Teuila Fuatai interviews Robert Oliver, the author of Eat Pacific: The Pacific Island Food Revolution cookbook for E-Tangata:
‘Chef Robert Oliver has made it his mission to promote local cuisine and ingredients, particularly in the Pacific.
He talks to Teuila Fuatai about why he believes in traditional Pacific food and diets, and the link he sees between good health and Indigenous cuisine.
My work as a chef, and my love of food, has taken me around the world. But the Pacific Islands, where I spent my adolescent and teenage years, have always had a special place in my heart.
Suva, in particular, has been a major source of inspiration. My family moved there when I was 11 — and I went from the dreary, sanitised supermarkets of New Zealand to the colour and liveliness of the market in Suva. Being there was like having all the lights come on at once.
Over the years, I’ve tried to give back to the communities I grew up in. The Pacific Island Food Revolution project, where we promote local cuisine, is part of that kaupapa. It brings all my experience and knowledge back to the places where I grew up.
In the 1990s and 2000s, I lived in North America and the Caribbean. I was really inspired by the farm-to-table movement, which emphasises the use of locally-sourced ingredients, often directly from the producer.
Through a friend, I was introduced to a Barbadian hotel owner who wanted his hotels to be supplied by local farmers rather than rely on imported food. He owned three resorts which had 21 restaurants between them.
At the time, most if not all the hotels in Barbados had these kind of “international sausage roll” menus, which basically consisted of pretty bad western food like pies and chips. Almost all the ingredients had to be imported for these menu items, even though they were terrible and so much money was going offshore.
My job was to turn that around. We wanted the menus to reflect the local cuisine, which meant giving the chefs the freedom to create dishes unique to their part of the world and culture. That allowed us to bring in local growers and producers as the major suppliers to these big hotels and resorts.
We were really successful, and over the years, I’ve worked with hotels in Fiji and Sāmoa to do the same thing. Not only did that ensure fresher, more nutritious and sustainable products, it also helped local producers and growers.
Eventually, that led to my first book Me’a Kai. I worked with Auckland researcher Dr Tracy Berno, whose area of expertise is sustainable development in the Pacific region, and Fijian photographer Shiri Ram. We created a regional cookbook for chefs to work from. It created excitement around Pacific cuisine, including in the overseas tourist markets that Pacific nations relied on.
In the process of creating and promoting that book, I returned to New Zealand in 2010, and resumed travelling and working around the Pacific. I spent a lot of time in Suva, which is like a second home to me, and where quite a few of my good friends live.
I soon learned how bad problems with diabetes had become, both in Fiji and the wider region.
I can’t count the number of times people would say, in casual conversation: “Oh, have you been tested for diabetes?” It seemed like everyone was suddenly talking about this disease. I’d been away from the region for 30 years, living in New York and the Caribbean, and the diabetes epidemic seemed to have emerged during that time.
The statistics shocked me. About 16 percent of Fijians over 40 were reported to have diabetes. Around 75 percent of deaths in the Pacific Islands were due to non-communicable diseases like diabetes. That was in 2011. Now, Pacific nations have some of the worst diabetes and obesity rates in the world. In 2021, for example, 23.3 percent of adults over 20 in American Sāmoa had diabetes, according to the International Diabetes Federation. In Fiji, the rate was 17.7 per cent, while in Kiribati it was 21.2 percent.
Imagine if that was car accidents or cancer. We’d have a massive response in place to counter it.’
Read the rest of the interview here.
