About Wanda Adams

Wanda Adelaide Adams was born and raised on the island of Maui, growing up in verdant ‘Iao Valley where her parents owned a small hotel and restaurant. She learned to cook at the hands of her Portuguese grandmother, helped her grandfather in his sprawling garden and she simply couldn’t be kept out of the hotel kitchen.

Wanda at the Hawaii Book and Music Fair - click to enlarge

Wanda left Hawai’i after graduating from Lahainaluna High School and attained a degree in journalism and English literature from the University of Washington, taking every opportunity to learn more about the foods and dishes of the Pacific Northwest. Over the next 20 years, she was uniquely situated in her work as a feature and food writer at The Everett Herald and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer  to observe the growth of the Pacific Regional Cuisine movement.

She returned to the Islands just as the Hawai’i Regional Cuisine movement was born and helped to document the movement as it grew into what today is a network of award-winning restaurants, Buy Hawaii grocery store labeling, farmers markets and various “locavore” and “sustainable agriculture” enterprises and initiatives.

At The Honolulu Advertiser, she wrote a weekly column that answered readers’ requests for more knowledge of their food history. She has collected hundreds of community cookbooks and early works on food history.
In 2005, she was asked to write The Honolulu Advertiser’s 150th anniversary cookbook, creating a history of Hawai’i foodways, with home-tested and updated recipes, as the story was told through the pages of the Islands’ largest daily newspaper since 1856. She also edited an annual, comprehensive restaurant guide, “Hawaii’s Best Restaurants.”

Her book, “The Island Plate” (Island Heritage) sold an unprecedented 30,000 copies (see Wanda’s books).

Today, she freelances, teaches classes on cookbook writing at the local community college and is STILL awaiting publication of her fourth book, “Celebrating Island Style,” about how local folks observe holidays throughout the year. She is featured in a food history segment “Origins” on the culinary Web site, sharyourtable.com and on the show’s Oceanic Time Warner TV channel.  She is a frequent public speaker.
“Even people who have lived here all their lives don’t know why half the dishes we think of Hawaiian lu’au foods are not of Hawaiian origin, why we eat Saloon Pilot crackers, how our famous love affair with SPAM came about, how many of our most beloved takeout dishes and restaurant foods are made or where they originated,” she says. “Even the signature dishes of arriving cultures have been profoundly altered as immigrants to the Islands ‘made do’ with ingredients available here, and as our tastes were changed by our close contact with each other, particularly during the plantation era.

” I stand metaphorically in the shoes of thousands of women and men — in ill-fitted plantation kitchens cooking on kerosene stoves made from tin cans, baking bread in outdoor masonry ovens, tending gardens of vegetables painfully imported seed by seed on the ships that served contract workers, learning to use the produce that already grew here in ways familiar to them and thus creating a new cuisine, serving as maids in the kitchens of the elite and creating a conversation between Eastern and Western ways. Mariners contributed imported goods from around the world as ships made restocking stops in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. Later came the home economists who taught us to use new, labor-saving equipment and new products. Then the chef, who oftentimes noticed what we took for granted and created a sophisticated approach to our folksy foodways.”

Wanda A. Adams