Eating ‘Local’: The Politics of Post-Statehood Hawaiian Cookbooks

In the last twenty years there has been an emergence of scholarship examining cookbooks as cultural texts that engage in a complex set of functions including the building of community (Bower 1997), communication of cultural and gender norms (Neuhaus 2003), preservation of a record of foods practices (Miller 1998), and the preservation of women‘s biographical record (Theophano 2002). This scholarship allows us to understand that cookbooks do significantly more than coordinate the production of food—cookbooks are also important everyday texts that reflect and reproduce the socio-political milieu in which the text is created. It is an understanding of cookbooks as texts of understated importance that under-girds my interest in cookbooks produced in and about Hawaiian culture and food in the post-World War II era. In this essay I will be looking at two cookbooks—Hawaiian Cuisine (1963) published by the Hawai‘i State Society, and The Hawaii Cookbook and Backyard Luau (1964) by Elizabeth Ahn Toupin—that were written by ―local‖ 1 Hawaiians about Hawaiian food, and published during the height of the U.S. ―luau-craze‖ of the 1960s. These cookbooks take up and amend the discourse of Hawaiian food made visible in popular, serialized texts of the era including the Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens series. Perhaps what makes these books most interesting is that the key individuals involved in the production of the texts were, twenty years prior, grassroots activists involved in the democratic revolution of