CHRISTINE R. YANO (WITH WANDA ADAMS)
[Food is] a marvelously plastic kind of collective representation. … In its varied guises, contexts, and functions, [food] can signal rank and rivalry, solidarity and community, identity or exclusion, and intimacy or distance.
Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” 1981
February 2009, Kabuki Restaurant and Delicatessen, Waimalu Shopping Center, Aiea, Hawai‘i, 11:00 a.m. I am here with Wanda Adams, former food editor for the Honolulu Advertiser,1 and fourteen retired “cafeteria ladies” (school cafeteria managers) from the Ewa-Waipahu school district.2 Wanda and I have been invited to one of their regular lunchtime gatherings. Mrs. Oshiro, the woman in charge, greets us and ushers us through the dark, nearly empty restaurant to a section in the back, which is noisy with the chatter of familiarity. Wanda and I are the last to arrive. In local Japanese American fashion, if an event is to start at 11:00 a.m., most people are there by 10:45 a.m. We are quickly seated at the end of a long table of women, all looking to be in their sixties or seventies, primarily of Japanese (including Okinawan) ethnicity.3 They greet us warmly and present each of us with a lei. Mrs. Oshiro interrupts the buzz and asks us to introduce ourselves and explain our project on school lunch. Everyone listens attentively, some nodding, others looking a bit puzzled or vaguely disinterested. After Wanda and I speak, waitresses begin serving lunch—miso soup, rice, chicken teriyaki, tonkatsu (breaded, fried pork cutlet), namasu (vinegared sliced cucumber, carrot, daikon), potato salad, and tsukemono (pickles). The chatter resumes, mixed with the soft murmurs of eating. This is not a boisterous bunch, but a group comfortable in their own longstanding friendship and shared experiences on the cafeteria line. They pay attention to the food. After the restaurant meal, one of the women serves a dessert that she made—“Frog Eyes” (pasta, canned pineapple, Cool Whip, instant pistachio pudding, canned mandarin oranges).
I talk intermittently to the woman seated across me, who retired in the last few years, but am content mainly to watch and listen. Wanda, though, works the room. She is a bit of a celebrity: people know her through her newspaper column on food. She asks for recipes and the women gladly oblige, not necessarily on the spot, but with promises to send them to her. They are pleased by her attention, which acknowledges their expertise.
The cafeteria ladies, along with Wanda, exchange the common talk of those who have been professionals in the food business for their entire lives. These are not high-flying chefs, but earthbound cooks and managers who have run school cafeterias. They have fed a good number of Hawai‘i’s children, five days a week, approximately forty weeks a year, for decades. They have come to know the children well, just as the children know them, often by name. They—and the food they served—form part of the ties that make the school a homey place. Many of their cafeterias still bake their own bread, even after the advent of pizza, nachos, and chocolate milk. These women have become identified in part by the foods that they learned to cook in large quantities, often faced with the challenges of received ingredients, calling on resourcefulness, culinary know-how, and a certain deft creativity. They know how to think on their feet, in the kitchen, stirring a twenty-quart pot of local stew. Sharing recipes with one another in portions of one hundred, three hundred, five hundred servings, their careers have been built on the power of food not only to sustain and nurture bodies but also to comfort, teach, and draw close those creating and sharing the contents of the cafeteria tray. In a land like Hawai‘i, with a high cost of living and an immigrant population base, working mothers are the norm, and those eating lunch at school form the great majority of students. These women have thus played a large hand in molding the food experiences of generations in Hawai‘i. What they have cooked and served have become part of the taste of childhood.
As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai notes in the epigraph beginning this chapter, food is a powerful, semiotic device that draws people together and also keeps some apart, etching in lines of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter draws on the lessons of food to do just that. I focus on these women (“cafeteria ladies”), the food they served, and inevitably the children they fed as a historical node centered on what I call culinary assimilation, learning the ways and tastes of national citizenship through food. Serving school lunch in a place like Hawai‘i meant serving the taste of a particular version of America, especially for a postwar generation in the early days of statehood. This was not macaroni-and-cheese America, nor was it hot dog-or-hamburger-in-a-bun America; rather, this was an America of its own making in a local context of the many Asian cultures and indigenous Pacific base that formed Hawai‘i’s ethno-racial mix. This version of school lunch meant a hot meal that more often than not included rice: America with its own local Asian-based twist. Although this may not have been blanket assimilation on the order of language (e.g., “speak American” campaigns), its sensory and emotive force provided a kind of subjective assimilation convincing eaters that they were partaking of a dominant force and, quite critically, that it tasted good. School lunch represented a midday lesson in deliciously shared citizenship. It mattered less that the food itself may not have been exactly what was served in Kansas. It mattered more that the food represented something different from (even better than) home that tapped into larger aspirations of belonging. Indeed, this was not yet an era of ethnic-cultural resilience but an era of eager, hungry Americanization in Hawai‘i and elsewhere.
In this chapter I analyze ways in which school lunch became the basis of locally wrought, culinary citizenship—representing its own version of America founded on principles of a Pacific-Asian–based multicultural history. I base my findings on formal and informal interviews with those who have been involved in school lunch in Hawai‘i, on newspaper columns, and on my personal experience while attending public schools in Honolulu in the 1960s.4 I consulted the online Child Nutrition Archives oral history project of the National Food Service Management Institute, including six interviews conducted by Dr. Josephine Martin in 2007 with food service managers from Hawai‘i.5
The chatter that lingers in my ears from the Kabuki Restaurant lunch sparks the idea of such cafeteria talk of times past in Hawai‘i as a site of multiply wrought, locally based, widely shared interaction centered on eating. School lunch—primarily that found in public schools in the late 1940s to 1970s—forms part of the common experience known as “local” culture. At least for a generation of those who grew up in Hawai‘i in a time when most cafeterias made their own dishes, that genre of cuisine known as “school lunch” carries fond memories of a hot meal in the middle of the day, nostalgically represented by these Japanese American cafeteria ladies. Ask those who grew up during that period and they can easily recall the smell of the food emanating from the cafeteria and the eagerness with which they approached school lunch. For some (especially from lower-income areas in the state), it was the only hot meal of the day. The smell, taste, and memory of those lunches are wrapped up in the images of the Japanese American cafeteria ladies. Although many of the women gathered at Kabuki Restaurant may be too young to have been the actual cooks in the late 1940s to early 1970s, they still carry the cultural weight and pride of their predecessors.
