She Grows Food

by Michelle Galimba

What does truth taste like? What does justice taste like?

These might sound like terribly pompous questions to ask. But they are worth asking as we learn, un-learn, re-learn the question: “What is food?”

What is food?

Food – we speak of it as good or bad, as healthy or indulgent, pretty or ugly, tasty or yucky, clever or boring,strange or familiar, pure or tainted.
What is it that we eat? It was there before each of us, like the air we breathe, and yet more complexly given to us by each other – cultural, social, ecological. It is what we have absorbed already before we became conscious; it is what we are formed from. It is what our first thoughts were bent upon, what our bodies cried out for before there were words. Food is a feeling, an interchange with the world, a necessary blessing.

Food can be beautiful and good. It should be so. Because it is the flower of the entirety of our knowledge, because it is the will of the community to nourish and sustain, to embody itself, animate itself. Because it is the form and medium of our conversation with the web of life, in which humans are but one node.

The pathway of food should be known by all – its path from earth to belly and back to earth. What knowledge is more necessary?

Truth might have a taste. Would we know it when we tasted it?

At L’Ulu a year or two ago, Chef Ed Kenney of Town Restaurant handed me a little plate on which was half of a baby turnip with top attached, glazed with a slightly sweet clear sauce and sprinkled with a few crunchy popped grains. It made me think again about turnips. I had no idea they could be so lyrical. Like a fine green tea with all those scents and flavors of grasses and flowers, of crushed leaf and ground mineral, but more homely, like a turnip is, even when a baby turnip. It seems to me now that Ed Kenney was truthful with that turnip.

Which was a risky thing to do, because, of course, the turnip was very much outgunned and over-shadowed by the flashy, dazzle-y flavors of the usual sort of luxurious concoctions at these culinary grazing events. You know, shrimp and saffron, champagne and mangoes, beef and lobster.

But the turnip was there giving testament. It was clear that Ed Kenny knew these turnips. That they were not just ingredients in a list at the beginning of a recipe; that he had seen and even, perhaps, tasted the soil they grew in, had seen them grow from seed to seedling, to harvest; that he understood their cultivation.

Cultivation, what a miracle it is: the long, long partnership between human and turnip for centuries and millennia, generation upon generation; our relationship to the wild ancestor of the turnip that we met and knew long ago as wild beings ourselves – hunters and gatherers – and brought along with us, brought into our fold, as we became farmers and then scientists, constructed our cities, and then our civilizations. Without turnips and wheat, rice and taro, soy and corn, eggplant and cucumber, we would not be what we are – artists, scientists, businesspeople, teachers – and they would not be what they are without us, and our shaping, our planting and harvesting, measuring and selecting. Our very minds exist within an unacknowledged reciprocity. The civilization that we enact by our highly specialized jobs and technologies cannot exist without the simple turnip.

How do we do justice to the turnip?

Perhaps, simply to remember what it is and what we are, not to forget our long journey together; to taste the reality – bitter, earthy, sweet – of the turnip and remember.

When the whistle blows at exactly 4:30 p.m. tonight this little market will begin accepting EBT (electronic benefit transfer for SNAP fka food stamps).

All morning Libby Smythe’s phone has been ringing. Libby is a member of the non-profit sponsor of this market Wahiawa Community Based Development Organization, the farmers market director and contact person for the market. Coming one after the other, the calls have been people expressing their thanks to the market for opening up their market to include EBT beneficiaries. Dan and Kasha sent out the media release to announce the launch of this service this Monday morning, the immediate response and deep support for this effort by our local journalists is a telling indicator of just how clear the need is and just how much we care as a community for one another. Here’s a link to an article by Erika Engle and an interview with HPR’s Noe Tanigawa.

On the ground in Wahiawa, the flyer Dan created are being distributed to the far reaches. Jackie Akuna, Ag teacher at Leilehua High School and farmers market vendor, made sure that flyers got to all the teachers and students. We’re thinking now we better round up some parking lot volunteers.

