The Island and the Plate: Eating at the Edge of the World

It's basically a complete pantry growing on a tree.

And for centuries, the coconut was the anchor of Pacific food security.

You could build a boat with the husk, thatch a roof with the leaves, cook with the oil, drink when freshwater was scarce.

There's a reason it traveled with those navigators across the entire Pacific.

El problema es que ahora la gente quiere arroz, pan, azúcar.

The problem is that now people want rice, bread, sugar.

Estas cosas vienen en el barco.

These things come on the ship.

And that shift didn't happen by accident.

Colonial history is baked into the pantry of every Pacific island.

When European traders and missionaries arrived, they brought flour and sugar and tinned meat.

And they came with cultural authority, or what presented itself as authority, and over time those imported foods became associated with modernity, with status, with progress.

Traditional foods got coded as old, as poor, as backward.

That's a pattern you see from Samoa to the Marshall Islands to, yes, Niue.

Esto pasa también en América Latina.

This happens in Latin America too.

Las personas dejan la comida local y comen comida de supermercado.

People leave local food and eat supermarket food.

And the health consequences follow.

Because the traditional diets were actually calibrated over thousands of years to the local environment and the local body.

The shift to imported processed food brought diabetes, obesity, hypertension, all at elevated rates.

In some Pacific island nations, diabetes rates are among the highest in the world.

Not because of genetics, but because the food system changed faster than the body could adapt.

Hay un dicho en español: 'somos lo que comemos.' Creo que es verdad.

There is a saying in Spanish: 'we are what we eat.' I think it is true.

We are what we eat.

That phrase actually has a complicated history.

The German philosopher Feuerbach wrote something like it in 1863, though the French had a version earlier.

But you're right, it lands.

And on Niue right now, what they're eating is increasingly determined by what the fuel price allows.

Which is a new kind of sentence to have to write about food.

Mira, el precio del petróleo sube y la comida en las islas cuesta más.

Look, the oil price goes up and food on the islands costs more.

Es un problema grande.

It is a big problem.

And the Iran war has made that worse.

We've talked about oil and airlines, oil and shipping.

But there's an angle that gets less attention: the cost of feeding remote populations when fuel prices spike.

Niue isn't the only place.

Think about islands in the Maldives, in Micronesia, in the Caribbean.

Any place that depends on ship or air freight for a substantial portion of its calories is directly exposed to oil prices in a way that most of us on continental landmasses aren't.

En España, nosotros tenemos las islas Canarias.

In Spain, we have the Canary Islands.

También dependen de barcos.

They also depend on ships.

La comida es más cara allí.

Food is more expensive there.

Good comparison.

And the Canaries are part of a wealthy country with infrastructure to absorb price shocks.

Niue has a special relationship with New Zealand, which provides a lot of its funding and its people have New Zealand citizenship.

So there's a safety net.

But you strip away that geopolitical relationship, and the food vulnerability is stark.

Los niuanos también pescan mucho.

Niuans also fish a lot.

El océano está cerca.

The ocean is close.

El pescado fresco es barato.

Fresh fish is cheap.

And that's one of the fascinating things about island food security.

The sea is both the barrier and the larder.

I covered a story in the late nineties out of Kiribati about how the fish were still there, still abundant, while everything else was getting harder to access.

The ocean was the most democratic food source they had.

The challenge was that fishing culture, like taro cultivation, requires knowledge, time, the right boats, fuel for those boats.

It's not as simple as it sounds.

Sí, el combustible otra vez.

Yes, fuel again.

Todo necesita combustible.

Everything needs fuel.

Es el problema central.

It is the central problem.

It keeps coming back to that.

And this election in Niue, which most of the world will not notice at all, is actually a referendum on that exact question.

How do you feed a two-thousand-person community on an island in the middle of the Pacific when the price of everything that connects you to the outside world just went up by a third?

What's the platform?

What do you even promise voters in that situation?

Creo que la solución es volver a la comida local.

I think the solution is to return to local food.

El taro, el coco, el pescado.

Taro, coconut, fish.

No necesitas un barco.

You don't need a ship.

In theory, yes.

In practice it's harder.

Because you're asking people to change what they eat, how they cook, how they spend their time.

Food is identity.

You said it yourself, we are what we eat.

Telling a generation raised on rice and canned tuna to go back to fermented breadfruit is a cultural ask, not just a logistical one.

That's been the tension in indigenous food sovereignty movements all over the world.

Pero en España, la gente vuelve a la cocina tradicional.

But in Spain, people are returning to traditional cooking.

Es una tendencia ahora.

It is a trend now.

Los jóvenes cocinan el cocido, la fabada.

Young people cook cocido, fabada.

Is that nostalgia or necessity, though?

In Spain, cooking fabada is a weekend project, a pleasure, a connection to something.

In Niue, if that trend doesn't happen, the alternative isn't just cultural disconnection.

It's real food insecurity when the ship is late.

Those are different stakes.

Tienes razón.

You are right.

No es lo mismo.

It is not the same.

Lo reconozco.

I acknowledge that.

Pero la idea es similar, ¿no?

But the idea is similar, no?

The direction is similar.

Reconnect with what the land and the water around you can provide.

And there's actually a broader movement around this that food scholars call food sovereignty, the idea that communities should have the right to define their own food systems, not have them dictated by global commodity markets or shipping routes or, in Niue's case, the price of a barrel of oil in an unrelated conflict halfway around the world.

