Page Eleven
Jonathan Weisgall
January 21, 1982

are based upon the 236-gram per coconut figure given in Bowes

and C.P. Church's Food Values of Portions Commonly

New York and Philadelphia:

Used (Lippincott,

J2th edition, ¥975, page 107), which

is an authoritative nutritional text.

.

Estimated Marshallese Daily Diet

Item

1)

Estimated No. Grams

green drinking coconut

this is Pollock's
figure--my estimate would
be 2 drinking coconuts

236 g.

Per person per day)
1.8

grated coconuts used in
rice and rice porridge

(using Pollock's estimate

425 g.
(1.8 x 236 g.)

of between 3-15 nuts per
household per meal. I
calculate the mean of
9 nuts per 10 persons to
be 0.9 nuts x 2 meals, or
1.8 coconuts per person
per day)

0.5
10

"du" from coconut
embryo

118 g.
(0.5 x 236 g.)

ounces of "jokaro" (this is

280 g.

my approximation)

“——~?“ounces of “jokamai" (my
approximation)
Total average daily grams
of consumed coconut

(10 x 28 g.)

56 g.
(2 x 28g.)
1,115 g.

As may be readily seen from my analysis of the estimated

Marshallese daily diet, the figure of 1,115 grams of coconut per

person is more than three times the estimate provided by Micronesian
Legal Services. I am rather curious how they arrived at their 300gram per capita rate. After having lived with Marshallese on Utirik
for two years and subsisting on a Marshallese diet, this dietary
estimate is as close as I can come to an approximation of the daily
(cont'd. )

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