Ligaya Mishan reviews Eat Pacific: The Pacific Island Food Revolution cookbook edited by Robert Oliver for The New York Times:
‘In Fiji, when breadfruit trees bear more fruit than usual, it is at once 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.)’
Read the rest of the review here.
