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.

Big Island farmers' markets and farm visits

I won't bore you with all the million farmers' market photos that we always take, except for this one, because it's especially unique. This is Sandwich Isle Bread Co's levain, the best locally-made bread I've had on the islands (of course, there are stories of Chris Sy's levain fit for Japan's emperor, but I haven't tried it...yet). The best part is the wood-fired, dome-shaped oven on wheels that allows Kevin Cabrera (the baker who calls himself a "yeast-wrangler" among the cattle wranglers of Waimea) to bake bread on site.

I love traveling with like-minded foodies. In this case, Laurie Carlson, president of Slow Food O‘ahu. With some time on our hands, we went to see the attractions: KTA, a local supermarket chain in Big Island known for its commitment to sourcing locally. It didn't disappoint. Here, behind the poke counter, the seafood man breaks down a yellowfin tuna brought in early the same morning.

Again, Laurie and I are of the same mind...we wonder if we have a pot big enough in our vacation rental to throw this fish head in. Unfortunately, our dining cards are fully booked for our stay, so we have to leave it behind.

A visit to Mauna Kea Tea in Ahualoa. Big Island agriculture seems to be betting on tea being the next Kona coffee. The green tea and oolong tea from Mauna Kea Tea is extremely light, though fragrant, and the tea farm one of the tidiest farms we've seen.

A friend of ours works on Jan Dean's Maluhia Farm and Hawaiian Homegrown Wool Co. as a sheep-shearer (how much more of a country job can you get??). Though Jan's main business is producing wool (for which we're actually eyeing wistfully for the chilly Big Island nights), she also keeps chickens.

We catch one of their hens in the midst of laying.

Unperturbed, she grants us a picture-perfect shot of her nest and freshly-laid egg.

For more pictures of the farm (check out our friend's new living space under the tarp!) and some fascinating pictures of chicken processing check out her gallery.