In the Hawaiian home that Martha Beckwith so often visited to collect the Kumulipo, the meal (pā'ina) is not divided into appetizer, main course, and dessert. It is organized around a staple: the nourishing starch, the 'ai — almost always poi made from taro — around which the accompanying dishes (i'a: fish, meat, seaweed) are placed. One eats with one's fingers, the shared poi bowl at the center. This table-staple, Beckwith found transposed in Jamaica, where Anansi folklore is also told around a communal pot. This set follows her folklorist's itinerary: the Hawaiian staple, its feasts, then the preserved foods, drinks, and travel provisions gathered from Maui to Jamaica to her native New England.

Taro, kalo in Hawaiian, is the totem ingredient of this set. In the cosmogony that Beckwith translated, the taro plant Hāloa is the elder sibling of humanity: one does not argue in front of a bowl of poi, for one is in the presence of an ancestor. Pounded, fermented, cooked, or wrapped, kalo connects these tables.