Plate lunch

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The plate lunch is a quintessentially Hawaiian meal, roughly analogous to the Southern U.S. meat-and-three or Japanese bento box. The combination of Polynesian, North American and East Asian cuisine arose naturally in Hawaii, and has spread beyond it. Standard plate lunches consist of one or two scoops of white rice, macaroni salad (in an American style), and an entrée (usually in a Japanese style such as chicken katsu or teriyaki). A plate lunch with more than one entrée is often called a "mixed plate". Although the exact origin of the Hawaiian plate lunch is disputed, according to Professor Jon Okamura of the University of Hawaiʻi, the plate lunch likely grew out of the Japanese bento, because "bentos were take away kinds of eating and certainly the plate lunch continues that tradition". Its appearance in Hawaii in recognizable form goes back to the 1880s when plantation workers were in high demand by the fruit and sugar companies on the islands. Laborers were brought to Hawaii from around the world, including from China, Japan, Portugal, and the Philippines. Kaui Philpotts, former food editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, notes that the laborers "didn't eat sandwiches or things like that; it was leftover rice and a lot of things like canned meat or teriyaki or cold meat or maybe scrambled eggs or pickles, and almost no salad or vegetable." Later on, macaroni salad was added to the plates, as it seemed to bridge national tastes and also mixed well with gravy-covered slabs of meat. Some locations also include the traditional Korean side dish kimchi.

Source: Wikipedia