Right before New Year’s, a friend invited me to attend her family’s annual mochi pounding get together. I was expecting a small gathering of aunts and uncles, but when I got there, the house was filled with aunties, uncles, cousins, nephews, neighbors, friends, friends of friends, and people who had just heard something about some mochi pounding thing in Mānoa, all warmly welcomed by Gordon and Gayle Lum. In typical local style, Mr. Lum pushed me toward the spread of food. “Eat, eat,” he tells me. Then again two minutes later, “Did you eat? You gotta eat, that’s why everybody comes!” Three minutes after that, I’m handed a plate piled high with tripe stew, chow fun, corn clam chowder and braised short ribs, all homemade by Mr. Lum; on the table there’s manapua buns, platters of chicken katsu, barbeque beef and nacho dip; pork, fish and chicken lau laus, to be served later on for dinner, are steaming in handmade wooden boxes set atop propane burners.





Meanwhile, the thock, thock, thock of wood hitting wood resumes behind me. Steaming hot sweet rice is pulled from those same handmade boxes that the lau laus are being steamed in and dumped into an usu, the bowl used for pounding the mochi. “The rice has to be soaked for a couple days before,” says Mrs. Lum about the mochi-making process. “Once the rice is cooked, you’re going to mash it to get the grains sticking together. Then after you mash, you pound.” Once the mochi is smooth, it’s moved to a table covered with flour, where many hands work to stuff the warm mochi with an assortment of fillings like azuki bean, peanut butter and chocolate.

The Lum and Kobayashi families have been hosting mochi poundings since the mid ’90s, but they’ve been pounding much longer than that. “Our grandparents and parents did it a long, long time ago,” says Mrs. Lum, “but back then, we were just kids and we didn’t want to be bothered with that, so eventually we stopped doing it. But as we got older, my cousins, which is the Kobayashi side, started having kids and they wanted their kids to learn how to do it.” Though they’ve adjusted the formula a bit, using propane tanks instead of a wood-burning cauldron to steam the rice, the mochi remains as delicious as ever. There’s nothing quite like freshly pounded mochi, still warm and much softer than the store-bought kind.

This year, Mrs. Lum estimates they’ll pound 150 pounds of rice into the chewy sweets, with many people bringing their own rice to pound. Her family provides 50 pounds of rice, but it’s meant to be shared with others. “I’m not gonna pound all that rice myself,” she says. “We bring all that so that friends will do it.” A dry erase board lists names of people waiting to pound. There’s a couple from Australia, a father and daughter who’s swift strokes make it obvious they’ve done this before, a nephew visiting from California who’s experiencing his first pound.

I ask one of the nieces if she’ll carry on the tradition. “Do you know how much work it is?” she says, looking at me like I’m crazy. “My aunty and uncle are prepping the entire week for this.” I’m sure those words were uttered years ago when Gordon and Gayle were her age.

This year, I unwittingly started a tradition of my own. So much time was spent over the holidays with my biological family, but so little with the people I encounter every day, my work family. The one time of year our house is clean enough to have company over, I invited a few colleagues over for dinner and some ping-pong and karaoke.

Chicken katsu, grilled ribeye, seafood crab salad, baked salmon, seven layer dip, sashimi, Chinese chicken salad, chocolate trifle, pear tart, banana cream pie, pound cake – mom went all out. And because a family always pitches in to help each other out, dad cleaned, Jason grilled the steaks, Donna made her famous crab jun, and my Aunty Elaine, mom’s sister, made a baked sushi casserole and a no-sugar banana bread, making one diabetic guest very happy. “We should all write our names on the bottles of wine or beer that we brought and see if they’re still here next year,” said one guest, automatically assuming there would be a next year.

Food is what inevitably brings us together. More than feeding our bodies, food feeds our spirits, strengthening bonds between family and friends and often building new ones with strangers. We may not agree on the appropriate size of kobu or the exact way to steam sweet rice, but I’m sure we can all agree on that.

