Fighting Gastrocolonialism in Indigenous Pacific Writing

Abstract

With one of the world’s highest percentages of obesity and its related diseases, especially cardiovascular problems and diabetes, the Pacific is perhaps one of the places in the world where the consequences of “gastrocolonialism” have become more damaging. This essay considers food consumption patterns by Pacific Islanders both in their home countries and in diaspora and engages with the critical conversation started by several Indigenous Pacific writers in their works and daily food activism against western culinary impositions and heritages. Apart from focusing on the authors’ critique of the idealization of western products, the multiple affective and cultural dependencies determining culinary choices, and the colonial, military or capitalist discourses shaping Pacific diets, I also read these works as contributing to the articulation of an Indigenous gastropolitics. The productive interrelation between these artists’ creative work and their activism arguably contributes to shape a transpacific process of resistance to gastrocolonialism which speaks across national boundaries to condemn urgent health problems across the region and aims at the recovery of Pacific health and well-being.