Here are two more sets of notes about Hawaiian plants and foods. I found these in files containing research notes belonging to the late University of Hawaii Professor Carey D. Miller.
First, there are two pages of typewritten notes based on conversation with Mr. & Mrs. C.C. Conradt. They described the feeding of babies (sometimes nursed for three years), including baked sweet potato and poi.
• restrictions on what women could eat “were very strictly kept. And baby girls were not allowed food tabu to women.”
• Why didn’t they eat more chicken? Not many raised. no place for them.
• Common people and chiefs ate the same food. “Quantity varied, not quality so much.”
Then there are another two pages dated 1957, “Notes taken in conversation with Mary K. Pukui and Mr. Wm. Meinecke.”
This consists mainly of a list of foods eaten regularly or occasionally.
Ka’u people were sweet potato eaters. Taro was down only on the edge of the forest and breadfruit only mauka. The land in general was too arid for anything but sweet potatoes.
Hilo people were taro eaters, “Hilo ai luau” is the phrase. They had an abundance of water and didn’t eat many sweet potatoes.
People of Mokapu area were the fishing group [land pieces were part of the large ahupua’a on the windward side (Kailua, Kaneohe, and Heeia)] and other pieces of the land area provided abundance of taro.
The sweet potato eaters of Oahu were the people inhabiting the area from Makapu’u to Kokohead.
Act of cutting hair and knocking out teeth, tattooing tongue–all done in grief to show aloha for the ali’i–was called manewanewa.
All quite interesting.
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I always enjoy and appreciate reading this type of info.
Mr . Meinecke was a wonderful man to know. He retired after decades at UH-Manoa where he was a member of first graduating class and held some corporate title for years.
In retirement, he lived alone in Waiohinu on his family home that featured a 100-year-old orange tree he was fond of climbing to pick fruit to give to friends.
Meincke was the first Caucasian born in Ka’u, he said, and he learned Hawaiian and English as a boy and was fluent in each. He served in his 70s as a court interpreter to validate the Hawaiian used in early-day land transactions. I spotted this old haole man in court jabbering away in Hawaiian and was intrigued, of course.
Later during a day-long interview he hold me of travel via Hilo port to undertake college studies at UH and how each summer it took him three days to reach Ka’u from Kuhio wharf, traveling in segments by train (which then ran to Volcano village, then by foot and occasionally getting a horse carriage ride. He was a pioneering old-timer who did not allow distance or time to keep him from his aims.
I would quickly accept what he wrote or said about Hawaiian food and other trends of his time.