomon Islands, describes the cultivation of yams in the interior of the island, and their exchange for fish, coconuts and salt water from the coast, and also for pigs, possums and dog’s teeth. Numerous feasts and ceremonies call on local gods to assist with planting, cultivating and harvesting the yams. Ceremonies and rituals elicit the goodwill of the ancestors and the help of garden spirits to produce a good crop.19
Yams take nine months to mature, producing only one main crop per year. They require good soil and good drainage. A yam garden can produce one or two crops, and then requires a fallow period of at least five years. Lush vegetation soon covers the yam garden during the fallow period; tree type and other factors determine whether the soil is again ready for yams. “If the vegetation has reached a stage where visibility at eye level has increased—indicating good development of larger trees—the area may be cleared again.” Skilled gardeners know when the soil is ready. “Nowadays it is lamented that no one is able to select suitable yam soils by smell as it is claimed some men could do in the past.”
As in so many indigenous cultures, burning is used to clear land for yam gardens. The typical size is a half acre, but some communal yam gardens are as large as ten acres, and small kitchen gardens are around one thousand square feet.
Gardens are laid out with parallel logs or sticks and expected to be beautiful. Spells, rituals and taboos pertain to every aspect of clearing, planting and harvesting. For example, in some parts of Guadalcanal, it is forbidden to enter the garden after weeding or to touch any yam vine. Work takes place in company and with singing. Holes for the yams are dug with specialized digging sticks. The completion of clearing, planting and harvesting are all occasions for feasts. Harvested yams are stored in yam huts, to which more customs and taboos are attached. Magic spells help preserve the yams and ceremonies accompany the filling and shutting of the yam hut. “All elderly people attest to the efficacy of past yam customs and say that because they are no longer used, disease is rife today.”
Sweet potato cultivation is rapidly replacing the traditional yam gardens on Guadalcanal. Sweet potatoes are easier to grow, have less demanding soil requirements, produce more in units of ground and time, and require less work. And pigs have become a menace to the large community yam garden because they are not hunted as much anymore.
THE OTHER MAIN SOUTH PACIFIC staple was taro, especially in the Cook Islands, Fiji and Hawaii. The elephant-eared taro plant grows better than yams at higher elevations and cooler temperatures and also does well in wet, swampy soils.
Taro contains the toxin oxalic acid, so it requires special treatment. Taro roots must be peeled and cut, steeped in cold water overnight, then drained in order to render them safe to eat. The root is typically boiled, then eaten. Taro leaves are a delicacy, cooked with coconut milk and meat or fish. Communal meals prepared by women are virtually identical across Polynesia, consisting of fish and glutinous puddings of taro or manioc, all wrapped in forest leaves.
The Hawaiian Islands are home to poi, fermented taro. The Hawaiians cook the root as do other islanders, then dry and powder it, mix it with water and ferment it for several hours. Poi is slightly tart and has the consistency of heavy molasses or very heavy cream. Even today some Hawaiian families get together to make poi, a good excuse for feasting and playing cards.
THE PREDOMINANT TAHITIAN staple was breadfruit, baked whole in earth ovens, boiled and eaten in chunks, or mashed and mixed with other fruits or vegetables into puddings. According to one observer, breadfruit baked in earth ovens remained edible for several weeks.20
The Tahitians also preserved breadfruit by removing the rind and throwing the pulp into a heap. The mass fermented for several days in a pit lined with leaves and covered with earth and stone. The paste, called mahi, was eaten on its own or mixed with other ingredients. Often the fermented paste was combined with more breadfruit and other fruit, as described by an early European visitor: “Before him two servants were preparing his dessert, by beating up with water some bread-fruit and bananas, in a large wooden bowl, and mixing with it a quantity of the fermented sour paste of bread-fruit.”
The impressive breadfruit tree* grew in parklike settings, creating a high canopy and producing an extreme abundance of fruit. Wrote D. L. Oliver, “The high, shady canopy and park-like settlement clearings provided by these picturesque trees charmed even the most hard bitten of the European visitors.”21 A fully-grown breadfruit weighs from two to five pounds, but can grow to weigh up to ten. When cooked, the taste of moderately ripe breadfruit is described as potato-like, or similar to freshly baked bread.
When the breadfruit was in season, the Tahitians engaged in mass bakings. At these times the whole populace ate gluttonously, the people “seldom quit the house,” according to an early colonist, “and continue wrapped up in cloth: and it is surprising to see them in a month or so become so fair and fat, that they can scarcely breathe: the children afterwards grow amazingly.”22
Gorging at feasts and at certain times of the year was common throughout the South Seas; such times of heavy eating were often preceded by a period of fasting or curtailed consumption, or followed by seasons of low food supply. Today breadfruit still serves as a staple food in many tropical cultures.
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, salt was plentiful in South Sea diets. The Hawaiians gathered salt crystals from the rocks by the sea, and preserved many types of fish with salt.
