It is very fattening and easily digested, and is sometimes prescribed by physicians to consumptives.
As you drive about the suburbs of Honolulu you will see numerous taro patches, and may frequently see the natives engaged in the preparation of poi, which consists in baking the root or tuber in underground ovens, and then mashing it very fine, so that if dry it would be a flour.

It is then mixed with water, and for native use left to undergo a slight fermentation.

Fresh or unfermented poi has a pleasant taste; when fermented it tastes to me like book-binder's paste, and a liking for it must be acquired rather than natural, I should say, with foreigners.
[Illustration: HAWAIIAN POI DEALER.] So universal is its use among the natives that the manufacture of poi is carried on now by steam-power and with Yankee machinery, for the sugar planters; and the late king, who was avaricious and a trader, incurred the dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own near Honolulu.

Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially to guano islands which lie southward and westward of this group.

On these lonely islets, many of which have not even drinking-water for the laborers who live on them, poi and fish are the chief if not the only articles of food.