Yams, Rice, and Soda

Abstract

Oral histories of Pacific Islanders who lived through World War II and its aftermath burst with memories of food: the hunger and deprivation of wartime, the forced agricultural labor, and the revelatory liberation of a full plate after the guns finally fell silent. The image of generous Americans bearing food is pervasive in written accounts of the war as well. But on bypassed islands like Pohnpei in the Central Carolines the story was never quite so clear-cut, if indeed it was anywhere. On Pohnpei, American personnel landed in small numbers without an overabundance of supplies, plunging into a society that had used food and gift giving to define its social identities, politics, and relationships with outsiders for centuries. Pohnpei therefore offers an opportunity to rethink military gifts of food on an island where gifts were few and often contested, where American sailors imbued food and nutrition with their own anxieties over race and modernity, where military planners moved to assert control over imports to shield the region from subversive foreign influence, and where Pohnpeians swiftly drew American military personnel into the logic of their own food politics.