Waet man kakae*

With all the technical trouble in April I was unable and then forgot to write a post about the little restaurant all Lakatoro based volunteers ran during the month of March, called Waet man kakae: white people's food. So let me catch up at once.

 

Vanuatu has a very rich subsistence economy. Every family has one or more pieces of land on which they grow their food, called karen, garden. These are not vegetable gardens as we know them, with neat little rows of this, that and the other. I guess to our untrained eye they look more like pieces of jungle:

But looks are deceptive. In this picture of a garden everything you see is food: banana (the enormous leaves behind Margret, the garden's owner), taro (the big heart-shaped leaves on the left) and manioc (the plant with the nine-fingered leaves in the bottom right corner). Come to think of it, what I just called a banana tree probably is not that, but something that looks very similar. We call it 'bird of paradise', the ni-Vanuatu call it laplap leaves, because that is what they are used for. Anyway, together with yams and kumala these are the most important staples, with the occasional breadfruit thrown in. It is free and there is lots and lots of it to go around: nobody goes hungry in Vanuatu. The ni-Vanuatu call this aelan kakae, traditional island food, to distinguish it from what is actually the most popular food source by far: rice imported from Australia. And bought in a shop for 130 Vatu per kilo.

It is quite a remarkable phenomenon: when the islands and the ocean surrounding them are perfectly capable of providing everyone with a couple of free meals every single day of the year, for some reason people choose to eat enormous mountains of plain white rice accompanied by a little tinned fish or corned beef (100 Vatu). While they wolf down the rice, one small tin will be shared between a whole family, each taking a small spoonful out of the tin as it is passed around. I have asked some of my colleagues why people prefer to eat the store bought rice and fish, when they can eat island food for free, but they don't really seem to know themselves. Some-one told me it is because rice will keep for a long time and is easy to cook. Some-one else said that it has to do with status. But what makes it so strange to me, is that plain rice and tinned corned beef are not exactly mouthwatering alternatives, are they? I mean, you could understand it if they had abandoned their maniocs for nasi goreng with rendang or for pilau rice with tandoori chicken. But plain rice and tinned sardines...? I can not imagine these enthralling the palate night after night, can you? (Quite apart from that, it is not good for the economy, all these Vatus going abroad to foreign rice and tinned fish companies).

In any case, yam or rice, the ni-Vanuatu tastebuds prefer bland foods. In general, neither the aelan kakae or rice and fish are seasoned with anything other than a little salt and pepper, sometimes some soy sauce. Therefore I thought it would be fun to give the people of Lakatoro and surroundings an opportunity to taste some of the other foods that are eaten around the world and to see what they think. I suggested to my fellow volunteers that we run a food stall at the market selling waet man kakae for a month. They thought it was a great idea, so during the whole of March we rented one of the little 1-table restaurants at the markethouse and served two different dishes from different countries during lunch hour (11.30 - 13.30). As we wanted to convince as many ni-Vans as possible to give the foreign food a try, we served massive amounts of rice with every dish, no matter what it was. We put out small sample dishes in the open window of the stall, so people could overcome their suspicion of all the strange stuff we tried to sell them. Some were really keen, most very apprehensive. On average we sold 10 meals a day, more or less the same as the women in the other stalls. However, I am slightly embarrassed to report that our busiest day was the day we sold... hamburgers! The whole month we had slaved away over hot stoves, cooking exotic stuff such as piccadillos with tostones, rogan josh curry with dahl and spaghetti Bolognese, but in the end people were queueing up for hamburgers and manioc fries with ketchup. Go figure.

We had fun though, and that was the most important thing. None of us were having a good time at work, so these lunch times provided a good break from all that. We chatted with the people who came in to try our food and laughed with the women in the other stalls. But most of all, we enjoyed our own cooking!

 

* NB: The phrase waet man kakae, meaning 'white man's food', is not to be confused with the phrase kakae waet man, which means 'to eat white man', i.e white man as food, a ritual regularly practised in Malekula until as recent as 40 - 50 years ago. When the different tribes in Malekula waged war on each other, the winner would eat the people they had killed in the process. It was symbolic as well as literal act of completely conquering your enemy. When missionaries started arriving on the island, the same courtesy was extended to them. Meat from humans is supposed to be much, much nicer than any animal meat. A welcome addition then, to a diet extremely high in carbohydrates and lacking protein.