I focus my study on public elementary schools because they are the site of the consumers’ greatest shared experience—that is, more students ate the school lunch served in cafeterias in elementary school than in higher grades, during which there may have been more options (e.g., eating lunch off-campus), more rebellious attitudes toward institutions, and more menu variety. Elementary schools may also be the site of heightened parental and public concern, with expectations of control over nutrition, diet, and, possibly, culinary socialization. Food as a source of Americanization may hold particularly true in the years leading up to and immediately following statehood in 1959.
Cafeterias in Hawai‘i, as elsewhere, operated under particular mandates: (1) utilize federally distributed food surpluses from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; (2) adhere to the federal government’s nutritional requirements; and (3) produce food that children will eat. This chapter describes the ways in which these conditions were addressed by school cafeteria managers (primarily Japanese American), becoming part of the culinary assimilation for both those planning and making the food as well as for the generations of children consuming it. The food served in cafeterias differed from that of the many homes that make up multicultural Hawai‘i. I look at ways in which historical conditions and prestige systems—sociocultural, political, economic—give particular meanings to the food.
School cafeterias have long been the site of much talk, whether it is about the latest friendships or last night’s TV show or the quality of the food. School cafeterias have also been the subject of much talk, particularly in the last few decades in the United States when alarm bells of childhood obesity have pointed a finger directly at the food served in that most public of institutions, schools. In her book School Lunch Politics, social historian Susan Levine cites the stigma of feeding America’s children as part of the National School Lunch Program, a social welfare policy instituted in 1946 under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.6 The general picture that Levine paints is that of dreary cafeterias, institutionalized (soon-to-be-corporatized) food, and docile children.
The case of Hawai‘i, by contrast, is startlingly different from—yet related to—Levine’s description. Cafeterias in public schools in Hawai‘i in the late 1940s to 1970s were known not for the blandness, but for the savoriness, of their food: older adults wax nostalgic over school lunches; specific schools were known for their lunches; and cafeteria managers—typically Japanese American women like those gathered at Kabuki Restaurant—gained reputations for the recipes they developed, which sometimes marked the start of a family legacy of expert food preparation and future careers in the restaurant business. Wanda Adams’s weekly column in the Honolulu Advertiser regularly featured readers’ requests for recipes for dishes served in school cafeterias.7 Some of these differences may be the product of social and institutional conditions in Hawai‘i, including a high proportion of working mothers, a relatively low proportion of children bringing lunch from home, public schools with full kitchens, and heavily subsidized school lunch programs (a long-standing twenty-five cent price tag for a meal).
The rosy era of the nostalgized school lunch in Hawai‘i is long gone. Although the smell of homemade bread still wafts from some cafeteria kitchens, more likely children are served food similar to that found across the United States—and, more important, face many of the same issues of tight budgets (including closing some kitchens and consolidating meal service to regional distribution centers), well-founded nutritional concerns, and children’s fast-food tastes. Highly public campaigns in the 2000s, such as Berkeley restaurateur and locavore activist Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard Project, which brings school-grown produce into the cafeterias; followed by First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden to promote healthy eating, especially for children; have brought to stage center the concerns about school lunches.
In fact, talk that ties children’s meals to politics has occupied common ground through time and space. As sociologist Gary Fine was quick to point out: “The connection between identity and consumption gives food a central role in the creation of community.”8 And what better institution to control the creation of community through food than the education system through which all citizens must pass? Thus school cafeterias, the governments that oversee them, and the cafeteria ladies who make many day-to-day decisions play key roles in community making. This community founded on food finds its greatest strength where there is the highest level of participation, as was the case in Hawai‘i’s elementary public schools in the postwar/statehood era.
Researchers, politicians, and cafeteria ladies alike recognize the power inherent in controlling what children eat. The idea of culinary assimilation does not surprise but is tied to citizenship in terms of hunger, consumer choices, and prestige systems. School lunch provides lessons for both children and cooks. Anthropologist Anne Allison analyzes what she sees as Japanese statist ideology tying mothers to children in regard to the bento (boxed lunch) that they prepare.9 Through a properly made bento, mothers learn how to perform as good mothers before the eyes of the state-linked educational system; children also learn the expectations of maternal involvement in school affairs. Conversely, a hastily prepared, ill-planned bento suggests inattentive parenting, which creates shaky foundations for a strong citizenry in both body and mind. Mothers heed the ideological lessons: this is about not only nutrition but also mandatory attentiveness, commitment, and labor. Indeed, it is about citizenship.
Japanese, American, and other educational systems are right to focus on the school lunch as critical to individuals, families, communities, states, and nations. Growing bodies need the most nutritious food that institutions can offer. Impressionable minds need to learn about nutrition (and politics) by way of the school lunch in order to learn lifelong practices of healthy eating and being. Furthermore, children may lead families into consumption patterns through some of the lessons from their school lunches, whether they are what constitutes a complete meal to preferences for certain dishes to developing a taste for the cafeteria’s cooking. Indeed, anthropologist Eriberto P. Lozada Jr. finds that children may be the decision makers in determining the restaurants or the particular kind of food that a family eats.10 Although this may be true, especially in the present era of global food industries and heavy advertising aimed toward children, even school lunch—if admired, as was the case in postwar Hawai‘i—may be the subject of such favor. One woman in her seventies recalls her children attending a public elementary school in Honolulu and insisting that she make spaghetti at home just the way the cafeteria ladies made it.