January 1, 2012

It’s New Year’s Day and I’ve slacked on stocking my fridge with local food, so I wake up with nothing more to eat than two apple bananas. The lack of my usual New Year’s hangover proves a blessing, or I would be desperately longing for my magical hangover cure: greasy hash browns, ketchup, a butter-soaked grilled cheese sandwich, and a day-long supply of Calistoga bubbly water – of which nothing is locally made or grown. The bananas cure the hunger shakes, but not for long. The rest of the day includes a couple of salads, an orange and Moloka‘i sweet potatoes for dinner – without butter, unfortunately. With New Year’s traffic clogging up North Shore roads, I was hesitant to venture out to the farmers market. Plus, although farmers markets are loaded with local food, a lot of it isn’t organic. And personally, I’d rather eat organic over local, since the latter isn’t always grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, antibiotics or growth hormones.

In 2010, there were 7,500 farms throughout the state utilizing 1.1 million acres according to the 2010 State Agricultural Overview published by the National Agricultural Statistics Survey. While the average farm was estimated to cover approximately 148 acres of this land, O‘ahu is home to a large number of “small farmers” who farm approximately one to five acres. Academics have estimated that pre-contact Hawaiians were feeding roughly 500,000 people with sweet potatoes, taro, ulu (breadfruit), bananas and fish. Today, Hawai‘i has a population of approximately 1.3 million people, and only about 10 percent of our food is locally grown.

So the question is, can we do it? According to several farmers I’ve talked to, they face various obstacles, including lack of irrigation, expensive insurance premiums, short and expensive leases that affect loan qualification, and the simple fact that there’s not exactly an abundance of would-be farmers. With the problems farmers face, can we feed nearly three times as many people as the islands have ever had before with strictly local food?

Not far from my home on O‘ahu’s North Shore is a number of small farms making locally grown produce readily available to residents. Organic produce from Mohala farms is available at the local health food store, organic fruit from Poamoho Organic Produce can be easily obtained, taro is being cultivated in an unassuming area of Waialua at Na Mea Kupono Farms, Meleana’s Farm provides weekly community supported agriculture (CSA) baskets, and the Tin Roof Ranch sells organic, free-range eggs and chickens that they process themselves. What’s interesting is that all of these farmers are new, having left behind an old career for farm boots and dirt, or are still keeping their day (or night) jobs.

It’s people running these small farms who are making rather small but significant contributions towards Hawai‘i’s sustainable future. On the other hand, it’s a lack of dedicated farmers like these that may be an obstacle towards that same goal.

Travis Overly, the owner of ‘Aina Ono Farm Stands, considers himself a new farmer. He recalls his first encounter with agriculture while in California; it was something drastically different than what local children see today. “I call the first farmers I saw in Napa ‘rockstar farmers.’ They pulled up to their farm in a Mercedes or BMW, threw on a pair of overalls and jumped into the fields. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ But here in Hawai‘i you look at the historical aspect, and it’s a paradigm. Kids these days see farming as something to evolve and grow from, something to escape, not something that want to aspire to. Coming from generations of people who were essentially slaves on a plantation, they want to move on to other things.”

Wong could easily rest on his capacity to cook delicious food and manage a talented staff. What sets him apart from his peers is not his ability to cook, but rather his active intrusion into the way we eat and grow food on the islands, and by extension, order our culture. In consistently pursuing the local over the non-local, he is making a political statement about what it means to eat here, now.

Alan Wong knows his numbers and has been making a pitch for the “eat local” movement for years. “The Department of Agriculture says that if we increase local consumption by 10 percent, we make 300,000 jobs and increase our local tax base by $600 million.” He goes on: “So, it’s our company mission to help get towards 10 percent by shining a light on these local growers. We do that, in part, with the Farm Series Restaurant dinners.” Although a week of these dinners is the price of a slightly used sedan, at least the moral component is in place. Wong certainly understands what he is up against. “Things are disappearing all around us. Look at the bees. Without them, we have about seven years on planet earth. I’m doing this adopt-a-beehive program with UH Hilo to help local folks learn about beekeeping. This is just bees though. We used to make 70 percent of our own food, our own eggs and dairy.”

