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The toddy is the sap that comes from an unripe coconut-blossom before the “spathe” inside the coconut bursts. A toddy cutter cuts off the tip of the spathe, showing a bit more than an inch of the unopened blossom. The cutter then binds the spathe with a string and shaves off a thin section of the exposed blossom; the toddy seeps out of the place where the cutting happened. The cutter then pulls the spathe down so that it sticks out horizontally and suspends a coconut shell under the tip to catch the toddy. To drink the toddy right away, one would let it drip into the mouth by a funnel made out of a leaf. The toddy cutter will change the collecting shell twice a day, each time cutting a thin layer of the blossom to expose more sap. As more and more sap extraction happens, the spathe-binding unwinds so more and more until the sap has run dry. Toddy cutting is tricky! A particularly adept toddy cutter can get about two pints of toddy in a day from one spathe. A non-adept toddy cutter…not as much. Toddy cutters usually do their work in the very early morning, at dawn or even earlier, or at the end of the day, toward sunset. Toddy cutters very often sing and sing loudly. Why would someone sing at the top of his lungs while high up in a coconut tree? One reason, relayed to All Around This World by Mike Wright, former Peace Corps volunteer in Kiribati and author of Wright’s English to I-Kiribati Dictionary, is that toddy cutters are singing to let women know they’re up in the trees so that women won’t use the often-roofless outdoor shower houses, called “roki,” until toddy cutting is done.