Alice Waters writes about her Edible Schoolyard Project using the headline “Want to Teach Democracy? Improve School Lunches.”11 The same may be said with even greater fervor about the years following World War II. At a time when patriotism ran high for the general population, as well as tenuously for Japanese Americans—that is, when citizenship had to be earned, maintained, and displayed—wartime remnants of unease cannot be overlooked. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i during wartime may not have faced large-scale internment because of their numbers, but they understood well their position as potential enemy aliens. Just as they lived under campaigns to “Speak American,” so, too, school lunches may be said to promote notions of “Eat American” or at least to taste it in one’s cafeteria tray.12 Needless to say, Japanese Americans were not the only ones to catch the fever of broad-scale assimilation in postwar Hawai‘i.13 With the campaign for statehood heating up (including a race with Alaska to become the forty-ninth state), the parallel culinary side of that fever may be seen in the workings of the cafeteria tray. Schools worked hard as the site for teaching the populace how to speak standard English and other lessons of American citizenship and also how to eat American and taste the victory of the flag. School lunch in Hawai‘i could thus be seen as a civic achievement.
The civic achievement of school lunch may not have been a conscious administrative decision to serve American food (or its interpretation). Rather, cooking and serving American food in large quantities was part of the training of cafeteria workers and heads, as well as an expectation of the public. Moreover, even as I interpret school lunch during this time period as a form of “tasting America,” I recognize the polyglot, sometimes haphazard, nature of what was actually served. Thus, this is not strictly a top-down, governmentally designed plate but one shaped by available ingredients (including an assortment of U.S. Department of Agriculture surpluses), federal nutritional requirements, cafeteria ladies’ interpretation of local menus and tastes, and the children’s ephemeral palate. In his discussion of national culture and food in Belize, Richard Wilks provides a useful table entitled “Polarities of Food Culture.”14 He contrasts two interactive, interdependent polarities of Lived Practice and Public Performance as cooking versus cuisine, meals at home versus public banquet, working class versus elite class, and local versus cosmopolitan. The case of school lunch in postwar Hawai‘i may be positioned between these two, existing as everyday food (cooking, not cuisine), eaten publicly in institutionalized settings (school cafeteria), and serving primarily non-elite working-class foods but with aspirational connotations (assimilation to a local version of American national culture). Wilks makes the point that national cuisine typically emerges through a dynamic interaction between polarities like these. So, too, a Hawai‘i version of American national cuisine emerged through such an interaction.
An examination of school lunch menus from that period reveals the predominance of Western food and the relative scarcity of Asian-based dishes.15 Even though there may not have been Asian dishes, there typically was rice—that is, white, short grain, Japanese-style steamed rice16—served with a variety of foods. As was common during that period, there was less emphasis on fresh foods and more emphasis on industrial food, from canned fruit cocktail to pudding mixes. And there always was white whole milk, even if a significant portion of the population may not have been able to digest this properly because of lactose intolerance.17 Just as the cafeteria trays had convenient compartments for each of the dishes, so, too, the menus reflected such divisions so that each meal comprised a protein, a starch, a vegetable, a fruit, and milk.
What is relatively absent from the school lunch menus in Hawai‘i is what might be considered a staple of lunches elsewhere in the United States: sandwiches. I argue that at this time, lunch planners—whether dietitians, cafeteria ladies, or managers—held a particular notion of the food that constituted a meal and would satisfy eaters. The emphasis in Hawai‘i rests on rice (short grain, steamed, Japanese style) and its constitutive role in the idea and place of a “hot meal.” According to food historian Rachel Laudan, in the state of Hawai‘i, the amount of rice consumed every year averages sixty pounds per person (including children), in contrast to the average of nine pounds a year for persons in the continental United States. Clearly, rice makes the meal. The taxonomic contrasts between a sandwich (cold, dry, light, old) and a hot meal (warm, moist, filling, fresh) suggest the relative lack of appeal of the former and the great, even emotional, appeal of the latter. I base this not so much on surveys and hard data but on informal conversations over the years with parents and children in Hawai‘i. According to them, one of the best things about the school lunch was that it was a hot, filling, and thus satisfying meal.
People remember the cafeteria experience and food well. On August 4, 1996, the Honolulu Advertiser, then the largest newspaper in the state, ran a long feature based on responses of readers to the question of “You Know You’re Local If. …” At least half the entries concerned food, many of which can be traced in some form to school lunch, from the dishes they ate to the cafeteria ladies who served them. Most notably, readers expressed their preference for eating rice (short grain, Japanese style) with everything, including Western starches—rice with spaghetti, rice with macaroni or potato salads, rice with tuna casserole. Although this kind of rice-based meal can be found throughout Hawai‘i, the school lunch experience and the rice that goes with it became emblazoned as identifiers of being local. Accordingly, what was served at schools subtly helped develop the style and taste known today as “local food.”
Throughout her tenure as the Honolulu Advertiser’s food editor, Wanda Adams’s “Food for Thought” column was besieged with pleas for school lunch recipes. Some requests were easy to satisfy: Spanish rice (by far the recipe most often sought), shortbread cookies, beef niblets (a corn-and-beef brown stew), peanut butter crisscross cookies, sweet-sour spare ribs or sweet-sour pork (see the appendix to this chapter). Others—baked lemon chicken from Ka’ahumanu Elementary, date bars with crumbly topping from Kamiloiki School, malted-top brownies from Likelike School, crispy morning toast from Ka’iulani Elementary, peanut butter bread (coffee cake) from Kapalama Elementary—were never located. Researching the files of the School Food Services office in Kaimuki in the early 2000s, Adams quickly learned that these recipes were likely to remain lost unless they happened to be handed down within the cafeteria managers’ families.
