Why Hawaiians Love SPAM & Other Trivia Tidbits

Since tonight's not a cooking night, I thought I'd share a few interesting items we learned about Hawaii on our vacation and through subsequent research.

According to one website I found, Hawaii has the highest per capita consumption of SPAM in the United States! Hawaii and U.S. territories Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are home to the only McDonald's restaurants that serve SPAM (Burger King had to start offering it in Hawaii in order to keep up with its competition). There's even an annual festival in Waikiki devoted entirely to "the Hawaiian steak" and benefitting the nonprofit Hawaii Food Bank. SPAM was introduced to these regions during World War II when it was used to feed American GIs, since it had a long shelf life and didn't require refrigeration.

Did you know that Hawaii's state flag actually has a Union Jack on it? Apparently, they've just never gotten around to changing it. Before Hawaii became our 50th state in 1959, I guess Britain was the country most likely to acquire it, since explorer James Cook reportedly was the first European to discover the island chain in 1778 (he called them the Sandwich Islands). The eight strips in the flag symbolize the eight islands.

The Hawaiian alphabet has only 13 letters - the vowels a, e, i, o and u and the consonants h, k, l, m, n, p and w. A few days into our vacation, we started to understand how words were pronounced (there are lots of apostrophes that break up the syllables) and we even began inadvertently pronouncing our vowels like the locals. I think that was because we spent almost all day every day listening to Maui's awesome local radio station, KPOA.

Hawaii's state fish is the humuhumunukunuku-a-pua'a (come on, you can say it: hoo-moo-hoo-moo-noo-koo-noo-koo-ah-poo-ah-ah) or trigger fish. It's name translates to "piecing together" and "nose like a pig" which I guess are both appropriate descriptions. We saw some while snorkeling and managed to snap a shot of one.

Lastly, and this is VERY important, don't ever remove a lava rock from Hawaii. If you do, you'll be cursed with bad luck. During our stay we heard more than once, from locals and repeat visitors alike, that many people end up mailing the rocks back to the islands after they've returned home.

Well, that's it for now. I've got one more onolicious recipe to make tomorrow, an easy one we can throw on the grill. Stay tuned till then!

Mahalo! (Thanks!)