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Eating to go and Local Customs, Uncle Ken's Corner Table
Aloha Everyone!
With food available every few miles on our island, we can be assured that we will never lack food when traveling from one place to another on our island home. When we are leaving home to go on an errand or to visit friends, we never think of packing food for our trip because food is always available, along the way, where ever we go. Unless we are going to a friend's for dinner, and are taking a dish as our contribution, we just pick up our car keys, and off we go! There are fast food outlets, lunch wagons, food courts and malls with restaurants all over the landscape. And the choices of food are endless. It wasn't always like that.
In the very early Plantation Days, when you were going to visit friends in a neighboring town or on another plantation, you first estimated how far it was and the time it would take you to walk that distance. You then prepared enough food and made your Bento lunch to sustain you along the way. Maybe you also made something to give to the friends you were visiting. Stores and places to eat were few and far between, and besides, you wouldn't want to waste your hard-earned money on buying food that you could just as easily have prepared at home and brought with you.
Those were the days before automobiles became commonplace in the islands, and the roads between towns and plantations were dirt and gravel ruts in the ground, made by horse-drawn wagons and carts. Harvested sugar cane was transported downslope from fields to sugar mill by a system of water flumes or by horse-drawn wagons, before the days of trucks. Between plantations and the dock where sugar was shipped to California for refining, you had rail. For distant travel, you could take the passenger trains, but most field workers walked. There were lots of short cut paths that criss-crossed the sugar fields, and all workers were familiar with them. When you got hungry, you found a tree to sit under, and ate your bento lunch, which was usually packed in a nice lacquer box.
You usually visited distant friends on Sundays because the workweek on the plantation was Monday through Saturday, a six-day workweek. You had a one-day weekend. So you had to plan your trip carefully, starting out very early in the morning, with enough time to walk to and from your destination. You had to be home in time to go to work on Monday. If you were fortunate, you could catch a ride on the back of a wagon. It was a tough life, but no one complained.
And when it was time to leave your friend or host family, they always prepared and packed food for you to take home with you, just in case you got hungry on the long walk home. So whenever you visited friends, it was an almost obligatory practice for the host to pack a Bento with the leftover food for the visitor to take with him. Even if it was just a bowl of rice or a musubi (rice ball), with some pickles and pieces of meat or vegetable, or some sweets, they gave you some food to take home. It was just plain courtesy to do so.
Does this sound familiar? That practice of giving food to friends to take home after a big dinner is now almost ingrained in local tradition and practice. The host always prepares more food than necessary for the meal, and always has extra food to offer to departing guests. It's no longer to sustain us on our trip home, but is part of our local way of being hospitable to our guests from start to finish.
That practice of offering leftover food to departing guests is a custom which makes our life unique and pleasant in the islands. Many guests will often decline the offer, but when pressed, they will accept a small token of food from the host. Even if it's not leftovers from the meal, the host will often offer fruits picked from his or her yard or freshly baked cookies to take home.
I recall that during the four years that I attended college near Chicago, I was often invited to dinner at the homes of friends in the dormitory. Being from Hawaii, I anticipated that the family would offer us a plate of leftover turkey or ham to take back to the dorm with us. And I have to admit that when that offer did not come, I experienced a twinge of disappointment. It was just an expectation born of my local background growing up in Hawaii. After a while, I realized that it was not part of mainstream American culture to give departing dinner guests plates of leftover food.
I was, therefore, pleasantly reminded of our local tradition, when I returned to attend additional classes at the University of Hawaii. When departing dinner at the homes of friends or relatives, I was loaded up with food to take back "to share with the guys in the dorm". And when I returned to the dorm, my roommates and friends would pack my room for a midnight snack, to feast on the Korean fried chicken, roast turkey, macaroni salad, sushi, teri beef and other goodies that I brought back with me. It was back to my roots again.
Giving food to guests who are going home after a get-together: It's a nice tradition in the community. After all, it just carries on a part of our heritage which started when our ancestors on the plantations needed food to eat on the road. Many of them, in turn, had brought that tradition with them from their homelands. And it ended up as a nice part of our local hospitality, and I hope it never dies out.
And that's my thought for today. Want some leftover food to take home?
Uncle Ken