Before schools began to share their central kitchens in the 1970s, there was only a sketchy central repository for recipes. Adams was told by Food Services personnel that cafeterias were operated independently, recipes were created by cafeteria workers from whatever ingredients were available, and many were never recorded or the records were destroyed or lost. Furthermore, many of the recipes would be impossible to replicate exactly even if they existed, as the cafeterias used surplus foods provided by the U.S. government and some of these were quite odd. The cheese, butter, and nut butters one might expect, but maybe not the dehydrated wheat flakes or rolled wheat, powdered milk and eggs, and canned stewed beef chunks. And even common foods might be altered in texture and flavor: chicken, fruit, potatoes, and sweet potatoes arrived flavored and canned. “Horrible stuff!” recalled one former cafeteria manager.
Those public and private school food service programs that received the ingredients were nonetheless required to use them, so cafeteria recipe designers had to be very creative. “People didn’t know what we put in there: bulgur wheat in crusts, almond butter in the spaghetti sauce, peanut butter in meat-loaf,” said Teri Jean Kam-Ogawa, a former cafeteria lady and now a child nutrition specialist with the School Food Services program. One well-known cafeteria lady, the late Chieko Okamoto, whose recipes are in the Food Services files, even made a cake with split peas. Kam-Ogawa said that one reason that popular crisps and cobblers were served so often was that the cafeterias were rarely given, and rarely could afford, fresh fruit. Cobblers, crisps, betties, and crunches were readily made in bulk and used up sweetened canned fruit, oatmeal, flour, and butter from the surplus stores, as well as leftover bread and rolls. Similarly, files of the American School Food Service Association’s School Lunch Journal show ingredients like sauerkraut hidden in chocolate cake, powdered milk as the basis of butterscotch blanc mange (a cornstarch pudding), cottage cheese in yeast rolls, and dehydrated sweet potato flakes in cookies.
Tasting this version of America thus relied heavily on the cafeteria ladies’ ingenuity and general cooking expertise, masking surplus ingredients, trying different recipes, and shouldering the responsibility of creating a hot meal every day for hundreds of children with as little monotony as possible. This was explicitly not home cooking. But it was comfort food that made school into a homey place through the lunch break in the middle of the day.
A significant part of remembering school lunch in the 1996 Honolulu Advertiser article and through talking with people rests on what I call the domesticating presence of the cafeteria ladies. One “local” writes: “You know you’re local if … you remember the names of the ‘cafeteria ladies’ at your school.”18
In Wanda Adams’s food column, requests for recipes were “local,” as demonstrated by reader Arlene Almaida Santiago, who reeled off the names of the cafeteria ladies at her school, Kalihiwaena Elementary: “Mrs. Sato, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Santos, Mrs. Shishido.” Clearly, cafeteria ladies made an impression on the children who stood in line for their food, an impression that was gendered and, to an extent, racialized.
Although the school lunch program, like much of the rest of prestatehood and early statehood culture, was dominated by haoles (whites), almost all its workers (cooks and, later, cafeteria managers) were of Asian ancestry (Japanese, Okinawan, Korean, Chinese, Filipino) and almost all were women (thus the term “cafeteria ladies”). Some people of Portuguese and Hawaiian ancestry also worked in school kitchens, whose racial mix became the image of the cafeterias. Notably, the racial mix of the kitchens was not reflected in the food, but it did offer an important civics lesson: even if one were of Japanese ancestry, one could (and should) cook and eat not necessarily the food of one’s ancestors but the food of citizenship—that is, American.
Kilihune Matsui, whose Chinese American mother studied to be a cafeteria manager, recalled that on some days, cafeteria managers were allowed to take home leftovers. Her family was thrilled to get something other than “the same old Chinese food.” “My mother learned how to ‘do haole’ and would make her own cream puff pastry shells and bake her own angel food cakes,” Matsui said. The family learned to eat dishes that Matsui’s girlfriends would not touch, such as creamed tuna or salmon loaf. Matsui’s mother, like others who attended the cafeteria manager–training programs of the time, was taught by haole home economists, many from the continental United States. Thus the cafeteria ladies brought their training in Western/American dishes to their places of work as well as their homes. In parallel with an earlier generation of Japanese (American) maids to haole families who learned American housekeeping and cooking and brought these home to their own families, these cafeteria ladies themselves became agents of assimilation.
Matsui’s mother’s story underscores the importance of home economics as an educational path that led the cafeteria ladies to their eventual careers. The course of study known as home economics was the product of an 1899 conference in Lake Placid, New York, where women activists developed a curriculum whose goal was twofold: to achieve respect for and create careers in what was then defamed as “women’s work”—cooking, cleaning, and household management—and to help disadvantaged families fight malnutrition and the ills associated with “uncleanliness.” The movement took on momentum, became a common course of study from grade school to college, and was a socially acceptable career choice for women, like that of teaching and nursing.
In the first half of the twentieth century, homey versions of the five “mother sauces” of classic French cooking dominated home economics cooking curricula: béchamel (“white sauce”), espagnole (“brown Spanish sauce”), hollandaise (“mayonnaise”), velouté (“light stock sauce”), and vinaigrette (“French dressing”). These sauces became the basis for much of the cooking by career home economists. Another influence of home economics that changed immigrant and first-generation palates was a focus on heavy proteins—beef, pork, chicken—in larger portions than is usual in Asia and on dairy foods, particularly milk. This was because rickets and other nutrition-related diseases were common in some areas, so the concern was getting enough nutritious food to eat. In Hawai‘i, these recipes and Western-style approaches were taught to budding cafeteria managers who may never have experienced anything like them in their Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino, or even Portuguese homes.
Some cafeteria ladies became famous within their small circles, and some of their recipes have appeared in community cookbooks over the years. One of these was Mrs. Eleanor Kim Tyau, a Korean American who was born in 1915 in Kona on the island of Hawai‘i, moved to O‘ahu as a child, and married a Chinese man at age nineteen. Tyau first came to Wanda Adams’s attention through a request from Shirley Okino, whose husband craved the salad dressing known to Saint Louis School boys of a certain generation simply as “Mrs. Tyau’s Sauce.” When the food page put out a call for the recipe, versions came in from all over. It was a straightforward salad dressing of the sort popular in the early twentieth century under the title “French Dressing,” tomato and oil based. But there was something about the way she made it that had the boys drizzling it on everything, from rice to cooked vegetables, bread to broiled meats. Here is her story, based on an interview conducted by Wanda Adams when Tyau was in her nineties.
