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On Hawaii, the Fight for Taro’s Revival [1]
['Ligaya Mishan']
Date: 2019-11-08
On Hawaii, the Fight for Taro’s Revival
The root vegetable was a staple food for centuries until contact with the West. Its return signals a reclamation of not just land but a culture — and a way of life.
Nov. 8, 2019
FROM ABOVE, THE blue is forever. There’s not a continent for more than 2,000 miles, only these tiny knuckles of green: the Hawaiian Islands, one of the most remote yet most visited archipelagos on earth. An island is defined by the sea that surrounds it; tourists tend to gaze outward, at the waves, toward what separates them from the world they’ve left behind. But on Kauai, at the northwestern end of the chain, it’s the mountains that command the eye, streaked with waterfalls and so furrowed that in satellite photos they look like fossils. Here, on the north shore, the flanks of tall Mamalahoa are steaming, night rains turning to mist in the morning sun. Thousands of feet down lies the river plain of Waipa and its flooded fields filled with leaves like broad, crinkled hearts, each larger than a human face. Among the thick, blushing stalks, a snail.
This is Pomacea canaliculata, known as the golden apple snail because of its color and size, although in Hawaii, it is more often the russet hue of an acorn and nearly as small: adorable and a killer. It is a relative newcomer to the islands, with roots in South America and ancestors who arrived here in the 1980s, intended as pets for home aquariums and then released into local waterways, by accident or in hopes of raising them as food. Now the snail, capable of laying as many as 1,200 of its bright pink eggs each week, infests taro patches on almost every island, leaving holes in the corms and eating the tender shoots, doubling farm labor and depressing yields.
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But it is only the latest interloper to imperil a crop that once covered an estimated 35,000 acres of Hawaiian land and that last year was officially harvested, according to United States Department of Agriculture statistics, on just 310 acres, fewer than those devoted to macadamia nuts or avocados, both introduced in the 19th century and alien to the native diet. Taro (kalo in Hawaiian) is ancient, one of the plants brought over in the canoes of the Polynesian voyagers who, some time during the first millennium A.D., crossed thousands of miles of uncharted seas to make a new life in these islands.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/t-magazine/hawaii-taro.html
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