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Papua New Guinea

a country about whose foods and foodways little had been written until recently, is the subject of one admirable book by May (1984). He observes that there is evidence of human settlements about 50,000 years ago, and also that some 9,000 years ago people in the highlands had established gardens, thus becoming some of the earliest known agriculturists. By 4000 bc, under the influence of successive migrations of people from S. Asia, agriculture had largely replaced hunting and gathering as a means of sustenance. Besides the indigenous food crops (sago, sugar cane, some sorts of banana and yam, breadfruit, etc.), there were introduced species which the immigrants brought: taro, more kinds of banana and yam, and perhaps coconut. The pig and perhaps fowl also came with them, but the sweet potato, now the staple crop in most of the highlands, was a later arrival.

The arrival of the sweet potato is of particular interest, since May asserts that recent archaeological discoveries show that it was being cultivated 1,200 years ago, and must therefore have arrived via Polynesia from tropical America. He says that the same seems to be true of maize (which see for further comment on the question of how and when it travelled from the New World to the Old World).

Foods introduced since European contact include tapioca, groundnuts, and a wide array of vegetables and fruits, plus cattle for beef, and deer.

Of the numerous aspects of food in Papua New Guinea which are of special interest, the following items represent no more than a small sample:

• Sago is prepared in three principal ways. In the first it is mixed with boiling water, stirred to produce a ‘gluggy paste, at which stage it is removed from the pot (generally being twisted around a stick) and eaten’. A second method is to form the moist flour into ‘cakes’ to be griddle cooked over an open fire. May continues: ‘Thirdly, the moist flour, sometimes with the addition of greens, may be baked in bamboo sections over a fire. As a variation on the second and third methods, in the Gulf and Western Provinces, the flour may be mixed with fruit, lotus seeds, green vegetables, sago grubs or diced meat, wrapped in palm spathe and placed over a hearth of hot embers; it is common to cook whole fish (in particular, catfish) in this manner. Sometimes leaflets are often used in lieu of palm spathe, to form a solid sago “stick” when cooked. Sago is also used in different parts of the country in a variety of soups. In the Sepik and elsewhere, it is mixed with coconut, banana and breadfruit and baked to form a solid “bread”. In the highlands it may be mixed with marita [see below], and either cooked as a pancake with greens or wrapped in leaves and cooked in an earth oven.’
• screwpine, Pandanus spp, is prominent. People of the highlands prize the fruits, which are eaten in three principal forms from various species in the genus. Describing all these, May devotes particular attention to what is known in Pidgin as marita. ‘The marita is a lowland to middle altitude species (P. conoideus), which is cultivated, semi-cultivated, and occasionally gathered wild. It produces a long red or yellow fruit which may be more than a metre [3′] long and weigh up to 10 kg [22 lb]. It consists of a large number of small segments on a central core. Methods of preparation of marita vary but a common procedure is to cut the fruit into sections (the size of the sections depending on the method of cooking) and boil it for about half an hour. The red segments are then scraped off the core and their woody centres separated out (preferably strained) to leave a thin, oily paste which looks like tomato sauce and has a distinctive, mildly astringent taste. It goes particularly well with pork, but is also eaten with greens and other vegetables.’
• The number of ‘exotic’ animal foods which have been or are eaten is extraordinarily large. May believes that it can safely be said that all furry animals in Papua New Guinea are eaten in one part of the country or another, and instances tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus spp), cuscus (Phalanger spp), opossum (various species), bandicoot, and bush rat (especially the giant rat Melomys rothschildi). Then, after a passage about crocodile eggs, lizards, and snakes, he remarks that ‘Any bird, it would appear, has a reasonable chance of ending up on the Papua New Guinean table.’ He provides information about the cassowary (Casuarius spp, fine table birds, keenly hunted in parts of the highlands) and large fruit-eating and other pigeons.
• Information about insects as food is also striking. The large sago grub (Rhyncosphorus ferringinlus papuanus), the larval form of a beetle, breeds in the rotting pith of palms. The grubs, which are about 5 cm/2″ long and as thick as a man's finger, are ‘harvested’ and either boiled or roasted. In some markets they are sold spitted and grilled in satay style.
• Pitpit, Saccharum edule, is a close relation of sugar cane (S. officinarum) and is, as May explains, ‘cultivated for the unopened bud of its inflorescences. These inflorescences, which are about the size and shape of bullrushes, do not normally emerge from their grassy sheath, and in the market are usually sold in a bundle tied together by the top of the sheaths. Pitpit may be baked, steamed or boiled; occasionally it is eaten raw.’ It should be noted that these remarks refer to what is called ‘lowland pitpit’, and that ‘highland pitpit’ is something quite different, Setaria palmifolia, also called New Guinea asparagus (from which the manner of consuming may easily be inferred).

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