Re-engaging Foodways: Life-courses of Disconnection and Reconnection with Food, Environment, and Sociality in Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on the centrality (and relationality) of food, environment, and sociality in the efforts of a group of education practitioners and learners on Hawai‘i Island to create a more liveable future alongside and despite global, social, and ecological upheavals. The ethnographic material stems from an engaged anthropological research on environmental knowledge and ‘āina-based education in Hawai‘i in early 2022 and digital anthropological encounters established before and after the onsite phase. Within this article we hope to convey the idea that, while the education practitioners and learners draw from knowledge of an ancient food system and even ‘restore’ parts of it, they do not simply replicate the foodways of the past by implementing them one-to-one. Rather, in their re-engagements of past foodways, people create social transformations and move through transitions in innovative ways in order to navigate through a contemporary world of disconnection and reconnection, continuity and disruption, loss and innovation, impoverishment and empowerment, as well as powerlessness and creativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-environment interactions
• ‘āina-based education
• life-courses
• foodways
• engaged anthropology

1. Introduction

The centrality of food to the culture of Native Hawaiians has been increasingly recognised among grass-roots activists, and the awareness of the importance of historic food system [sic] […] has only helped to justify their efforts. There are various projects through which people are trying to learn from the ancient food system and to restore some of its components in Hawai‘i. (Kame’eleihiwa 2016, 75)

While foodways in Hawai‘i have often been linked to narratives of a ‘Pacific paradise’, praising culinary features and traditions for decades, recent and critical research has increasingly turned to its historical and political dimensions (O’Connor 2008). Thus, the current scientific focus is much more on people’s lived practices and how these practices relate to questions of political independence, food security, health issues, agricultural land use, and the value of human-environment relations (Hobart 2016; Kent 2016; Suryanata and Lowry 2016). Food practices are increasingly understood as cultural expressions of belonging in and to Hawai‘i and related political aspirations. Global ecological trends and challenges, however, are also increasingly interwoven with people’s efforts to transform their foodways (Kent 2016; Kimura and Suryanata 2016; Manner and Thaman 2013).

Our article, therefore, focuses on the centrality (and relationality) of food, environment, and sociality in the efforts of a group of education practitioners and learners on Hawai‘i Island to create a more liveable future alongside and despite global, social, and ecological upheavals. The ethnographic sections in this article stem from the engaged anthropological research of Janne, the first and main author, on sustainability, environmental knowledge, and ‘āina-based education’ in Hawai‘i in early 2022.¹ It also stems from digital anthropological encounters that she was able to establish before and after her onsite phase with interlocutors in Hawai‘i; this approach was used partly because of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions that impacted her initial research plans unexpectedly. Anita, as the second author, has long interests in Pacific landscapes, people’s foodways, and life-courses of care that date back to ethnographic research undertaken more than a decade earlier in Papua New Guinea with a focus on the deeply social-relational, emotional, and embodied as well as emplaced nature of daily food exchanges (von Poser 2011; 2013; 2017). In sharing our perspectives, we hope to further discuss that, while the people whom the first author came to know and work with in her field site try to ‘learn’ from an ancient food system and even ‘restore’ parts of it, they do not simply bring out foodways of the past by implementing them one-to-one. Rather, in their re-engagements of ‘past’ foodways, people create social transformations in relation to present-day realities, struggles, and processes of becoming (Biehl and Locke 2017) and thus move through transitions in innovative ways. Food itself thus ‘is an active agent and has ability to mediate human actions aimed at constructing themselves and generating sociality’ (Darmanto 2022, 289).

One way to gain a more comprehensive understanding of such transformations, we believe, is by analysing how and why people push these transformations forward on social, subjective and (inter-)generational levels. Our findings are based on the integration of an anthropological life-course perspective, which helps to reveal the historically shaped disconnections and reconnections with food, environment, and sociality that the people we refer to in this article have experienced, and that they try to overcome while striving towards new, healthy, and decolonial foodways.