Wahiawa is the first farmers market chosen by GreenWheel Food Hub in strategic effort to bring EBT service into Oahu farmers markets that are located in areas of need and have committed to a 100% locally grown produce policy. We all feel it is an honor to be working with the citizens of Wahiawa, this old town with ancient agricultural roots. Wahiawa has witnessed the fall of agriculture in Hawaii and has been significantly impacted and transformed by it. It’s a hardworking community now wracked by unemployment, a large and growing senior population, and apartment complexes once taken up by military families now house families recently arrived, economic and health refugees from Pacific islands. There’s a lot going on in Wahiawa and it’s a good thing that there’s strong and active leadership in this community.

I’m a co-founder of both She Grows Food and GreenWheel Food Hub so you will be hearing a lot about GreenWheel Food Hub here at She Grows Food. She Grows Food has fostered the development of GreenWheel Food Hub from the time it was a little seed in the mind of myself and Chef Gida Snyder during our talks after the KCC Farmers’ Market where she was a vendor and I am still a manager. Both She Grows Food and GreenWheel Food Hub share the goal of repair and regeneration of our local food systems. They also share a profound love of down home community can-do spirit and care, ono food and all that goes into growing good food. I see this in everyone involved in these two individual yet deeply connected efforts – Dan, Linda, Jesi, Rob, Gida, Kasha, Nan. I see the same sparkle in our partners in these efforts too.

There are many people who came in to help make this happen at Wahiawa and who have offered their support to insure this service continues. The Island Innovation Fund and Hawaii Community Foundation have committed to supporting GreenWheel Food Hub’s effort to bring EBT into five Oahu Farmers’ Market over the next year, Wahiawa is the first. Kaiser Permanente and Kanu Hawaii, partnered for an initiative that focuses on supporting neighborhoods experiencing food desert situations, they are helping to cover costs for EBT at this market. Just this past weekend, InterIsland Terminal hosted an event in collaboration with Mission Street Food, The Whole Ox Deli and Prima that focused on a sharing of ideas about food, charitable businesses, and community building. Proceeds from this event are also going to GreenWheel Food Hub to help with Wahiawa Farmers’ Market EBT service and outreach.

Yes, we’re excited. I’m recharging the batteries for my trusty canon hd and am going to try and eke out a long night to edit scenes from tonight’s market for you.

Dan and I are hopeful that we are seeing in all of the energy surrounding this choice of inclusion at this little neighborhood market is a turning point of some sort. A visible point of reference that underscores and illuminates an instinct towards wholeness. Yes, no one gets left behind.

We are very pleased to publish this extraordinary piece by our first guest writer Michelle Galimba. She kicks off our current exploration of food system issues – hearing from women on the frontline. She grows food interviewed Michelle for our profiles on women food growers. She is a scholar, writer, rancher, mom, and a valuable voice for food system recovery here in Hawaii.

I live in the district of Ka’u on the southern end of Hawai’i Island. It is one of the more remote, sparsely populated areas in Hawai’i. There are two small ex-plantation towns, Na’alehu and Pahala, and several sprawling sixties era “agricultural” subdivisions. The traditionally designed towns are pleasant places to live – walk-able communities with an organic feel to them; imbued with the character of the open space around them and by the agricultural activities, both past and present, that brought these communities into being. The subdivisions have very little infrastructure, no town centers, and are extremely auto-dependent in design. It is really striking to see the way in which land use decisions in the past and community design shape our lives.

The sugar plantation shut down in 1996 and the transition has been long, difficult, and ongoing. When I first moved back here it seemed like the only time the media took notice of Ka’u was as the poster community for the devastation caused by ice and other drugs. Most people were driving one or two hours to a resort for work. The community was very much out of balance.

