On Easter Island, food is the most precious gift you can receive
The navel of the world … this is how the ancient peoples who settled on Easter Island millennia ago described this most remote inhabited place on earth. This place has fascinated me since I first learned of it in the sixth grade when I read “Kon-Tiki,” the record of explorer Thor Hyderdal's attempt to sail from Chile to Easter Island to postulate that Chilean people settled the island.
Located in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, Easter Island lies midway between Tahiti and Chile, 2,500 miles from the former and 2,300 miles from the latter. The nearest populated land mass is tiny Pitcairn Island almost 1,250 miles to the west (DNA testing in the 21st century showed that, contrary to Hyderdal's theory, Easter Island was settled by Polynesians).
No other populated island on earth is as isolated as this. Barren now and detached from any other civilization, it is the easternmost island of the South Pacific. Easter Island is triangular, with an extinct volcano at each corner. The island mass is only 45 square miles.
Called Rapa Nui by the native speaking people, the island was named by an Admiral Roggeveen who sailed into view of the island on Easter Sunday, 1722. Three-quarters of the island's 3,800 inhabitants are descended from the ancient Polynesians who settled this island in about 300 A.D.
Who were these ancient people? How did they manage to find this tiny dot in the ocean without maps or GPS? Why did they decide to carve and erect almost 1,000 (996 to be exact) enormous statues or moai from volcanic lava? How did they move these giant statues from the single quarry where they were hewn miles away? Why didn’t they complete the more than 400 moai which are still in the “nursery” in the crater of the extinct volcano, Rano Raraku. With no connection to the known world, just what did they eat?
Until contact with Europeans in the 18th century, the native people of Easter Island lived on a diet very similar to other Polynesian islands. Because of its scarcity, the Rapa Nui (as the islanders called themselves) believed that food was - and still is - the most precious gift a person can receive. Important religious rites, such as a child's first tattooing, were not considered satisfactorily concluded until the grateful father of the child offered a banquet in honor of the “tattooer.”
Most traditional island menus begin with “dig a deep hole in the ground and pile in some hot rocks.” The first settlers brought sweet potatoes, bananas, pineapple, mango and taro with them from their native islands. The waters around Easter Island were rich with sea life and sea birds easily caught from their canoes.
The population of Rapa Nui eventually grew to between 3,000 and 4,000. Without realizing the result, the people deforested the island. Without trees, there could be no canoes to catch food, and no trees to move the giant moai. Without trees the topsoil disappeared and the ability to raise crops diminished.
Petroglyphs dated about 1600 show emaciated people. Studies of archeological sites show that porpoise bones and seabird bones disappeared. It was a time of great hardship, cannibalism and civil war. More than half of the population died.
However, in 1722 when the first explorers arrived on Easter Sunday - hence the name Easter Island - they found healthy people. How could this be? The answer to this is found in a place known as Orongo. On the cliff walls there were petroglyphs of a birdman. A contest was held between the clans for a man to swim across a mile of open ocean, retrieve a bird's egg and swim back. The winning tribe would be in control of food distribution (sounds like Survivor, doesn't it) and order was restored.
Imagine Easter Sunday, 1722, a Dutch ship sailed into the harbor of Rapa Nui. Jo Anne Van Tilburg of UCLA commented, “It must have been, to them, like a spaceship landing in your backyard.”
These alien white men brought the true destruction to the native peoples of Rapa Nui - disease. Syphilis, typhoid and other diseases took their toll. The real culprit for the decimation of the Rapa Nui people was smallpox. An epidemic in 1877 left only 111 islanders alive. In the last 150 years the population has grown and attracts visitors from all over the planet. An Australian travel writer said it best, “Inside all of us there is a place - remote and islanded - that houses endless regret or secret happiness. A place like Easter Island.”
Shoyu 'Ahi Poke
(From The Poke Cookbook by Martha Cheng, Serves 4)
• 1 pound sushi-grade ahi tuna, cut into 3/4-inch pieces, to be safe to eat raw, tuna must have been frozen before eating
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced sweet onion, such as a Vidalia
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced scallions (green parts only)
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce, plus more to taste
• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
• 1/2 teaspoon sambal oelek (a spicy condiment easily found in local supermarkets, located with the hot sauces)
Directions
1. In a medium bowl, combine all the ingredients. Fold gently until evenly distributed. Taste, and adjust with more soy sauce as desired.
2. Serve immediately, or cover tightly and refrigerate for up to a day. If you let the poke marinate, taste it again right before serving; you may want to add another splash of soy sauce. To this base countless other ingredients may be added, other types of seafood, edamame, tomatoes, peppers.
Fran Ginn is former chef/owner of The Back Door Café, who retired after 31 years in the food industry to be a grandmother. She can be contacted at fran@franginn.com.