He explains what he’s up to. “I know this restaurant is doing our part to be more self-sufficient and sustainable. There’s a supply and demand thing going on with local production,” he says as he checks off a mental list of points for an interview. “I was just in a civil defense meeting. Who knows how I got invited, but there I was. Without shipping, we’ve got no more than three days of MREs before we starve. I’m trying to make this place more than a restaurant. People raise money with us all the time – really the entire chef population does it so it’s not just us. This is good karma.” More than good karma, this is actually the sort of sermon that makes it seem completely rational to drop half a paycheck on a dinner date.

Alan Wong’s flagship restaurant on King Street in Honolulu is easy to miss if you’re zooming past McCully Street and the more conspicuous chop suey spots. The place requires a slower pace to find. The day I took the elevator up to the third floor, the chef and his staff were reviewing menu items for a forthcoming restaurant to be located in the Grand Wailea resort on Maui, named Amasia.

Arranged on one of the tables were dishes in various forms of development. Simply grilled, large sardines were arranged on a silver platter; poha and caper berries glistened in spiced olive oil; a platter of fried lotus root with mustard powder looked like something I would stand in line for 30 minutes to attack at Costco. Fried ulu and sweet potato spiraled out of a metal container like an edible fire, and a pot of Japanese pork curry with whole peppercorns and macadamia nuts funked up the area, disrupting all capacity for rational thought. I tried not to drool all over a conspicuous notepad. In a vain attempt to maintain professionalism, I sat askew of the table and waited to dig in like a Pavlovian dog after the bell had rung. It was intensely difficult to pay attention to the serious discussion of dish preparation with the full spread awaiting plunder like that. A later review of my notes was a testament to the experience. For a full page all I could write was, “Effing ONO,” like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining when he really lost his marbles.

When Wong reviews his menu, it is a serious affair. Gathered around the table, the young chefs resembled doctoral candidates during a status review of their respective work prior to submission, hanging on the words of their director. He uses silence as an instructional tool much like a stoic professor out of a Kurosawa film, with all moves and words intentional and instructive. In The Blue Tomato, Wong writes about the process of menu development: “Our staff’s reaction and interaction is more important than whether that dish ever makes it onto the menu. … This process also makes anyone offering a critique a better teacher. Criticizing a new dish in front of the staff can be intimidating, but our most successful cooks, who have gone on to become sous chefs of chefs, were the ones who embraced this and met the challenge.” Each staff member was being actively reviewed for talent, and the dishes met the challenge.

New restaurants are notoriously difficult business ventures, and even the best have failed to survive past the watershed two-year mark. No matter what happens with Amasia, the food will be amazing. The concept of the restaurant is the “gastro-pub,” a phenomenon that has been changing the way we eat out for the better. Wong later explained it as “izakaya-style, something that goes across cultures. We’re celebrating Asian street food. There will be traditional tables, and a robata station for certain orders.” In describing the necessary investment discussions, he explained, “I was in a meeting with haole guys from the mainland, and you could imagine how well ‘pupus’ goes over as a restaurant title with them.”

Pupus would have been a great name, but not with the tourists. While the traditional American sit-down offers very few surprises, the pupu platter concept is nothing but hits. What Wong and other restaurateurs have picked up on is the way we eat when we aren’t stuck in our chairs. With smaller plates and more options, sharing becomes a necessity. Eating can be fun again. The chefs that Alan Wong has hired will not disappoint. This is local food unburdened by provincialism. These are local ingredients set free to inspire.

When I asked him what the secret is to cooking for local folks, he spun the question back at me, “How do you tell if say, a Chinese restaurant is good?” To which I reply, “If there’s a table of old Chinese dudes grinding at the corner table at 3 p.m.”

“You got it,” he replied, “Another good sign is if kids like your food. You can’t fake it to them.” Like an ancient sage, the Chef answered my question with an observation. The reason that local folks love his food so much is that it is a reflection of themselves. The food at his restaurant is an artistic, gorgeous interpretation of what we eat at home. These meals are worth every penny.

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