Food

In Typee, food is as central to the characters' lives as it is to our own. But while we may be posting pictures of our plates, for Tommo, Toby, and the Typee natives, a meal may demonstrate simpler truths.

Breaking Bread(fruit)

Pretty much as soon Tommo leaves the ship, he finds it hard to fulfill his basic needs—the most pressing is having enough to eat, as he and Toby torch calories across a mountain. Sweetly, they combine their stores—mostly "those small, broken, flinty bits of biscuit which generally go by the name of 'midshipmen's nuts'" (6.8)—and then divide them into even little portions so that they both enjoy the same amount. This equitable division illustrates the easy companionship between Toby and Tommo.

When Tommo and Toby are welcomed to the valley with a feast, this signals good will and welcome. As a first course, the strangers are served poee-poee, a breadfruit porridge. Mehevi must show them the proper way to eat it: "Mehevi, motioning us to be attentive, dipped the forefinger of his right hand in the dish, and giving it a rapid and scientific twirl, drew it out coated smoothly with the preparation" (10.33). He does so gently, and with patience, signaling that no immediate ill will befall the bedraggled, half-starved sailors.

It Reflects a Peoples' Relationship to the Land

While other societies labor day and night over ventures in back-breaking agriculture, the Typee are able to use what their immediate environment provides them. As Tommo puts it: "Nature has planted the bread-fruit and the banana, and in her own good time she brings them to maturity, when the idle savage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies his appetite" (26.21). With coconuts, breadfruit, and the odd hunted wild pig (or "baked baby" (12.30) as Tommo and Toby disastrously misunderstand), the Typee do just fine.