In pre-literate Māori society, there was no separation into starter, main course, and dessert. The meal was organized around what the forest, sea, and gardens provided, and especially around tapu (the sacred): certain foods were reserved for gods and chiefs, others for daily life. The great communal cooking method was the hāngī, an earth oven where steam from heated stones slowly cooked roots, birds, and fish. Sharing (manaakitanga) mattered as much as what was eaten: feeding a guest honored the ancestors.

Two pillars of the traditional Māori table: the sweet potato kūmara, brought by Polynesian ancestors and carefully cultivated under the protection of Rongo, and aruhe, the wild fern root that was roasted and beaten to extract a nourishing paste. These are foods from before any European contact — no wheat, no livestock meat, no products of the New World in the American sense.