An earth oven, and the way a feast is cooked. Stones are heated in a fire and laid in a pit; pork, sweet potato, greens and bananas, wrapped in banana leaves, go in on top, and the pit is closed with more leaves and earth so that the food steams for several hours. Earth ovens are made across the country and above all in the Highlands, where pigs are a family's wealth and are killed for feasts and exchanges rather than eaten every day. A visitor usually tastes one on a village stay or when a lodge or a tour arranges one.

Is the food in Papua New Guinea spicy?

Rarely. Village cooking relies on salt, coconut milk and the taste of the food itself, and chilli is seldom part of a dish; a sweet potato off the fire is eaten plain. Hotel kitchens cook to international taste.

Can vegetarians eat well in Papua New Guinea?

Yes, at an everyday meal: village food is mostly root crops, bananas and greens, and the markets are full of them. Meat is the centre of a feast, where pork comes out of the mumu, and coastal dishes cooked in coconut milk often hold fish, so a vegetarian asks how a dish was made. Remote lodges cook from what they have, and a dietary need is best told when the stay is booked.

Food guide

What Papua New Guinea Eats, From the Garden to the Mumu

Food in Papua New Guinea comes from the village garden, the forest and the sea, and it is cooked plainly: roasted in the embers, boiled, or steamed in leaves. Most of it is eaten at home, and outside the hotels there are few restaurants. A visitor meets the country's own cooking at the produce markets, on a village stay, or at a feast when a mumu is opened.

Updated 2026-10-05

Kaukau, taro, yams and sago

Each region lives on its own staple. In the Highlands it is kaukau, the sweet potato, grown in mounded gardens and eaten at nearly every meal, roasted in the fire or boiled. In the lowlands and on the islands taro and yams count for more, and on the Trobriand Islands the yam harvest is the high point of the year, its best tubers stored in the villages' yam houses. Along the Sepik River and in the swampy lowlands the staple is sago, saksak in Tok Pisin: the pith of the sago palm is pounded and washed, and the white starch that settles out is baked into flat cakes or stirred with boiling water into a thick, sticky paste. Cooking bananas, roasted or boiled, are eaten everywhere, and in the towns rice and tinned fish from the stores have joined the garden crops.

Greens, coconut milk and fish

Green leaves go into most pots. Aibika, a shrub of the hibiscus family with soft, slightly slippery leaves, is one of the greens most often grown and sold, and it is often stewed with coconut. On the coast and the islands, the milk squeezed from grated mature coconut is the base of the cooking: reef fish and greens are simmered in it, and fish is also grilled over the fire. Green coconuts are opened on the spot for their water.

The produce markets

Every town has an open-air produce market, and the big markets of Mount Hagen and Goroka show the Highlands' gardens in one place: sweet potato, bananas, greens and the fruit of the season, laid out on the ground or on tables, most of it sold by women from the surrounding villages. On the coast, fish and coconuts join the stalls. Betel nut — buai in Tok Pisin — is chewed across the country, and the red stain it leaves on the mouth is one of the first things a visitor notices. Markets trade in cash, in kina, and a visitor comes with a guide or a driver.

Hotels, lodges and village stays

In Port Moresby and the larger towns, hotel restaurants cook international menus. Away from the towns there is seldom anywhere to eat but the lodge, and the lodges of the Highlands, the Sepik and the islands usually cook set meals for their guests, with local vegetables and fruit and, on the coast, fish. A village stay means eating with the host family: whatever the garden, the river or the sea gives, cooked over the fire.

Coffee from the Highlands valleys

Coffee is the Highlands' cash crop. Arabica grows in the valleys around Goroka and Mount Hagen, the Wahgi valley among them, and much of it comes from the gardens of village families rather than from large plantations.

This overview comes from Visaja's worldwide missions database (visaja.com), checked against official government sources; for binding answers, the mission itself always has the final word.