Eleanor Kim Tyau first worked as a maid and cook (“not by choice; it was what I could do”). A Mrs. Edwards from the Department of Education was impressed with her work and urged her to go the University of Hawai‘i to get a degree in food services management. “She said you can train anybody to be a cafeteria manager, but you need a degree to be a food services manager,” Mrs. Tyau recalled. However, Mrs. Tyau became pregnant and so could not become a full-time student. Instead, when she was twenty-one, she attended a two-year cafeteria manager program taught at the central Honolulu high school (McKinley High School) taught by a Mrs. Foxall.
Upon graduation, Mrs. Tyau’s first assignment was at Kalihi-waena School, where she remained until World War II. As everyone was expected to turn their hand to war work, she was assigned to the cafeteria on the campus of Saint Louis School (a Catholic Marianist school for young men), which had been turned into a civilian defense canteen, a feeding station for war workers (students took their classes and meals at McKinley High School during this period).
This would be the beginning of a fruitful thirty-seven-year career at Saint Louis School; when the war ended, the school asked her to stay on as a concessionaire. An independent businesswoman, she was contracted not only to provide meals for students but also three meals a day for the boarders and the priests and brothers who taught there, and lunch for nonboarding students. A sports lover, Mrs. Tyau also found time to cook for the various sports teams and to provide meals for class reunions. She remained touchingly grateful that coaches and athletes were kind to her developmentally disabled son; in return, she fed them well and helped raise funds for the teams.
At one point, she supervised a staff of twenty to accomplish this.
For the much-loved Saint Louis Carnival fund-raiser, she made gallons of kimchi (hot and sour fermented cabbage) and taigu (dried salt cod marinated in sesame oil, paprika, Korean red pepper powder, and honey and dressed with sesame seeds). “I used to buy the codfish in hundred-pound crates and soak it and pick out all the bones myself,” she recalled, shaking her head at the work she was capable of then. She made hundreds and hundreds of jars of each dish annually for the sale, carrying on from the late 1940s until her retirement in the 1970s. “But I just never seemed to make enough of it.”
Despite her fame for kimchi and taigu, Mrs. Tyau said she doesn’t recall cooking much that “I could truly say was Korean or Japanese; it was more Western stuff—stew, curry, meatloaf, baked chicken, spaghetti.” However, she did acknowledge that Asian ingredients played a role in many of these Western recipes and that both teriyaki chicken and teriyaki beef were standards.
Her specialties included sweet-sour spareribs, beef stew, lamb curry (she bought whole carcasses and cut all the meat), baked spaghetti (with bacon in the sauce and cheese on top) and an invention of her own called “Spanish beans,” which was cubed luncheon meat and fresh green beans, stewed in tomato purée with onions, garlic, and soy sauce, and thickened with a poi (mashed and fermented taro root)-based batter. (“I didn’t like flour or cornstarch”; see appendix.) Desserts ran to chocolate sundae pie (Spanish cream with bitter chocolate curls), peach and apricot pie, marble cakes (yellow cake with chunks of chocolate and chocolate frosting). “It was all very simple food, but the boys liked it,” she confessed.
The plasticity of school lunch as an icon in postwar Hawai‘i suggests both shared local identity based on the common experience of a public school education, as well as subdivisions of a place-based identity dependent on the particular school (and its lunch) of one’s childhood. Neighborhoods can be identified by their physical and socioeconomic location and also their shared school meals. These identities and memories interact synesthetically through the smells of the apple brown betty baking, the sounds of the cafeteria trays, the smell and taste of milk that came out of an individual-serving carton, the texture of the Spanish rice on one’s tongue, the smoothness of the concrete floor underfoot, the cool touch of the stainless steel counters, and the distinctive odor of sour milk that pervaded certain areas of the cafeteria.
School lunch is a common experience of locals of a certain age, as well as the way they ate it, which reflects local practice. One does not eat all of one thing at a time (nor, in general, is one supposed to skip anything, such as peas or cooked carrots). Instead, one samples the meat, starch, and vegetable together, each bite reconstituting the well-balanced cafeteria tray contents, saving dessert for last. One could interpret this style of eating as reflecting a local ethos of a “melting pot” or, more to the point, a “plate lunch.” Although this interpretation may sound overdetermined and trite, it follows what anthropologist Dafna Hirsch finds in her analysis of hummus in Israel: “[In] the Israeli manner of eating hummus (referred to in Hebrew as ‘wiping,’ distinct from Palestinian ‘dipping’), the entire bodily hexis involved in its consumption … manifest the main qualities that Israelis like to associate with ‘Israeliness’: informality … but also sociability.”19 In other words, the very manner of eating school lunch in Hawai‘i, as in eating hummus in Israel, may be interpreted as linked to identity.
Until child labor laws intervened in the 1970s, students in both public and some private schools were required to render one or two days’ service a year to the school lunch program, generally serving food or milk, punching or collecting lunch tickets, and performing other simple tasks. Even this becomes part of the remembered experience of school lunch—whether of one’s own labor (and legitimately missing class) or recognizing one’s friend on the other side of the counter serving. Lori H., who attended Lunalilo Elementary School on O‘ahu, recalled this practice without resentment—fondly, in fact. In a 2009 e-mail to the Honolulu Advertiser, she remembered that these students got free lunches and generally an extra dessert and thought that wearing black hair nets was hilarious. They enjoyed the chance to sneak their friends extra large servings of the “really good stuff” (such as, she said, mashed potatoes, considered “exotic” because then the dish was rarely served in island homes). Rochelle Uchibori said the long hours of “cafeteria duty” “gave me a better appreciation of and insight into the hard work it took to bring us those meals.”
