“That may seem like a minor modification, but as someone born and raised in Hawaii, its implications resonated. I admit I even made this mistake myself, having first heard of the dish from one of the countless “poké bowl bars” that had popped up around Los Angeles.Īs Hawaiian chef Mark “Gooch” Noguchi put it talking to First We Feast: Let’s straighten up the basics first – it’s poke not poké . With poke bowls, however, the #instafood craze put a cherry on the cake of the decades-long process of commodification and appropriation of Hawaiian culture. “The Algorithm” loves the seemingly innocent smoothie bowls, buddha bowls or açai bowls.
It is not a secret for digital creators in the food industry, myself included, that bowls tend to perform better and get more engagement on social media. The ‘gram has been deciding how and what we eat. Typically for Instagram, it’s style over substance. Poke bowls have taken the online – and offline – world by storm and confused us all as for what poke actually is.
