Purple Rice
I’ll never understand Pacific Islanders’ relationship to rice. Many will themselves admit that their addiction to rice makes no sense. Rice requires large areas of lands to cultivate. There’s no reason it should be the staple of a region called Micronesia.
Though I’ve never heard anyone say it, a meal is not complete without rice. The first time I met my host family they prepared a feast with fish and different kinds of taro and banana. My host dad apologized because there was no rice.
At my old house, the family could go through a 50-pound bag of rice in less than a week. In a house of seven where rice is the major part of every meal, it’s still a staggering number. Go to your kitchen, cook a couple cups of rice, and pile it an inch deep on a dinner plate. Try to finish it. Do it again for breakfast tomorrow, and take it in a tupperware container to work for lunch. If you want meat, open a can of tuna.
It’s not uncommon to have only rice for a meal. If we run out of fish, sometimes there’s only rice to eat. I’ve spent many a morning trying to down a plate of rice just so my stomach won’t grumble while I’m teaching. Not altogether crazy, considering burnt bread is considered a proper breakfast in our country.
All this can be explained logically. Rice is cheap and quick. It fills up your stomach. It lasts and is easy to transport. Perfect for island life.
The problem is that people love rice. They crave it. This week I bought stuffing and mashed potatoes (both instant) for my family. They still ate rice on the side. On my birthday we had three kinds of taro and two kinds of breadfruit (all special dishes that require a lot of preparation), and some of my friends skipped them all to pile their plates with rice.
They can be pretty creative with rice. Sometimes they’ll add food coloring and we’ll have purple or orange rice. If we’ve been eating plain rice for a few days, they’ll put a bit of coconut milk and salt on it. If there’s a bit of flour they’ll mix them together and fry it. For a special treat they cook ramen with canned meat and pour it over rice. But mostly it’s large portions of plain white rice.
From time to time boats will be late and we’ll run out of rice on Kuttu (I no longer have this problem because I live in a store). To the volunteers, this is a cause for celebration. It means taro and breadfruit for every meal. But the locals go hungry. The kids complain. People slouch and slow down and talk about how much they miss rice.
It’s even become a part of the language. It’s polite to invite someone to eat if they come to your house. People will often take it a step further and invite you to eat rice-”sa mongo rais”-even if they have none.
It’s commonly thought that the Japanese started it all. Surely they brought it with them when they invaded these islands before the war. Taro patches were torn up to plant rice. But most of this probably went to the soldiers, not the locals. They were stuck eating coconut to fill their stomachs.
It was actually the United States that caused it all. During the Trust Territory days, large amounts of aid came to the islands. Some brilliant American realized that rice is cheap and easy to transport, and the Micronesian diet changed for ever.
I’ll never understand that there is no American counterpart to rice. We can go days without bread (though we don’t always). Vegetables can changed because of the season. We want meat for lunch and dinner, but so do people here. There is no single staple food in the States.
Now it’s started to grow on me. I don’t look forward to it, but even when I have taro cooked in coconut milk or pounded breadfruit, I’ll find myself putting rice on my plate, and sometimes eating it first. I still can’t eat rice like my friends on Kuttu, but I’m catching up. That plate of rice I told you about earlier? I often call that lunch.
