Naka Nathaniel: The Voyage to Becoming the Breadbasket of the Pacific

Hawaii has some of the best food-growing conditions on the planet, yet it’s well known that we import more than 80% of what we eat.

Importing jacks up prices, contributes to climate change and puts everyone at risk if there’s a disruption to the supply chain.

It qualifies as one definition of insanity that a place as abundant as Hawaii imports so much food at higher costs and greater harm and risk to ourselves and the planet.

We can continue to lament how we fell into such a precarious place or we can find ways to feed ourselves in ways that are healthy, affordable and delicious. Hawaii can become the breadbasket of the Pacific.

It’s a challenge to wean ourselves off of imported food. But it’s doable.

Keala Kahuanui is up for that challenge. 

In 2007, when she was a young crew member on Makali’i’s voyage to the far-western reaches of Micronesia, the leadership of the double-hulled sailing canoe designated her to be the cook. 

Makali’i, slightly smaller than the Oahu-based Hokule’a, was stocked with canned goods from Costco and supplies from food banks. This was an important and symbolic voyage. Makali’i was to travel to the home island of Mau Piailug, the Micronesian navigator from Satawal who taught Hawaiians the lost skills of long-distance voyaging.

Every six hours, Kahuanui would prepare for the crew shift changes. This was when everyone aboard would eat together. She was responsible for nourishing her crewmates. 

When a crew member didn’t care for another meal of Spam and decided to pass on eating and chose to sleep, Kahuanui understood that as the cook, she needed to up her game. Crewmates skipping meals meant that they’d go 12 hours without food and that could impair their abilities to effectively carry out their tasks and jeopardize the safety of the voyage. 

Using what was available, she made a mixed vegetable stir fry with Spam and shoyu sugar and her crewmate was nourished.

She fed her crew for 27 days, however one part of the voyage to Satawal was incredibly painful for her. Every other day, when she had the stamina, she’d take a 5-gallon bucket of empty cans and opala and she’d throw the trash in the water and hope that the refuse would quickly sink. 

When she emptied the bucket, she worried about the dolphins, malolo and squid she saw swimming alongside the canoe.

“It was so eha (painful),” she said. The alternative was worse: bringing their trash to a tiny Pacific atoll with no refuse station.

Kahuanui resolved to do better next time.

And she has.

This is why voyaging is so important to Hawaii. We are saltwater people and being on the ocean helps us more clearly understand who we are and what our roles and responsibilities are.

Kahuanui and the Makali’i crew, which sails under the umbrella of the Hawaii island nonprofit organization Na Kalai Wa’a, took up the challenge of its renowned navigator, Chadd Paishon.

Five years ago, before a voyage to Mokumanamana, an island 500 miles northwest of Makali’i’s home harbor of Kawaihae, Paishon asked: Could Makali’i be provisioned for a long-distance voyage solely with food grown and gathered on Hawaii island?

Kahuanui, and the island community, stepped up to the challenge.

As food raised on the island arrived, she studied various food preservation techniques.

“I get on YouTube and I listen and learn,” she said. And then she came across warnings of deadly bacteria.

“I need a kumu, I need somebody real to teach us this,” she said. “I can’t be learning this on YouTube. We could kill people.”

With the help of food preservationists, Kahuanui not only learned how to can meals like luau stew, but she has also learned to freeze dry foods grown on Hawaii island. With a little hot water, she can feed a crew with foods that are both nutritionally and spiritually nourishing.

She says it gives her chicken skin to think about what her work represents.

“It’s hope in a jar,” she said. “We would not get the same effect with a can of Spam. These jars (of locally grown food) are the confirmations that I want for our people — this is what they need.”

Kahuanui has become so skilled in provisioning that she will be traveling to Turin, Italy, at the end of September to speak at the Slow Food Terra Madre Conference.

“Slow food” was a movement started in Europe to counteract fast food. It’s dedicated to creating a culinary situation that is beneficial to both the food provider and the consumer. 

Before she shares her manao with the Italians and the rest of the world, she will present at the Council of Native Hawaiian Advancement conference, in Waikoloa, Sept. 17-19.

Kahuanui already shared her knowledge with other canoe families from across the Pacific at this summer’s FestPAC in Honolulu. Na Kalai Wa’a’s canoe, Mauloa, was the centerpiece of the exhibition at the convention center.

The canoe was there to embody a proverb, an olelo noeau: The canoe is an island and the island is a canoe.

What has happened on the canoe now needs to happen on the island. 

Kahuanui responded to a vision and made something significant happen. She fed a canoe crew with food exclusively raised on Hawaii island. Now, the island needs to feed itself.

A new vision is for Hawaii island in the coming decade is to make true strides toward not only feeding itself, but being able to share its abundance with the rest of its oceanic neighbors. 

For those who live above us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the season of harvest, so I’m going to spend the rest of this month writing about the steps needed to make our island home the breadbasket of the Pacific.