South Pacific Diet

Thousands of islands create a geographical region known as the South Pacific islands. The territories in this region include Papua New Guinea, Polynesia, Micronesia, Samoa, Guam, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Tonga and the Cook Islands. The French, English and Americans colonized many of these areas, which brought foreign influences to the islanders' culinary choices.

Coconut

The coconut is the most important food in the South Pacific islands. As a beverage, coconut refreshes during tropical weather by providing electrolytes and cool coconut water. Coconuts also provide their meat, oil and sugar. A coconut has four stages of growth. Consuming a coconut harvested during stage one provides the most palatable coconut water, and stage two provides the best flesh, when the meat is a thin layer before it thickens and loses its moisture and sweetness.

Vegetables

The staples in the South Pacific Islands often include a starch, such as taro root or breadfruit, meat and fish. Tropical fruits are also common. Less common are vegetables, but due to foreign influences, the grocery stores in the South Pacific islands provide a variety of vegetables. Taro is a starchy tuber; taro leaves, often used in stews and for wrapping foods for underground cooking, provide the islands' only native leafy green vegetable.

Western Influences

In modern times, the South Pacific diet is a combination of traditional foods and foreign influences. Canned meat products, such as Spam and corned beef, are particularly important; consuming them conveys social status. Other foreign influences include eggs and milk, which increased in popularity in the South Pacific by 920 percent from 1965 to 2000, according to the World Health Organization. Alcohol is important in some South Pacific island cultures, but some territories banned it because it caused violence and other harmful disruptions.

Festivals

The social side of eating is important to South Pacific islanders, who often eat in large groups and share meals with one another. Feasts for birthdays and holidays often include ground roasting. A pit lined with hot stones provides an underground oven for roasting a pig, surrounded with vegetables wrapped in taro leaves. Tropical fruits, such as mangoes, papayas, pineapples, bananas, tomatoes and avocados, round out the menu.