Kapu, the ʻAikapu and the ʻAi Noa of 1819

The kapu system belonged to the chiefly order of the Hawaiian Islands in the centuries after Polynesian settlement, which current radiocarbon work places at about 1000–1200 CE. Its eating rules, the ʻaikapu, were set aside in 1819 under Liholiho, son of Kamehameha I, acting with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, an act known as the ʻai noa, the free eating.

Kapu means forbidden or set apart, and in the Hawaiian Islands it governed the sacred and the ordinary alike: who might approach a chief, which places and seasons were closed, and what might be taken from land and sea. The table was one of its principal fields. Under the ʻaikapu, men and women ate apart, and the foods bound up with the male gods and with offering were reserved to men. Pork, certain fish and certain varieties of banana and coconut were among the things withheld from women. The research on file records kumu, the whitesaddle goatfish Parupeneus porphyreus, as a sacred reef fish used in offerings when a red fish was required, and as kapu to women; it records moi, Polydactylus sexfilis, as kapu to commoners. Fish in this order was not only food but a means of address to the gods, and its taking and eating were bound by rule. The foods themselves came with the canoes. Kalo Colocasia esculenta, ʻuala Ipomoea batatas, ʻulu Artocarpus altilis, maiʻa, niu Cocos nucifera and kō Saccharum officinarum were carried by the Polynesian voyagers and planted in the loʻi and on the dry slopes, while the fishponds and the reef supplied the fish. In the Kumulipo tradition the first kalo, Hāloanakalaukapalili, was the stillborn first son of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, and his younger brother Hāloa became the first Hawaiian. Kalo was therefore an elder kin and not merely a crop, and the eating of its pounded form, poi, carried that weight. The kapu laid its rules across a table already ordered by kinship, land and the gods. In 1819, after the death of Kamehameha I, Liholiho, with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, ate in company with women in public, and the eating rules ended. The ʻai noa removed the separation of men and women at meals and the prohibitions on foods that had been reserved to men. It is the single most direct change to the Hawaiian table recorded before the arrival of the American Board missionaries in 1820, and it came before them, not because of them. Kysar records the abolition and names the separate eating of men and women at feasts as part of the system that ended. What followed shaped the century. The missionaries arrived into a country whose old order of eating had already been dissolved, and Kamehameha III, in the constitutions of 1839 and 1840, set out a framework in which land was held for the people and divided between crown, chiefs and the people. The ahupuaʻa, the land division running from mountain to sea that had supplied the kitchen, entered a new legal world. The sugar plantations, the Chinese from 1852 and the later labour waves, and the plate lunch that grew from them, were built on that ground. The ʻai noa is the point from which the modern table of Hawaiʻi is usually reckoned: the old rules of who might eat what were gone, and the foods of many kitchens could be set beside the Hawaiian one.

Before 1819 the table of the chiefs and the table of the people were set by rule: kalo pounded to poi, ʻuala and ʻulu baked in the imu, fish eaten raw, broiled on coals by the koʻala method or cooked in kī leaves, and pork and the reserved fish confined to those permitted them. Coconut, banana and sugar cane supplied sweetness, and salt, ʻinamona and seaweed gave the seasoning of the Hawaiian kitchen. With the ʻai noa the same dishes were eaten by men and women together, and the foods of the imu and of the loʻi stayed the base on which later arrivals built the shoyu, rice and noodle dishes of the local table.