When you go on a pig hunt in Niue there’s really only one option for dinner. So it was for photographer Richard Robinson and writer Pete McKenzie. After documenting a hunt with Huggard Tongatule, who is leading an ambitious plan to rid the whole island of pests (page 80), they headed back to his place.
Tongatule laid out a marvellous spread of perfectly prepared wild boar, uga/coconut crab, and taro.
Robinson was in “pork heaven”, says McKenzie. Him not so much. That day he had watched Tongatule shoot and gut the pig and turn a blowtorch on it, burning off the hide and hair and sending enormous bubbles of air beneath the skin. It was a lot, for a vegetarian.
But whenever McKenzie is reporting in the Pacific, he knows he’ll be eating meat.
The decision is partly about pragmatism, he says—but more importantly, respect. “Being able to take a few bites was a way of saying ‘Thank you’.” Happily, there was enough taro to feed a dozen ravenous journos.
Writer Bill Morris, meanwhile, had few qualms about cracking into kōura, or freshwater crays, after a trapping trip with Terressa Shandley Kollat (page 26 and 34). Kollat put together “mountains of food”, Morris says: a pot of kōura, smoked salmon, marinated venison, and fresh breadrolls to mop it all up. The crays were trickier to get into than their big salty cousins, Morris says—but worth it. “They were sweet and delicious. I thought they tasted better than marine crayfish, actually.”