Food

If you’ve been out here in Kiribati a while and spend some time with the local expats/i-Matung, one peculiarities you will soon notice is that one of the main topics of conversation is…food!  That’s right, one of the main things we talk about is food, or more importantly what is available, where and for how much.

Almost all the food here is imported. There is next to no land to grow anything on and even if there were the soils are coral sand, great for coconut palms but bugger all use for much else. The Taiwanese government has a small agricultural ttraining centre where they do grow/produce amazing variety of things and are teaching the locals how to grow more varieties of vegetables but this process has been extremely labour intensive- even getting the sand to a reasonable quality of soil using seaweed and other compostable materials was a major mission. And even though they are producing more varieties of vegetables- which are donated to local schools/charities- there are no bees here to pollinate the flowers so it must be done by hand.

5 plus a day? I try to have a piece of fruit or two each week... the one and only time I ever found peaches out here. 

Don’t get me wrong, some foods are grown. Pumpkin seems to be one of the hardiest, easiest to grow plants, so pumpkin is often included in meals at restaurants- usually boiled. Cucumbers too are reasonably easy to get hold of, not sure if they are grown locally, or imported from one of the outer islands, but I suspect the latter. Bananas can be found in local markets, again typically imported from the other islands. On North Tarawa where there is  a lot less pressure for land villagers do grow some crops including Taro. Locally, a few cherry tomatoes can be found along with limes, pawpaw etc but not in any decent quantities.

So, as I said most food is imported. The most common vegetables to be found are onions and carrots, both imported from NZ or Aust. Much to my surprise apples are pretty common most of the time and found in refrigerators at the shops (about $1.20-$1.60 each) but aren’t exactly the fruit I was expecting to find at the equator! Food brought in by plane gets only so far up the atolls from the airport while food imported via the port makes it part way down from the other end. Each importer buys their own products and tend to buy the cheapest things available in Australia and New Zealand (so the quality of the produce is often not that good by the time they arrive on island) and mark ups can be a tad…extreme. Recently cabbages were $35 each! So you are often at the mercy of the importers as to what can be found on island and no two places stock the same things. It can also be totally random what you find. I was out for a bike ride one Saturday and stopped to get a drink at one of the stores close to the airport and they had a fridge full of fresh kiwifruit. Of course I bought one but have never seen kiwifruit again anywhere on South Tarawa.  

So shopping for groceries ends up a bit of a scavenger hunt, travelling to half a dozen small shops and the larger “supermarkets” to see what is available and there can be sometimes rather large fluctuations in price between the different importers. Going from shop to shop for groceries is an important part of the weekly routine, but one that I actually do quite enjoy. Some of the main stores are locally in Betio where I work, and they often have more variety

and different stock to their branches in Bairiki, closer to where I live, so I’ll often pop out at lunchtime to source groceries while at wrk and that has made life a bit easier.

For the i-Kiribati population, rice is the staple of the diet. It is heavily subsidised by the government and eaten in vast quantities- along with locally caught fish, but people put few vegetables with it and nutrition out here in general is pretty poor. Rather basic nutrition-less crackers (Punja’s breakfast crackers) and instant noodles- which are often eaten raw as some sort of snack- are some of the most common foods for my workmates and I assume many other people too. The i-Kiribati are quite short. Most people are under 5 ½ ft (170 cms) tall. This is no doubt is partly genetic but a large part of it is probably due to poor nutrition and the resulting stunting of growth in the important growth years during childhood. A rather sad and sobering fact.

Most Saturday mornings I bake myself a batch of cheese scones. Ah, the comforts of home.

So, food here is a big deal and for us i-Matung and the bush telegraph, or in this particular case the modern equivalent known as the South Tarawa Expats Facebook page, quickly gets informaiton out when something out of the ordinary arrives on island and which shop it is found at. 

As well as having to rely on whatever the shops decide to import food supplies are at the whim of the government. There was great excitement two weeks ago with news that that potatoes had been spotted at Coral Ace in Betio (one of the larger stores)! Potatoes? Yes this humble staple of western diets was banned by the government and has been unavailable for at least a year! Why? Apparently to protect the local potato industry. What potato industry you may ask Exactly! There isn’t one! Ironic isn’t it? However, somebody in the government took exception to the quality of potatoes being imported (remember when I said earlier importers try to get the cheapest products- including produce, at the cheapest price, well that’s what you get poorer quality food!). Anyway, the story as told by other i-Matung (so it must be true), is that someone took exception to the quality of the imported potatoes and they’ve been banned but now apparently the ban has been lifted- at least in the case of New Zealand grown spuds. Australia potatoes are still banned but with the quantities imported of ANY potatoes being so small I doubt the Aussies are even aware of this.  And as for the local potato market? Well it is still non-existent. 

So imagine my surprise when I sat down to lunch at work a couple of Monday's ago and there before me sitting in their pale white, slightly gooy looking glory was a plate of mashed potatoes. Were they lumpy? Hell yes but they were also bloody delicious! How long will spuds last on island? Who knows but after that lunch I went down to Coralace and bought myself four small potatoes for $4.50. Yes, 500 grams of spuds for $4.50 or $9.00 a kg but who cares! It’s the little things that remind you of home that can make or break your day. The number one rule of shopping here being if you see something buy it, you don’t know when more are likely to arrive on island and once sold out they are gone, sometimes for weeks or months at a time.

Yes I am sad. One of those sad, sad food shots but hey it was bloody mashed spud and broccoli !

We had a similar story recently with mince, it too was spotted in Moel’s, another of the local supermarkets, a few weeks back and this too as BIG NEWS on the island as mince had not been seen anywhere for over a year. So again the local i-Matung community descended en-mass to stock up on mince at least $13 per kg. Now however, it seems to have disappeared again and who knows when more will arrive on island. Meanwhile, I eagerly await an update on the bush telegraph. 

Craig