Bula, Kia Ora, Cheers, Santi, Ganbei

My wife and I visited five nations in five weeks spanning five seasons. It was summer in Fiji, fall into winter in New Zealand's North Island, spring in Queensland, Australia and summer again in Bali, Indonesia and Hong Kong, China. The trip's mission was to discover what food heritage sites and stories are being preserved and to what extent they are available to the public. The purpose in writing this book was to demonstrate how others might do the same: discover and record the food historic sites and memories associated with places both near and faraway, familiar and unknown. We did the same sort of research around France in about the same amount of time for a book we wrote "Gastronomie! Food Museums and Heritage Sites of France." The Fiji equivalent to the French "Bon appetit" is "Bula" but also means so much more including "welcome," "good health," and "life is great!" In Fiji the toast is "Kia Ora." Australians, of course, say "Cheers Mate!" Indonesians proclaim "Santi" and in China it's "Ganbei."What do Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and China have in common? We weren't seeking commonality in planning our itinerary, but once we completed the trip we realized that all these places have a special or national drink, grow sugar and sweet potatoes and have specialized cooking styles all of which you'll find described in this book. Sweet potatoes, for example, are a heritage crop for Pacific Islanders. Queensland grows 80 percent of Australia's crop. Mareeba, where we visited in the Atherton Tableland, is one of the nation's major production centers. In Bali local varieties of sweet potatoes are still grown using traditional methods where they are an important part of everyone's diet. Either eaten fresh or processed into flour they are an important part of everyone's diet. The sweet potato flour winds up in a variety of foods and beverages including sweet potato juice, sweet potato rice and even sweet potato ice cream. China is the world's leading producer of sweet potatoes. On Hong Kong's Lantau Island, for instance, we encountered Mok Kau-moon, a sweet potato and soybean farmer, who is best known for his freshly made daily "tofu fa." This soybean curd coated with syrup is a Chinese favorite dating back many centuries. Mok Kau-moon makes his sweet tofu snack food using mountain stream water that flows through his sweet potato fields on the hillside above the beach community of Mui Wo.