Robert Oliver's new potent recipes from a Pacific Island Food Revolution

For a good few years now, a revolution has been taking place in Robert Oliver's kitchen.

The award-winning chef, judge, and TV host released his cookbook Eat Pacific this week.

You'll still find your favourite Pacific cuisine with all its classic island trimmings. But little by little, Oliver says so-called cooking challenges have been cropping up.

The celebrity chef said these challenges were based on issues the region faces.

The cookbook is the companion series for the popular Masterchef-style Pacific television programme, Pacific Island Food Revolution.

Watch Robert Oliver's interview below.

Eat Pacific includes 139 zesty recipes from Fiji, Sāmoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Papua New Guinea.

The talanoa to Pacific Days' Brian Ma'a about his latest cookbook and the cooking challenges in the region.

The show, in its third season, is hosted across Fiji, Sāmoa, Vanuatu, and Tonga and has an estimated audience of five million viewers a week, he said.

Oliver said he came up with the idea as a way to revive Pacific cuisine and help address the health epidemics in the region.

"I put a cookbook together from the show a couple of years ago, and within, I guess 30 seconds, I had a note from someone in the Solomons saying, 'Hey, we wanna be in it too'.

"And then my friend Rangi Mitiera Johnson, the cook says, can I contribute? And so it just kind of grew and it grew very informally and organically.

Celebrity chef Robert Oliver and Votausi MacKenzie-Reur, owner of Lapita Café in Vanuatu and a respected nutritionist and community leader, with her copy of Eat Pacific. Photo/Pacific Island Food Revolution

"So, there are 11 countries including recipes from Tuvalu where I've never been. And I don't think many people outside of Tuvalu know anything about the food culture or know much about it.

"So it just grew into this really lovely kind of community who have all participated in the development of this book."

Eat Pacific is more than healthy, tasty, affordable food. This book has a powerful health and food-sovereignty message, he said.

Raised in Fiji and Sāmoa, the New Zealand chef said the local food cultures held the key to better diets, economic sustainability, and combatting diseases such as diabetes and obesity.

Eat Pacific was released on Thursday and you can check out https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/books/eat-pacific for your copy.

Votausi MacKenzie-Reur, owner of Lapita Cafē in Vanuatu and a respected nutritionist and community leader, said the Pacific Island Food Revolution programme was a Pacific solution to a Pacific problem.

"We don't need anything from outside to help us; we have our tradition and our food to guide us."