Right from the start, there were ex-plantation workers that were looking for ways to make the transition. They planted coffee or tried other diversified crops. They started ranches on the land that had once been used for sugar-cane. The macadamia nut orchards have continued right through, although they have weathered some really difficult times with low prices for macadamias.

The Ka’u coffee farmers really struggled too. There probably wouldn’t be Ka’u coffee industry without the help of Senator Dan Inouye’s RETA-H (Rural Economic Transition Assistance – Hawaii) grant program. However even with that help getting started there was not much of a market for Ka’u coffee. Even though their coffee was always very good it had no identity. It wasn’t Kona but it cost as much as Kona to produce, and the farmers were having a lot of trouble selling their coffee.

Over the last five years or so there has been an ongoing effort to brand Ka’u coffee, mostly using “guerilla” marketing techniques, since the farmers don’t have money for an expensive traditional marketing campaign. They entered their coffee in international cupping contests, they started a Ka’u coffee festival, they got help in getting media attention for their accomplishments. The state and county of Hawaii have helped out with marketing grants, and they have gotten the support of the community behind them and their product. Now they are getting much better prices for their coffee and have no trouble selling it. They worked together to do this, as an industry. It wasn’t easy, there were a lot of bumps along the way, but slowly they have built a brand for their coffee and viable businesses for themselves.

Branding, which is a form of communication, has been very important in bringing local beef to local markets as well. Our ranch has created a brand to tell its story, and there are several other local beef brands that are helping to transform our industry towards a more locally-supported, diversified business model. It really goes against the grain of most people in agriculture, to be promoting oneself rather shamelessly, but it’s what we need to do. We need to communicate what it is that we do, so that the public can see the value in our products and how they differ from products that are imported. This is how we can create vibrant agricultural businesses and strengthen our rural communities.

To be honest I have to say that the macadamia nut company and the coffee farmers have had to use imported labor to harvest their fields because the locals will not do that work. Finding people that fit on the team at our ranch is really difficult, too. This says volumes about our cultural attitudes towards agricultural labor. It’s amazing how powerful the stories that we tell ourselves are, and how unconscious we are of that power, for good or ill.

The story about rural communities and the work that goes on there generally is cast as: backwards, boring, low-class, poor, demeaning, repressive, unsophisticated, comical. That’s the story that we’ve lived with for as long as I can remember. It’s very difficult for young people to feel good about working in agriculture or to stick around in a rural community when they get negative feedback continually from the culture at large.

On the other hand, in the last few years, there are good things starting to happen in rural communities around the state because of an ongoing cultural shift which has manifested, among other things, in consumer demand for local food. The market for locally grown produce and meats has been and continues to be key towards building a more diversified, resilient agriculture in Hawaii. It is really an exciting time to be in agriculture. Although it’s still a difficult, risky way to make a living, at least there is more social support; there is a story being told that is supportive of agriculture and rural communities.

My experience of living in a rural community is of deep multi-generational relationships among people, plants, animals, and the land itself; of lives lived in direct contact with forest and ocean; of a relatively egalitarian and unregimented society; of people rich in the skills of subsistence and nurturing life.

In some ways the most important element in revitalizing a rural community is to change the story that people tell themselves and that they hear from those around them. It’s not something that requires much money, however it is not without difficulty. We’re used to our stories. It’s hard to let go of our mistakes, even when they are bringing us down. And it’s not as if only rural communities need to change the story they tell themselves. It’s equally true for urban or suburban communities.

To me the crux of the change lies in how we imagine and relate to life, to the life within us and around us. Do we continue to devalue and deny the fact that we are highly dependent, both physically and psychologically, upon the great web of life that brought us into being? Dependent upon but also highly responsible for? With every privilege comes responsibility and we have taken great privileges. Now we would be wise to use our ingenuity to build a civilization that nurtures life, rather than exploiting it.

This is where women have something very important to offer civilization at this juncture. Whether our difference is culturally constructed or actually hardwired into our physiology, in any case, we are less aggressive and more nurturant in our emotional, and therefore intellectual, tendencies. We have a big responsibility in helping to make the shift towards a less aggressive, more ecologically balanced civilization.