One common practice was the addition of salt water to food, or even the straight consumption of salt water, as found in this 1769 description of a Tahitian meal by colonist Sir Joseph Banks:
He setts commonly under the shade of the next tree or on the shady side of the house; a large quantity of leaves either of Bread fruit or Banana are neatly spread before him which serves instead of a table cloth, a basket is then set by him which contains his provisions and two cocoa nut shells, one full of fresh water the other of salt. He begins by washing his hands and mouth thoroughly with the fresh water which he repeats almost continually throughout the whole meal. He then takes part of his provision from the basket. Suppose (as it often did) it consisted of 2 or 3 bread fruits 1 or 2 small fish about as big as a perch in England, 14 or 15 ripe bananas or half as many apples: he takes half a breadfruit, peels of the rind and takes out the core with his nails; he then crams his mouth as full with it as it can possibly hold, and while he chews that unlapps the fish from the leaves in which they remain tied up since they were dressed and breaks one of… them into the salt water; the rest as well as the remains of the bread fruit lay before him upon the leaves. He generally gives a fish or part of one to some one of his dependents, many of whom set round him, and then takes up a very small piece of that that he has broke into the salt water in the ends of all the fingers of one hand and sucks it into his mouth to get with it as much salt water as possible, every now and then taking a small sup of it either out of the palm of his hand or the cocoa nut shell.23
Early visitors were amazed to see salt water fed to babies!
LIKE MANY EUROPEANS, Dr. Weston A. Price described the decimation of the healthy South Sea Islanders by infectious disease. He noted, for example, that the native population of the Marquesas, ravaged by smallpox, tuberculosis, and venereal disease, was reduced from over one hundred thousand to two thousand; during the 1930s, the population of Tahiti declined from about two hundred thousand to ten thousand.
Price noted that those islanders living on native foods suffered only 0.14 percent tooth decay, while those consuming the “foods of commerce” had at least 26 percent decayed teeth. Even remote islands produced a product that had value in the civilized world: dried coconut, or copra. In the early days, the islanders traded copra for sugar and white flour, with disastrous effects on their teeth. Long before dentists arrived to cope with the epidemic of caries, the islanders suffered from the dreadful pain of tooth decay. Abscessed teeth often led to suicide. “If one will picture a community of several thousand people with an average of 30 percent of all the teeth attacked by dental caries,” wrote Price, “and not a single dentist or dental instrument available for assistance of the entire group, a slight realization is had of the mass suffering that has to be endured. Commerce and trade for profit blaze the way in breaking down isolation’s barriers, far in advance of the development of health agencies and emergency relief unwittingly made necessary by the trade contact.”24
The next generation suffered from changes in facial structure—narrower faces resulting in crowded teeth and other detrimental structural changes. Price visited a tuberculosis ward in Hawaii and noted that every patient there had dental deformities—the crowded teeth did not cause TB, of course, but Price surmised that the poor lung development that accompanied poor facial development made these young people susceptible to the often fatal disease.
Today, throughout the South Pacific, white bread, rice, cassava and crackers have largely replaced sweet potato, taro, yams and breadfruit. Canned meat, beer, sugar, soft drinks and snack foods are consumed in place of fish, shellfish, free-ranging poultry, and the fat and blood of pigs. The high-carbohydrate traditional diet of the islanders can only work when augmented with nutrient-dense animal foods, particularly foods that supply the fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2. If the islanders are using chemical-based sunscreen rather than coconut oil, another source of nourishment is lost.
Today, modern islanders suffer from many chronic illnesses, especially obesity and diabetes. Health officials blame the decline on Spam (“Spam at the Heart of South Pacific Obesity Crisis,” said one headline25) and turkey tails imported from the United States, and mutton flaps imported from New Zealand, popular foods that most resemble native meat products and that seem to be the least likely to cause health problems. Fiji banned the importation of mutton flaps in 2000 and Samoa banned imports of turkey tails in 2007, but health officials have yet to call for a ban on soft drinks and sugary snack foods.
The decline in health accelerated during the 1960s, as described in a touching letter written to the Weston A. Price Foundation:
As a child I had an experience similar to that of Weston Price. My family spent six weeks each summer traveling to different parts of the world. Our favorite was the Pacific Islands, so I was there four times, from 1958 to 1968. In that space of time, we noticed dramatic changes in the children on the islands. My father was a gynecologist (infertility specialist) and my mother was an anthropologist/sociologist, so we noticed these things! On the last visit, when our cruise ship arrived, the crew told us we had to wait to disembark because the Sara Lee coffee cakes got off first. They told us they would be sold out of the stores within twenty-four hours.
On our first visit, the children were round-faced, with wide beautiful smiles and gleaming even teeth. They always smiled, laughed and ran around playing. By the last visit, they looked like poor Americans with pinched faces, darkened uneven teeth and sullen expressions. There was more picking on one another than playing. The South Pacific was no longer paradise. During that time, the French completely transformed Papeete, Tahiti, for their nuclear program and American Samoa was likewise changed. Even in Hawaii the same thing was evident.26