Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas.
In Fiji, when breadfruit trees bear more fruit than usual, it is at evvel a gift and a warning sign: Hurricane season will be dire. As a child, Robert Oliver watched people bury the fruit in pits lined with banana leaves. After the storms passed, they dug them up, now fermented, and put them straight on the fire to cook. This was how generations survived. Reportedly, breadfruit from a pit dating back three centuries was discovered to be still edible — to have defied time.
But in the past few decades, the ingredients Oliver grew up with have been displaced. Stores in Fiji and across the Pacific are now filled with the same kinds of foods found everywhere, emblems of Western modernity: instant, highly processed, stripped of almost all nutrition. It is no coincidence that rates of chronic disease have skyrocketed. “This is not nourishment,” Oliver writes in “Eat Pacific,” a collection of recipes from and inspired by “Pacific Island Food Revolution,” a TV cooking competition he has hosted since 2018. (The first two seasons are on YouTube.)
Recipe: Ipo Pain Perdu (Coconut-Bread French Toast)
Here is the back of a giant blade smacked against a coconut, the squeeze of pulp in a fist, the snowy cream running down into a bowl. Contestants from Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and, in Season 3, Papua New Guinea work mostly in makeshift kitchens open to the air. In the middle of a challenge, one runs into the surrounding trees to pluck wild berries she says she hasn’t seen since she was a little girl. A team tucks hot volcanic rocks into a dish and laments that their coconuts are uto — sprouted — so they have less meat. When Princess Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tuita of Tonga makes an appearance, there is a ripple of awe. “We’re jittery,” a contestant confides. Another, speaking in Tongan, says quietly, “To cook for the princess — it is a joyous occasion for my life.”