Our rural communities are resources for this shift as well. It’s not that we need to go backwards, but that we need to seek out alternatives to our current structures and ways of life. Rural communities have been quietly negotiating the impact and opportunities of modern and post-modern civilization without losing contact with the biosphere, and those skills, practices, and values are important resources for the change in story that our civilization needs to make.

Michelle Galimba
Kuahiwi Ranch, Naalehu, Hawai’i

More about Michelle and Ka’u:
kuahiwiranch.com
www.kaucoffeecoop.com

In the summer of 2011, Chef Gida Snyder and I began brainstorming on strategies to bring EBT (electronic benefit transfer food stamps) to farmers market. A year later we have formalized this effort into a social enterprise called GreenWheel Food Hub, have found a wonderful fiscal sponsor in Feed the Hunger Foundation, and have honed ourselves a mission: let’s do what it takes to create greater access to fresh locally grown food, with a focus on low-income communities.

Our team now includes Kasha Ho and Nan Geller. We have also gained some incredible partners in this effort: She Grows Food (of course!), Kanu Hawaii, Whole Foods, and Kaiser Permanente.

Here’s the video we made to formally announce our EBT efforts and to spread the word about Whole Foods adopting us GreenWheel Food Hub as a Community Partner and our 5% Day at Whole Foods Kahala.

In just this first year we’ve been busy and learned a lot: in April we piloted a pop-up farmers market with Kanu Hawaii and EAH Housing at EAH’s Kalani Gardens affordable housing complex in Mililani, in a few weeks we will see the launch of EBT service at Wahiawa Farmers Market, and we are close to bringing EBT service to Honolulu Farmers Market (the team at Whole Foods has already helped us fundraise to cover start up costs for service to this market). We’ll continue chronicling the progress of GreenWheel Food Hub here.

Lisa Asagi
Editor and Co-founder

This year is turning out to be the Year of Cheese in Hawaii. Before 2012, there was no such thing as cheese made commercially with milk from local cows in the state. Nothing, nada. Chef Gida Snyder and the ladies of Naked Cow Dairy, Oahu’s only dairy, changed that. What started out as a friendly experiment has turned into a full-blown, artisan cheese operation that is already exceeding everyone’s expectations. Bleu Cheese with Ala’e Salt Rub? A young brie style, creamy and rich with a fat content high in omegas from the pristine pastures these local cows are raised on? A hard parm style that shaves like the best of them? It has become The Little Dairy That Could. But then Waianae has a long history of beating the odds and bringing forth into the universe the extraordinary.

Naked Cow Dairy was started by Monique van der Stroom, one of a handful of the nation’s herdswomen. She ran several milking dairies on the island, saw all of them close up, had the gumption to still strike it out on her own. What Monique learned from those years was that they could not compete with liquid milk imports – not at the $5 a gallon price the big box stores sold theirs for (milk that was months old and triple pasteurized.) She knew that any dairy hoping to survive would have to develop a line of value added products – butter and cheese. With the help her a team of women, including her recently relocated sister Sabrina St. Martin (a refugee from Louisiana and Katrina), Monique developed a line of gourmet butter that keeps expanding in tantalizing ways: Toasted Coconut, Macadamia Nut Honey, Hawaiian Salt, Waianae Pesto, Maui Lavender, Italian Summer Truffle.

Enter Gida Snyder, a graduate fresh from KCC’s Culinary Institute of the Pacific with a hardcore passion for helping farmers. It all started with an experiment in mozzarella and the rest is history. Actually it was a whole new beginning. The start of a new paradigm for chef and community supported agriculture here in Hawaii. Because what Gida started was to both go in a create a whole new product line for this farm, as well as an IndieGoGo campaign that successfully crowd-funded $18,000 (surpassing the original $15,000 goal) to cover the costs of the final pieces of equipment needed by Naked Cow to finally begin producing cheese on a commercial level (the funds purchased a heating element for a 200 gallon vat).

