Post #214091 by Kono on Sat, Feb 11, 2006 5:52 PM

From Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania (pg 245):

"Long after night had fallen, and often until quite late, I heard the villagers pounding the yanggona root in their big wooden mortars. This thudding was continuous, like the sound of a stirrup pump, and it was always a woman using the pestle. The Fiji method was different from the Vanuatu way. In Fiji they sluiced this pounded root through a piece of cloth and the narcotic drink was squeezed into the kava bowl.

"We don't chew," Masi said.

But I now knew that human saliva reacted with the root and made a stronger drink---that was why they called Tanna product "two-day kava": You were stupefied for two days on a few shells of the stuff.

At one time, village girls in Fiji had prepared the root by chewing it and spitting it out. Having a winsome Fijian girl smilingly masticating by my side seemed infinitely preferable to me than a filthy man with black tooth stumps munching and drooling. But as Masi said, We don't chew. Non-chewing islands in the Pacific were invariably the islands where the missionaries had exerted the strongest grip, for nothing was more disgusting to a European that drinking someone elses's saliva. Missionaries had encouraged the use of mortars and pestles."