2. Conceptual Frame: Foodways over the Life-course

In the anthropology of food and related transdisciplinary food studies, the term ‘foodways’ broadly refers to the ‘behaviors and beliefs surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food’ (Counihan 1998, 6). The foodways that we wish to address relate more specifically to life-courses of social transformations and of disconnection and reconnection with food, environment, and sociality, a topic of long and continued interest in the Pacific (Pollock 1992; 2017; Wentworth 2017). In order to more profoundly understand the entanglement of foodways and the life-course, we deploy the processual, relational, and ever-changing notion of sociality (Carrithers 2017; Darmanto 2022; Long and Moore 2012; Ingold 1990; 1991; Strathern 1988), which implies a ‘generative potential of the relational field in which [persons] are situated and which is constituted and reconstituted through their activities’ (Ingold 1991, 371). In so doing, we point to an ‘evanescent but vitally important matter of interaction as a site of constant fecund motility which routinely produces both the new and the routine in social life’ (Carrithers 2017, 127). A sociality lens helps us in analysing the social transformations that are mediated through concrete activities of producing, cooking, consuming, and sharing food and that are considered relevant to ongoing constructions of belonging and the making of contemporary Hawaiian relationality and self- and personhood. Such a making includes one’s political positioning in a postcolonial reality, too, as part of a larger process of implementation of ‘visions of food democracy’ as described by Kimura and Suryanata in their introduction to Food and Power in Hawai‘i (2016). Food engagements always entail political power as engrained in economic market structures and food pricing, but also in agricultural history, agreements, and government regulations, which are closely linked, in turn, to socio-cultural understandings of personhood and contextual structures (Kent 2016; Kimura and Suryanata 2016; Lukens 2013). Food engagements and political aspirations intertwine when food itself becomes a ‘tool for resistance’ as Lukens (2013, 1) argues with reference to Hawai‘i:

When people and countries reclaim their food sovereignty/security (defined as the capacity of communities to maintain and control their own food systems), they are more capable of negotiating the terms of their larger political relationships – both with national and foreign governments. (Lukens 2013, 1)

With regard to these processes, we expand the definition of ‘foodways’ by analytically addressing some of the emotional and affective dynamics which both shape and are shaped by people’s food-related practices and forms of care (von Poser and Willamowski 2020), on the one hand, and related political evaluations, mobilisations, and decisions, on the other. According to our understanding, these dynamics become only fully graspable through the systematic integration of an anthropological life-course approach (Danely and Lynch 2013; von Poser 2017) which serves us to shed light on the social-relational nature of these dynamics.

During one of their first digital meetings, when Janne was in Hawai‘i, she shared with Anita her experiences of becoming aware of the social and affective efforts that some of her interlocutors obviously undertook in the re-engagement of local food systems that they considered to be their ‘own’ food systems and that had been denigrated, denied, and erased as a consequence of settler-colonialism (Chao 2022; Darrah-Okike 2020; Kimura and Suryanata 2016; Mauriello and Cottino 2022). A vivid dialogue was set in motion, in which questions concerning the importance of people’s life-courses emerged as a joint focus of interest and one possible analytical avenue to better understand how, when, and why people relate to their foods and environments in specific ways and which forms of sociality they consider paramount in sustaining their lives and relations with regard to foods and environments. This is in line, we believe, with Hobart who, in pondering the question of what it means to eat ‘local’ in the Islands of Hawai‘i, claims that food studies scholars

must also account for the complexity with which its residents understand (and perform) their relationship to the Islands through food in ways that are intersectional, at times contradictory, and always historically grounded. (2016, 428)

Life-course approaches are especially common in transdisciplinary research on aging. They are used to reveal the interplay of different historical, political, social, economic, and biographical influences at different points in life, which are constitutive for the quality of life as people age in time and space. A life-course approach takes into account people’s individual experiences and the relational, historical, and political contexts of their experiences, the decisions which they made during their lives, their opportunities and missed chances, and how all this informs their understandings of self and other.

Life-courses, firstly, always unfold as ‘linked lives’ (Hutchison 2019). The notion of ‘linked lives’ is an important analytical life-course pillar that sheds light on the social relationships that people form, maintain or discard over generations within families and within broader social surroundings. Moreover, life-courses are always influenced by certain ‘transformations’ and ‘transitions’. The anthropologists Danely and Lynch (2013) speak of ‘transformations’ to address large-scale and sometimes radical and dramatic changes that people may experience in different local, national, or global contexts, and they speak of ‘transitions’ to define the changes that people individually experience as part of their social and psychological developments; the latter term also denotes possibilities of agency within particular historical realms and as related to the timing of and the linkages between life-courses.

In drawing attention to the profound entangling of food practices and people’s life-courses, we hope to bring forward the idea that

[f]ocusing on […] the life course allows anthropologists to unpack the temporal dimensions of cultural practice, the ways people reflect on their pasts and imagine their futures. (Danely and Lynch 2013, 18)

In the next section, we delve into the life-courses of four educational practitioners and trace their reflections on their paths as well as their transformative ideas and practices.