“Nani,” who went to Manoa Valley Elementary in the 1950s, remarked during a phone call to food editor Wanda Adams, “They fed us so well. It was so much better than anything the schools are making now.” Another man, a McKinley High School graduate of Okinawan heritage, whose mother was a cook, jokes that he knew only three “Okinawan” dishes when he was a child: meatloaf, spaghetti, and mac and cheese. Years later, he asked his mother why she cooked that way, and she said that those dishes were the ones she learned to cook, first in service as a maid in a haole household and then in the school system working in the cafeteria. She emphatically added, “Plus, I wanted my children to be Americans.”
The legacy of school lunch of postwar Hawai‘i may be seen most clearly in the evolution of the plate lunch: a sectioned plate of rice, meat dish, and macaroni salad. The plate lunch has become an icon of local culture, notably in a touring exhibit (1997/1998), “From Bento to Mixed Plate,” curated by the Japanese American National Museum. Further iterations of the iconicity of the plate lunch can be found in food scholar Rachel Laudan’s The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage,20 Wanda Adams’s The Island Plate,21 and journalist Arnold Hiura’s Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands.22 Hiura’s documentation of the genesis of the plate lunch in postwar Hawai‘i includes historic sharing of plantation bento (lunch) among workers, pushcart peddlers serving hot lunches to dock workers, lunch stands and wagons selling plate lunches, drive-ins, and restaurants. He does not mention the role that school lunches had in creating the expectation of a hot meal in the middle of the day, shared with one’s peers while seated at a long table. Some people still call it the highlight of their day.
In an article entitled “The Gourmetization of Hummus in Israel,” anthropologist Dafna Hirsch discusses the meanings given to and political claims made of hummus: “The meaning of hummus for Arab-Jewish relations is not given, but is a matter of the way in which it is used by social actors.”23 Here, too, debates may flare over the nutritional value of plate lunches past and present or the degree to which they were local (Pacific Asian based) versus American food or how they navigated the space between public and private. As in Hirsch’s discussion of hummus, so, too, our discussion of plate lunch in Hawai‘i is based most significantly on the way in which the school lunch—or the idea of it—is used by social actors, including the state, educators, cafeteria ladies, and the children past (now adults). School lunch for baby boomers and older in Hawai‘i represents their shared experience, the stuff of nostalgia for a time when people talked about assimilation as if it were a proud and necessary achievement.
For this older generation, school lunch was not laden with concerns about nutrition. Rather, the plastic tray and small carton of milk carried with them some of the best-remembered, everyday, not-home, comfort food of one’s childhood. This is the food that people would never expect their mothers to make. Rather, it was the food that they went to school to eat and, years later to talk about. Here lie the practices of talking with one’s mouth full. School lunch became its own genre of food: similar to but not replicating that found in many family-style restaurants in Hawai‘i.
But how did school lunch provide such a fulsome mouth in postwar Hawai‘i? I return to some of the features of Appadurai’s epigram with which I began this chapter: rank and rivalry, solidarity and community, identity or exclusion, and intimacy or distance. School lunch during the statehood era provided a means of inclusion, generating identities that changed through time—as members of a particular neighborhood school, as members of an island-based state, as fledgling Americans, as a generation of aging baby-boomers. These identities were not without rivalries, sometimes pitting school against school on the basis of their lunches, sometimes correlating with the socioeconomic class of the neighborhood. But the rivalries themselves became points of pride and affiliation.
The mouths filled with talk of school lunch in Hawai‘i are replete with emotion, intimacy, and overwhelming affection. They speak person to person; they speak, too, in the public forum of nostalgic newspaper articles and food columns. The objects of such affection are the Spanish rice or the shortbread and often the women who made them, the cafeteria ladies like those with which I began this chapter. Those mouths are still talking, as are the women themselves. When they talk about the good old days, the subject inevitably turns to food. Good old days may never have been quite as good as people remember them, but this is where the nostalgized school lunch and the opportunity to taste this version of America now called “local” find their way to center stage. As an everyday, every-person shared experience, the Hawai‘i school lunch of the postwar era embeds mundane, assimilationist rhetoric in the intimacies of the heart and stomach.
This is where culinary citizenship comes alive—or at least did for a generation that grew up with dreams of becoming American. Even before one could march with stars and stripes in hand, one could at least participate in acts of assimilation daily. The achievement of the postwar school lunch in Hawai‘i was that it created citizens through taste rather than through didacticism. Cafeteria ladies knew all too well that in order for children to eat their peas, they had to savor them and return every day wanting more. School lunch lessons taught clearly that politics may be best swallowed when mixed with a hearty dose of pleasure.
The following are some of the recipes documented from school or cafeteria worker files or recreated from “skooldayz” memories by food writer and editor Wanda Adams.
SPANISH RICE
2 cups uncooked long-grain white rice
3½ cups half water and tomato water (drained from canned tomatoes, see below)
½ green bell pepper, minced
½ medium-large onion, peeled and minced
½ cup stringed and chopped celery
2 pounds ground beef (less than 20% fat), lightly browned, fat drained
1 (28-oz.) can plus 1 (15-oz.) can peeled, chopped tomatoes, with juices (use some juices to cook rice, remainder in casserole)
1 (6-oz.) can tomato paste
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1½ tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons mild chili powder
In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, bring water/tomato water to a boil, pour in rice, bring to boil again, cover, and turn down to low, steaming until liquid is absorbed. In a very large bowl, stir together rice, bell pepper, onion, celery, browned ground beef, tomatoes with juices, tomato paste, salt, sugar, Worcestershire sauce, and chili powder. Spread in a 9” × 13” baking dish and bake at 325° for 40 minutes or until cooked through.
Makes 16 servings.
