The Pacific Island culinary traditions — spanning Polynesia (Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, French Polynesia, New Zealand/Māori), Micronesia, and Melanesia — are built on a unified foundational technique (the earth oven, known as umu in Polynesian languages and imu in Hawaiian) and a shared botanical heritage (taro, breadfruit, coconut, sweet potato, yam) that arrived with the Austronesian migrations beginning approximately 3,500 years ago. The Pacific Island culinary tradition is simultaneously one of the oldest continuous cooking cultures in the world and one of the least documented in English-language culinary literature.
The Pacific Island culinary foundation.
BRITISH ISLES + GERMAN/CENTRAL EUROPEAN + PACIFIC ISLAND