Summary of Work on Consumption

Problem: How do plants consumed in the diet (the full range including calories, nutrition, seasoning) relate to plants consumed as medicine (the full range including internal, topical, inhaled)? What factors determine whether a plant is a medicine, food, poison, cosmetic, etc?

Our Objectives and Questions: Student Learning Objectives:

1) Identify pre-Contact Hawaiian spices and foodstuffs and their uses.

2) Identify post-contact spices and foodstuffs and their uses in contemporary Hawaiian food.

3) Explore positive and negative aspects of introduced food and medicine.

Scientific Questions:

1)  What are nine plant foods used as medicines in pre-contact Hawaii. How are these plants used today in Hawaii, as based on the acquired literature?  

2) Focusing on post-contact introduced spices and foodstuffs, How have they impacted traditional Hawaiian medical practices?

3)  What is the role of diet as preventative medicine and treatment in Hawaiʻi today?

What we knew before: We knew that native Hawaiians have many health problems compared with the rest of the U.S. population. We knew that Hawaii has been highly globalized since European contact with the arrival of Cook. We knew that traditional Hawaiian cuisine has been replaced in much of Hawaii by a corporate, western diet. I also had previous knowledge of Polynesian introduced plants and their uses. Dane and Marisa were both familiar with laʻau lapaʻau. 

How we adressed these: We each took on 3 plants. I covered Kukui, Ti, and Breadfruit. Dane did Kalo, pia, and limu, while Marisa did 'uala, mamaiki, and niu. We also divided up the scientific questions for the paper. I wrote the section on #3, Dane did #1 and Marisa did #2.

We worked well together, meeting a couple of times in Hamilton and Sinclair libraries, and working for hours on research. We worked a few times to improve our LOs and scientific questions, switching them around before they were finalized. This was a difficult process for us at first, but with some help we were able to achieve what we wanted to learn out of the problem.

I found working with a new group quite difficult at first. I think this was because we each had developed a specific formula with our previous group and now we had to redesign how we were going to work together and achieve our goals/answer our questions. This got better with time and with group meetings. In the end I think we were able to develop our own unique formula that hopefully has helped us answer this problem.

I believe everyone contributed a lot to the group work. We all met at the times we planned to meet and worked hard to complete our section of the problem. For what was not assigned to individuals, we found ways to fill it in. We also provided each other with books and articles that we thought would be helpful.