Food

When the Maori people first arrived in New Zealand they hardly had any food known to them to survive on except for the common food of New Zealand. The Maori people had to make a drastic change to their lifestyle if they were to survive and succeed. They had to adjust to an almost totally new type of food supply which they had never seen. Because the Island was entirely within the temperate zone, none of the Maori traditional (tropical) crops grew there. Only the Kumara (sweet potato) that was imported from Polynesia provided a valuable crop, although it required a lot of labor and was difficult to store. The breadfruit and coconut are essential foods in the north but could not survive in the climate of New Zealand. There was no immediate danger of starvation because there were always fish, shellfish, crayfish and crabs they could catch in the coastal waters. Gradually through generations of Maori people, they discovered plenty of edible plants and berries of different kinds in the vast forests of New Zealand, the most important of them was the RARAUHE.