Eating empire, going local: Food, health, and sovereignty on Pohnpei, 1899-1986

Eating Empire, Going Local centers the island of Pohnpei, Micronesia in a global story of colonial encounter and dietary change. It follows Pohnpeians and Pohnpei’s outer Islanders in their encounters with Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States, negotiating, adapting to, and resisting empire through food and food production. In the process, Pohnpei extended food’s traditional role as locus of political influence and used it to navigate deceptively transformative interventions in ecology, consumption, the market, and the body. Food became Pohnpei’s middle ground, one that ultimately fostered a sharp rise in rates of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. The chapters draw on global commodity histories that converge on the island, of coconuts, rice, imported foods, and breadfruit. These foods illuminate the local and global forces that have delivered public health impacts and new political entanglements to the island. Eating Empire uses food and the analytic lenses it enables – from ecology and race to domesticity and sovereignty – as a tool to reimagine Pohnpei’s historical inter-imperial and contemporary political relationships from the bottom up.Ope