Source: files of the Hawai‘i State School Food Services program
SWEET-SOUR SPARE RIBS (OR PORK CHUNKS)
4 to 5 lbs. pork spare ribs (with “soft” bones) or chunks of pork butt
Seasoned flour (optional, see below)
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 to 3 inches peeled fresh ginger, grated or minced
½ cup soy sauce
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup white vinegar
1 (20-oz.) can pineapple chunks in juice
Cornstarch (optional, see below)
Sesame seeds for garnish (optional)
Approach 1: Cook on stovetop with thickened gravy: Lightly dredge the spare ribs or pork chunks in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. In a large Dutch oven, fry pork pieces in vegetable oil; drain fat. Add garlic, ginger, soy sauce, brown sugar, vinegar, and pineapple juice; cook over medium heat, simmering 30 to 40 minutes or longer until pork is tender; add pineapple chunks toward the end of the cooking time. Thicken juices with cornstarch, as desired (whisk in cornstarch, bring juices to a boil, turn down heat, and serve).
Approach 2: Cook in oven with thin gravy: Marinate pork with ginger and garlic in soy sauce, brown sugar, white vinegar, and pineapple juice for at least one hour, turning occasionally. Preheat oven to 325°. Place pork mixture in a large, heavy Dutch oven and bake in oven for 30 minutes; stir and turn meat; and cook another 30 minutes until pork is very tender. Add pineapple chunks toward the end of the cooking time.
In either case, serve hot with steamed rice; garnish with sesame seeds, if desired.
Makes 8 to 10 servings.
Optional: Add 1 star anise during cooking or ½ teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder. Early recipes also routinely used Aji-no-moto (MSG).
Source: files of the Hawai‘i State School Food Services program
and various community cookbooks
Drizzle of oil or spurt of vegetable spray
1 lb. ground beef or finely chopped luncheon meat or ham or raw bacon
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
2 (15-oz.) cans green beans (or equivalent defrosted frozen beans or steamed fresh beans, cut into 1½-inch lengths)
2 (8-oz.) cans tomato sauce
¾ to 1 cup thin poi
Cooked rice
In a large, deep sauté pan or wok, heat vegetable oil or vegetable oil spray over medium-high heat; add meat, lower heat to medium, and brown meat. Drain away excess fat (reserving a little for caramelizing the vegetables). Fry onion and garlic over medium to medium-low heat until onions are limp and translucent. Add soy sauce, sugar, green beans, tomato sauce, and meats, and cook until heated through. Thicken juices with poi.
Makes 4 to 6 servings.
Source: The late cafeteria manager Mrs. Eleanor Tyau, Saint Louis School
BEEF NIBLETS
2 tablespoons canola or other vegetable oil
2 pounds cooked pot roast, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 round onion, sliced
1 to 2 cans low-sodium chicken or beef broth
2 drained cans or 1 bag frozen corn
Cornstarch for thickening gravy
Salt and pepper to taste
Brown beef in oil; add garlic and onion. Pour in broth, and simmer until beef is tender. Add corn. Whisk together 1 to 2 tablespoons juices with 1 tablespoon cornstarch (more if the dish is very juicy). Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Makes 6 to 8 servings, with mashed potatoes or rice.
Source: Phyllis Dolim Savio, former student, Saint Anthony
School, Wailuku, Maui
KAIMUKI HIGH SCHOOL HAWAIIAN CURRY
6 tablespoons margarine or butter
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 teaspoons peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger
6 tablespoons flour
1½ teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 cups room-temperature milk
1 cup room-temperature coconut milk
3 cups cooked shrimp, chicken, veal, lamb, or fish
Condiments: sliced bananas, chutney, chopped preserved ginger, chopped nuts, sieved hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, grated and toasted fresh coconut
Melt margarine or butter and sauté onion and ginger. Add flour, curry powder, and salt; blend thoroughly. Gradually add milk, stirring constantly. Cook until thickened and smooth. Add shrimp, meat, or fish, and cook just until heated through. Serve with hot rice and condiments.
Source: Seventeen magazine prize-winning recipe from Kaimuki High School cooks. School lunches usually didn’t serve condiments, but very light, unspicy, white sauce– based curries were common.
BAKED SPAGHETTI
¾ package of dried spaghetti
1 lb. hamburger
½ medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can button mushrooms, with liquid
1 package spaghetti sauce mix
1 (6-oz.) can tomato paste
1 (15-oz.) can tomato sauce
1 tablespoon butter, softened
Spices to taste: basil, oregano, garlic powder, or salt
Shredded cheddar cheese
Preheat oven to 300°. Cook and drain spaghetti; toss with a little olive oil to prevent sticking. Some schools cut the cooked spaghetti into short lengths; others left it whole. Brown hamburger and drain fat. Add onions and garlic, and simmer until onion is limp and translucent. Add mushrooms with liquid. Make spaghetti sauce according to package directions, and add paste and sauce. In a large bowl, combine spaghetti, hamburger/onion/garlic mixture, and spaghetti sauce. Spoon into a buttered 9” × 13” baking dish. Top generously with cheddar cheese. Bake at 300° for 30 minutes (do not cover).
Makes 8 to 10 servings.
Source: Files of the Hawai‘i State School Food Services program and Bev Pace
Notes: Mrs. Eleanor Tyau memorably fried chopped, uncooked bacon with hamburger for this dish. Many cafeterias made their own pomodoro (tomato sauce) from scratch and used spices and garlic very lightly because of children’s timid tastes.
APPLE BROWN BETTY
4 cups coarsely chopped day-old bread (or dry chopped bread in 325° oven)
½ cup butter, melted; plus 1 tablespoon softened butter for dish
4 tart cooking apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
⅓ cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon grated or finely chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 tablespoons apple juice
Whipped cream or hard sauce*
Preheat oven to 375°. Lightly butter a 2-qt. casserole or baking dish. In a large bowl, drizzle melted butter over chopped bread. In another bowl, combine apples, brown sugar, lemon juice, ginger, and cinnamon.
Assemble brown betty: Spread one-third of buttered bread crumbs in casserole dish; top with one-half of apple mixture. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon apple juice. Repeat bread and apple layers. Top with remaining bread.
Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes; uncover and bake another 30 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream or hard sauce.
* Recipes for classic hard sauce, a thick mixture of soft butter and sugar, can be found online or in older cookbooks.
Source: Files of the Hawai‘i State School Food Services program
1. Wanda Adams is a former food columnist of the Honolulu Advertiser. Besides her experiences as a journalist, she brings the perspective of her own background as someone who grew up on Maui in the 1950s and 1960s in a Caucasian family, first attending Catholic school and then public intermediate and high schools. The Honolulu Advertiser was one of two dailies in Honolulu until it was sold in June 2010.
2. The Ewa-Waipahu district of Honolulu county (island of O‘ahu) encompasses a broad area characterized generally by lower socioeconomic strata than central Honolulu, with a racial-ethnic admixture that reflects the presence of the U.S. military (white, some black), former agricultural workers (Filipinos, Japanese), and younger families seeking cheaper housing (white, other Asian).
3. My attribution of ethnicity to these women is in part by their names (although these are married names), in part by the way they look (although it might be difficult to distinguish other women of Asian ancestry), and in part by the reputation of those who worked as cafeteria ladies (primarily those of Japanese ancestry—including Okinawan—but also some of Chinese or Korean ancestry). Of the fourteen present at the lunch, only one woman was not Asian. All the others’ names were Japanese: Doi, Fujita, Kakazu, Kiyabu (Okinawan), Kondo, Maeda, Nakasone (Okinawan), Oshiro (Okinawan), Saito, Sugai, Tanabe (2), Wakatsuki.
4. My intention in beginning this project was to write a full history of school lunch in Hawai‘i, beginning with the establishment of the public school system, and to that end, I turned first to archival data for documentation. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, that documentation does not exist, especially since records have been regularly expunged by the School Food Services office in Honolulu. Although the documented history—and my goal of a book—has thus been lost, I have attempted a partial retrieval through interviews with older cafeteria managers and patrons.
5. These interviews are available online at http://www.nfsmi.org. The women interviewed were (alphabetically): Janice Low (ethnicity unknown, but likely Chinese American), cafeteria manager and other food-service positions in school lunch programs on all six islands of Hawai‘i since 1977; Donna Matsufuru (Japanese American sansei), school food service supervisor for the state of Hawai‘i and various positions in food service from 1972 onward; Doris Yaeko Mau (Japanese American nisei married to a Chinese American), retired cafeteria manager (thirty-eight years since the 1960s) and past president of the O‘ahu School Food Service Association; Nancy Miura (Okinawan American nisei originally from Maui, Honolulu Vocational School degree in school food service management), retired cafeteria manager, past president of the O‘ahu School Food Service Association, and various school food service positions since 1954; Peggy Nakamoto (Japanese American, Honolulu Community College degree in cafeteria management), retired cafeteria manager and past president of O‘ahu School Food Service Association, and various school food service positions since 1968); and Sue Uyehara (white, originally from Louisiana, married to Okinawan American; M.A. in public health and nutrition from the University of Hawai‘i), state director of the Child Nutrition Program since 2006. I found this information in interviews and photographs.
6. Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
7. See the appendix for Adams’s sampling of recipes.
8. Gary Allen Fine, Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1.
9. Anne Allison, “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997), 296–314.
10. Eriberto P. Lozada Jr., “Globalized Childhood? Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, ed. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 163.
11. Alice Waters, “Want to Teach Democracy? Improve School Lunches,” Huffington Post, September 3, 2009, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alice-waters/want-to-teach-democracy-i_b_276420.html (accessed January 25, 2012).
12. Roland Kotani, The Japanese in Hawaii: A Century of Struggle (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Hochi, 1985), 98; Eileen Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
13. Nor was this the first time that public authorities had recognized the significance of molding citizens through food. An earlier campaign during the 1920s and 1930s emphasized the Americanization of Hawai‘i’s multiethnic population through food, with home economists and public schools leading the way. See Rachel Laudan, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 101.
14. Richard Wilks, “Food and Nationalism: The Origins of ‘Belizean Food,’” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 70, table 1.
15. The following are some school lunches from around 1960 culled by Wanda Adams from Hawaii State School Food Services menus:
MENU 1
Spanish rice with ground beef
Wax beans
Crisp relishes
Tangerines or orange slices
Drop biscuits with butter or margarine
Milk
Vanilla pudding
MENU 2
Lasagna
Tossed salad with chopped egg and dressing
Chilled fruit cup
Buttered French bread
Milk
Butterscotch brownie
MENU 3
Baked spaghetti with meat and cheese
Brussels sprouts
Carrot sticks
Sliced peaches
Poppy seed rolls with butter or margarine
Milk
Peanut butter–raisin cookies
Oven-baked crispy chicken
Cole slaw
Garlic French bread
Cherry streusel dessert
Milk
16. Japanese short grain rice is standard in Hawai‘i, eaten not only with Japanese food but also with everything from chicken to spaghetti. Long grain rice, by comparison, is eaten primarily with Chinese food.
17. The rate of lactose intolerance among those of Asian ancestry is notoriously high, sometimes estimated at 90 percent or more.
18. Sent in by Mildred Kobayashi of Wahiawa, whose aunt was a “cafeteria lady.” “You Know You’re Local If …,” Honolulu Advertiser, 1996, D:1, 3.
19. Dafna Hirsch, “‘Hummus Is Best When It Is Fresh and Made by Arabs’: The Gourmetization of Hummus in Israel and the Return of the Repressed Arab,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 4 (2011): 619.
20. Laudan, The Food of Paradise.
21. Wanda A. Adams, The Island Plate: 150 Years of Recipes and Food Lore from the Honolulu Advertiser (Waipahu, HI: Island Heritage Publishing, 2006).
22. Arnold Hiura, Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Water-mark Publishing, 2009).
23. Hirsch, “‘Hummus Is Best,’” 827.