Grow Community Festival at Wai‘anae High School

Three or four times a year, Ka‘ala Farms and Wai‘anae High School organize a Grow Community Festival for WHS students in the Natural Resources Academy (which includes students studying agriculture, Hawaiian studies, marine sciences, and food service). The goal of Natural Resources Academy is "taking care of the natural resources we have in Wai‘anae," says agriculture teacher Lei Aken.

The Grow Community Festival is kind of a Hawaiian version of Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard, an organic garden and kitchen classroom in Berkeley. The students learn to build dry boxes, dry fish, smoke meat (in this case, turkey, since it's a week before Thanksgiving), build an imu, pound taro, and use an earth oven to make pizzas.


Above, commercial opelu fisherman Domingo Gomes shows the students how to dry ahi fillets and scrape the meat out of oio which they'll later mix with taro and fry for oio andagi. Though Wai‘anae High School does have an organically-certified garden and some aquaculture where the students raise ogo, shrimp and tilapia, most of the food prepared this day was not raised at the high school.


Uilani Arasato (pounding above), one of 17 interns at Ka‘ala Farms over the summer, takes on an almost motherly role in showing the inexperienced (including me) on how to pound poi. While pounding, she talks of breaking down Wai‘anae stereotypes, the topic of her "I am Wai‘anae 2009" video.


Eric Enos, co-founder and Executive Director of Ka‘ala Farms, putting the pizzas prepared by the students (which includes a few "stuffed-crust pizzas") in the earth oven. Enos says Ka‘ala Farms partnership with WHS is natural. "Our mission is to preserve the living culture...connect families through food. Sustainability [has been] our mission from way back when..But it’s really important that we work with the youth. By empowering youth we really get momentum...Public education really has to be elevated. Otherwise it’s just recruit for the military."


Taro flatbread, made by mixing taro and water.


Taro andagi - the dough is made with taro, bananas, coconut milk, flour, baking soda and sugar, rolled into balls and fried.