3. Ethnographic Setting and Methodological Approach

The ethnographic data presented is drawn from long-term critical engagement and ongoing research both on site and online (via digital ethnography) with education practitioners and learners who live and work on Hawai‘i Island. The first author² started this research on the basis of several encounters of mutual resonance during the beginning of her doctoral project, which had evolved besides her professional involvement in the national monitoring of the UNESCO program Education for Sustainable Development in Germany. During this early and transdisciplinary phase of work, she realised that local voices and perspectives based on Indigenous repertoires of knowledge were oftentimes missing in the program and, therefore, attempted to search for partners in order to diversify knowledge, on the one hand, and develop a collaborative format based on contemporary engaged anthropological research, on the other, as one possible way of a critical and decolonial approach. The first author had already learned of its importance in terms of ecological sustainability, to adapt to climatic changes, during a stay in Fiji as part of an intercultural youth exchange program in 2014 and 2015. In 2020/21, she thus contacted educational institutions in Oceania (mostly Fiji and Hawai‘i³) and received the strongest response from NGOs and educational practitioners in the context of ʻāina-based education in Hawai‘i; this form of education considers

[t]eaching and learning through our deepening kinship with the ʻāina so our people, communities, and lands thrive. ʻĀina refers to land, sea, and air—all that feeds, heals and sustains us (https://kumu.io/hlf/aina-based-education).

In this context, the first author tried to deploy a methodological approach of careful encounters, dialogues, and learning relationships to maintain both mutual resonance and the recognition of diverging perspectives from partially interconnected worlds (Carpena-Mendes, Virtanen, and Jessen Williamson 2022, 310). In order to do so, she accompanied people who agreed to become partners in her research to formal and informal learning settings, such as classroom teaching, online training for educational practitioners, and non-formal workshops for gardeners and farmers. Additionally, she participated in various online events and workshops and physically attended community workdays. Participant observation served as the central data collection method, however, due to the educational context and the epistemological centrality of teaching and learning, her own learning was significantly shaped by expert interviews. These interviews took place online before and after the research phase on site, but also during the fieldwork on Hawai‘i. Due to various debates about ethical guidelines for the implementation of anthropological research in decolonial and Indigenous research contexts, the first author chose the special approach of volunteer work and learning by doing within the framework of participant observation.⁴ To establish an approach of a reciprocal relationship between researcher and researched, she supported the different projects voluntarily and worked on a teaching farm, participated in community days for the reforestation of ecologically relevant settings, helped to provide tourists with low-threshold information about marine conservation, and supported the implementation of after-school programs. The method of learning by doing was particularly useful: This concept goes back to Gaudet and colleagues and was developed especially for Indigenous research contexts in which mutual learning and teaching are of central importance. It thus focuses on learning from each other through observation, listening, and the sharing of knowledge (Gaudet, Dorion, and Corrigal-Flaminio 2020). ‘Learning by doing also means that we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work, in this case, it was supporting the revitalisation of community gardens’ (Ferreira et al. 2022, 566). Gaudet and colleagues, however, originally conceptualised the method as even more focused on the ways and embodiments of Indigenous independence efforts, which are not just about a cognitive exchange, but about connecting ‘hearts, bodies, voices, and minds’ (Gaudet, Dorion, and Corrigal-Flaminio 2020, 19). Learning by doing in the first author’s research context is connected and specified with the Native⁵ Hawaiian concept of ‘ike maka (literal translation: visual knowledge), which she variously experienced while volunteering within the different educational programs. The ‘‘ike maka does not refer to a purely cognitive learning process but learning and experiencing while doing it, and thus embodied learning or knowledge that you can experience sensorially’ (Saffery 2019). This kind of data generation also took place in her research context but is only marginally represented within the data corpus of this article.

During fieldwork, the first author had different key informants, among them Deb, Kāne, Leilani, and Makao⁶, which are the main protagonists here. All four are education practitioners themselves, though in different settings and roles. While Deb was a teacher who was in charge of a school garden and conducted classes, Kāne and Makao managed two very different properties and farms. While Kāne took care of a farm with crops (vegetables, fruits, and medicinal plants) and trained students and gardeners, Makao supported the development of a native forest system [comparable to what Manner and Thaman define as high-elevation forests within their model of Pacific island polyculture (2013, 345)] and worked mainly with volunteers from the local community. Part of their everyday educational work also includes transmitting knowledge on various aspects of agriculture and land use. Leilani worked in an NGO which she herself had founded to recreate relationships between the community and a specific sacred place. The cultivation and processing of food, however, is only one (partly secondary) aspect of the protagonist’s content work, which focuses mainly on the aspect of cultivation, and less on contributing knowledge on ways of eating per se. Other interlocutors also provided very valuable insights. Most of these individuals were involved in administrative, scientific, and volunteer education work.

For this article, the first author will explore the question of how her research partners enacted and interpreted the foodways which they considered relevant and appropriate when pondering their contemporary relationships with the environment. Based on the empirical data, the following three aspects will be highlighted: first, a perceived disconnection with what they called ‘traditional’ foodways against the background of Hawai‘i’s colonial and imperialist history; second, (intergenerational) aspects of re-learning and re-engaging these foodways; and third, the reference of food to bodily health and emotional well-being, especially in times of crises such as the aftermath of Covid-19 and inflation.