We all knew that this campaign was a game changer. Seeing the community come together and make change happen before our eyes, was really something, and something brand new. And yes, this is just the beginning.

Here’s the video launching the Indiegogo campaign:

Here’s the miraculous Pop Up Cheese Shoppe at R & D in Kakaako that helped to give everyone a taste of what they were supporting:

Yes, this is only the beginning. Come along for the ride as we follow Gida, Monique and Sabrina on their cheese making journey. Check back here for more cheese please!

In 1948 seven men of Okinawan ancestry from Hawaii sailed to the U.S. mainland on their first leg of an incredible journey. They were headed to an Oregon hog farm to purchase 550-head to help in a Hawaii-based relief effort for war-torn Okinawa. The tiny island of Okinawa was devastated by the Battle of Okinawa, where more bombs were dropped and more naval guns fired than any operation in the Pacific during World War II. The Okinawan community in Hawaii joined by other ethnic groups raised nearly $50,000 to restock Okinawan hog farms. Needless to say that was quite a remarkable feat back in those days and during those challenging economic times.

Those seven men cared for the animals in makeshift crates aboard a military transport ship on that 28-day voyage from the U.S. to Okinawa. They encountered storms, seasickness and floating mines but they accomplished their mission. The last surviving member of those seven men, Mr. Yasuo Uezu recently passed away in July 2011.

The Chinese dating back to the 14th century influenced the Okinawans’ love for pork. Okinawa is just 400 miles from China and they established an economic and cultural relationship that thrived to the 16th century. When Okinawans started migrating to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations in 1899 they brought their food traditions with them. Practically every family raised pigs for special occasions and when the plantation contracts ended, some of those families raised pigs as major source of income. Today, a few of those Okinawan family farms are trying to keep the culture and tradition alive.

The irony given this historical backdrop is that Hawaii hog farms have been in steady decline for decades. According to the Statistics of Hawaii Agriculture reports, there were 650 hog operations in 1978 statewide as compared to 230 in 2008. Hawaii lost 430 farms or over 65% of its hog operations in this 30-year period. (These statistics include operations with one hog on up so the actual number of commercial operations will be significantly less). Competition with imported pork and the rising cost of feed coupled with residential encroachment and societal pressure will continue to challenge our local farms.

According to the USDA, Americans consumed roughly 50 lbs. of pork per capita in 2008 and for Hawaii the vast majority was imported. Hawaii’s food security or insecurity is a hot button issue as well it should be. The UH College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources estimates that 85% of fruits and vegetables we consume can be grown locally by 2020. Our greatest challenge will be protein security and keeping our livestock industries viable. The Hawaii cattle industry is dependant on an infrastructure that has atrophied and with limited processing capacity. We are down to two commercial dairies on the Big Island and 4 commercial egg farms on O’ahu. We have no commercial poultry farms supplying locally raised chickens and our aquaculture industry has its own share of challenges.

Hawaii’s people mobilized and responded to the crisis in Okinawa after WWII, and most recently to the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. People were in dire need of aid and Hawaii’s people didn’t hesitate and gave generously.

Can we afford a crisis before we act on our own behalf? Can we, as people of Hawaii today demonstrate our support and aloha for our own farming community? Only demand for Hawaii grown products will encourage investment in expanding local food production.

We were compelled to write this commentary after interviewing two Okinawan hog farmers. Their family farms date back to the early twenties and forties with multi-generations involved with their operations. Okinawans in Hawaii have a strong sense of pride for their heritage and culture, as do people of all cultures in Hawaii. If we can collectively summon our local pride in support of our own, we will position our communities to be more resilient and food secure as we move forward.

Lisa Asagi and Dan Nakasone
Co-Founders of She Grows Food