European and American influences on food habits and gastronomies reached the Pacific much later, i.e., only in the last 200 years. Traders, whalers, administrators and missionaries arrived with strong ideas about food and gastronomic practices. The earliest of these visitors such as Captain Cook exposed Pacific peoples to new foods and new gastronomies when they hosted chiefs on board their ships. They left plants and animals that they hoped would become established to supply victuals for future ships. Missionaries had a more pervasive influence as they lived alongside communities which they expected would adopt the new western gastronomic ways, as part of the civilising process (Pollock 1989). But Pacific communities were not so eager to replace their long-established eating and cooking habits with things that cost hard-earned money.
Only since World War II have many western gastronomic approaches proliferated. Western foodstuffs and ideologies spread as a result of aggressive marketing activity, rather than migrants’ influences. An alternative use of ‘transnationalism’ to refer to the operations of large-scale multinational corporations is epitomised by reference to global food giants such as Nestle, Coca-Cola and McDonalds (see Miller 1997 with specific reference to Trinidad). Such companies vigorously sought to establish their products across the Pacific. Hot bread shops and fried chicken outlets represent these marketing principles, as do tuna processing and local beer and soft drink manufactures. These multinationals provided business models for creating new jobs as well as gastronomic opportunities.
Commercial food outlets have proliferated, from small family-owned food stores to supermarkets, as Hau’ofa (1979) demonstrates for Tonga. Supermarkets located near the market place and bus depots became a social hub linking rural communities with their urban relatives (Pollock 1995). New gastronomic trends were passed on, including new recipes, new technology and new values of time and tastes associated with food. The desirability of the latest imports, recommended by visiting family members from New Zealand or Australia, has continued the process of widening gastronomic horizons.
Family responsibilities had to be rearranged as new gastronomic principles became accepted. Serving three meals a day, as missionaries recommended, interrupted work patterns, and cooking on a kerosene or electric stove became women’s work. With men and young people away all day, others had to help with picking crops, cooking, feeding young children and washing clothes. Food parcels that travel both ways between Rarotonga and Auckland continue to express the love and affection that sustain family ties (Alexeyeff 2004). In urban centres, office workers buy their midday food at takeaway stores catering for these new needs.
Income has become a major determinant of what a household can put on the table. Cheap imports such as rice and canned fish were the limit for many households in the 1960s. Corned beef has become an icon of this new transnational trade in foodstuffs, as Michel Tuffery (2007) illustrates with his life-size cow sculptures made entirely from corned beef cans. He specifically links his art forms to his views as a New Zealand-born Samoan of the history of food exchanges that express Samoan identity across transnational boundaries (for an image see the Te Papa museum website).
New western ideas of gastronomy have introduced conflicting messages about the link between food and wellbeing. Missionaries advised housewives to feed their men meat, but this was not readily available in the islands until refrigerated transport was developed in the 1880s, and then the taste had to be acquired. Meat has always been more expensive than fish. A Pacific meal of taro eaten with fish remained the epitome of Pacific gastronomy because the components were readily available, filling, did not cost money and fulfilled long-established gastronomic ideals.
A repertoire of ‘good foods’, whether local or imported, has raised many questions, both for government officials and women’s groups (see e.g., Schoeffel 1985). These new foods, promoted by the media, medical advisors and nutritionists were based entirely on western ideology and bio-medical reasoning. At first, they derogated Pacific gastronomic habits but these gained positive value for their high fibre, low salt and low sugar content, in contrast with western gastronomic habits that contributed to increased rates of cardiovascular problems and diabetes (Coyne, Badcock and Taylor 1984). Brenda Sio produced a Samoan food pyramid for World Food Day in Samoa 1996 which included Pacific foods alongside western foods differentiating the good labelled Ioe (yes) versus Leai (no) (Sio 1996); this proved a more effective nutrition education message than previous, monocultural ones. Obesity has emerged in the new millennium as a major health concern linked to poor food choices both in the islands and in overseas communities, as was demonstrated by a front cover story of Islands Business in March 2007.
Western gastronomic influences introduced a drastically new set of ideals and practices that became major commercial intrusions. But we must distinguish their introduction from their adoption. The new gastronomic principles could not override the identity that had become established between Pacific communities and their foodways inherited from their ancestors and established by migrants over several thousand years.