La guerra de Irán cambia el precio de la comida en el Pacífico.

The Iran war changes the price of food in the Pacific.

Es extraño pero es real.

It is strange but it is real.

That's the world economy in one sentence.

A conflict in the Persian Gulf, a naval blockade affecting forty-eight ships and counting, and somehow the price of getting a bag of flour to Niue goes up.

The interconnectedness is always there, it just becomes visible when something breaks.

And food is where ordinary people feel it first, before the stock market numbers, before the GDP figures.

The price at the market is immediate.

Cuando yo vivía en Londres, el precio del pan subía mucho.

When I lived in London, the price of bread went up a lot.

La gente hablaba de esto en las tiendas.

People talked about this in the shops.

That's exactly it.

The bakery is where economics becomes personal.

I remember being in Buenos Aires during the 2001 collapse.

The peso was freefall, the banks were frozen, the whole edifice was coming down.

And the thing I remember most vividly is the bread line outside a panadería in Palermo at seven in the morning.

People weren't talking about bond yields.

They were talking about whether the empanadas were going to cost more this week than last week.

Las empanadas argentinas son muy diferentes de las españolas.

Argentine empanadas are very different from Spanish ones.

Las dos son buenas.

Both are good.

Las argentinas tienen más carne.

The Argentine ones have more meat.

We are absolutely going to detour into empanadas.

But hold that thought, because there's one more thing about Niue I want to land before we drift entirely into your preferred topic of food arguments.

The election this week is about governance, yes, about the cost of living.

But underneath it is a question that every small, isolated community eventually faces: do you maintain your distinctiveness, your traditional food, your language, your culture, or do you integrate more fully into the global system that makes life materially easier but culturally thinner?

Es la pregunta más importante.

It is the most important question.

No solo para Niue.

Not just for Niue.

Para todo el mundo.

For the whole world.

For the whole world.

Said plainly by the man who once spent forty-five minutes explaining to me why supermarket olive oil is a personal insult.

El aceite de oliva barato es un problema serio, Fletcher.

Cheap olive oil is a serious problem, Fletcher.

Esto no es una broma.

This is not a joke.

I know you mean that.

Which is sort of the point.

In every culture, there's a set of foods that are sacred, that carry the memory of what that culture is.

For Niue, it might be taro prepared a certain way, a specific method of cooking fish in coconut milk.

Lose that, and you lose something that can't be shipped in on the next boat.

The food is the thread.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Mi abuela me enseña a cocinar.

My grandmother teaches me to cook.

Ella no tiene un libro.

She doesn't have a book.

Solo sabe cómo se hace.

She just knows how it is done.

That transmission, grandparent to grandchild, without a recipe, without a cookbook, just hands and smell and repetition.

That's how food culture survives or doesn't.

And in a place like Niue, where the population is two thousand and shrinking, many of the young people emigrate to New Zealand for work, that chain of transmission is under real pressure.

When the people who carry the knowledge leave, the knowledge can leave with them.

Pero a veces las personas emigran y llevan la comida con ellos.

But sometimes people emigrate and take the food with them.

Los inmigrantes españoles en Argentina llevan la paella, el jamón.

Spanish immigrants in Argentina take paella, jamón.

La comida viaja.

Food travels.

Food travels, and it changes when it travels, and sometimes that's beautiful and sometimes something's lost.

The Niuans in Auckland have their community, their churches, their festivals.

Taro still gets eaten.

But it's not the same as the taro growing in the garden behind the house, prepared the way it's always been prepared, eaten in the place it came from.

Context is part of the recipe.

Oye, Fletcher, quiero hablar de la palabra 'probar.' Tú dices esto mucho cuando comes algo nuevo.

Hey, Fletcher, I want to talk about the word 'probar.' You say this a lot when you eat something new.

Probar.

Right, I use it when I want to taste something.

'Puedo probar?' Can I try this?

But I've noticed you use it in different ways.

What are the layers there?

Sí.

Yes.

'Probar' es 'to taste' pero también 'to try.' Son dos cosas.

'Probar' is 'to taste' but also 'to try.' They are two things.

'Prueba la sopa.' 'Prueba este camino.'

'Taste the soup.' 'Try this path.'

Huh.

So the same verb covers 'taste this food' and 'try this approach.' In English those are completely different words.

We'd say 'taste' for food and 'try' for everything else.

Spanish just uses one verb and trusts the context.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y también 'probar' significa 'to prove.' 'Prueba tu identidad.' Tres significados, una palabra.

And also 'probar' means 'to prove.' 'Prove your identity.' Three meanings, one word.

That's actually elegant once you see it.

Taste, try, prove.

There's a kind of logic underneath it, right?

When you taste something, you're testing it.

When you try something, you're putting it to the test.

When you prove something, you've passed the test.

One verb, one underlying idea, three applications.

¡Muy bien, Fletcher!

Very good, Fletcher!

Aprendes rápido.

You learn quickly.

Pero tu pronunciación necesita trabajo.

But your pronunciation needs work.

It always does.

Though I'll note for the record that I have successfully avoided telling anyone I'm pregnant in this episode, which I consider genuine progress.

Es verdad.

It's true.

No dices 'estoy embarazado' hoy.

You don't say 'I am pregnant' today.

Un gran avance para ti.

A great step forward for you.