4. Empirical Insights

In the following, the empirical basis of this article with regard to Hawaiian foodways is addressed.

4.1. Hawaiian Foodways, their Historical Web, and Current Tendencies

In this section, attention is paid to the fact that foodways are always ever-changing in terms of the resources and techniques that are available as well as across generations. It is also shown that they are changing in ways that make visible how people relate their own worldviews and social and political engagements to societal, spatial, and material transformations, to the colonial violence in local and global history, and to present-day forms of life.

Pacific Island countries can boast a long history of diverse agronomic use. For example, food has traditionally been grown through rotating cropping zones, agro-forestry systems, and home-garden use systems, among others. Kimura and Suryanata point out that ‘[w]hen Captain Cook came ashore in 1778, the Hawaiian society already had a well-developed knowledge system to manage the islands’ natural resources for supporting its people’ (2016, 3). Kame‘eleihiwa refers to the ahupua‘a system which describes land divisions that run from the highest point of the mountain to the lowest point at the sea, as an important knowledge system for food-sufficiency (2016). While there is a long tradition of agriculture on the Hawaiian Islands, they ‘went into a long-term decline by the mid-nineteenth century, a consequence of depopulation, land alienation, and commercial cultivation of sugar and pineapple’ (Manner and Thaman 2013, 351). The first European and American settlers began to cultivate Hawai‘i and grow sugar cane as early as the 1700s. Further political takeovers, such as the privatisation of land from the 1840s onwards, also influenced agricultural use and the disruption of Indigenous land use, culminating in the annexation of Hawai‘i in 1898 (Darrah-Okike 2020, 3). The expansion of plantation agriculture and the political interference of white Americans and Europeans in Hawaiian affairs are therefore historically closely linked. Hawai‘i was further known as an ‘agricultural state’ (Suryanata and Lowry 2016, 17) due to its high level of crop cultivation. The changes to food systems described in this article can also be assigned to the discourse of gastro-colonialism or food colonialism (Chao 2022; Fresno-Calleja 2017; Perez 2013) due to its historical foundation in settler colonialism.⁷ Perez refers to the violent curtailment of Indigenous agricultural experience and knowledge as well as the violent takeover and occupation of land, which is alienated for military purposes, among other things, and is no longer available to the inhabitants (Perez 2013). But what significance do these immense historical paths of agriculture carry for the shaping and evaluating of contemporary foodways?

Even before the first author arrived in Hawai‘i she was confronted with the topic of food and foodways. While looking for places to stay she had an online meeting with a family which offered her a room to stay. One of the first questions they asked her concerning living together was whether she cooks and likes cooking. At that time, she found the question quite odd. It took her by surprise that it was one of the first questions they asked her since to her cooking was not optional but a daily task. A passage from her fieldnotes, written a few weeks after her arrival, mirrors her realisation that cooking for oneself and one’s family would not come as naturally as she had thought:

Cooking for yourself is just not the norm when everyone is eating out (fast food). Among other things, this is also because food is so damn expensive, and even in the supermarket, ready-made products/prepared products are cheaper than fresh ones. And this, where in the backyard of my hosts, a wild papaya tree (volunteer) bears as many fruits as I could eat papayas in a week (December 2021).

What the first author experienced firsthand on site was a feeling of being caught between seeing that there was a backyard on which to grow the produce she was consuming, and realising that the land was not being used by her. However, since she (and to some extent her host family) did not know what diseases the tree had, what nutrients were in the soil, or when the proper harvest times were, the (fertile) habitat was not used to its full extent. She had to resort to supermarket products with feelings of frustration because she knew that the same products could also be grown in her immediate environment, supposedly in an ecologically sounder way and a lot cheaper. With other products, such as lemons, this was the opposite, and her hosts were able to use the fruits for barter systems with neighbours and colleagues, which were easily settled in overlapping harvest periods (e.g. citrus fruits and avocados) through individual agreements. While the first author would interpret this in her German home setting as an expression of a disconnect with agricultural land use due to its (capitalist) everyday life surroundings and structures, in the Hawaiian context the meaning differed.

A feeling of dependence on supermarket products could be described as the imperialist consequences of land use⁸ in Hawai‘i. In the 2020s, 85-90% of all food products were imported (Kukahiko 2020; Miles et al. 2019; The Hawaiian Islands, History). Inflation has afflicted Hawai‘i like no other US state since the 1990s and makes it one of the most expensive US states to live in (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). Even if, according to Kent, there is no direct link between the high prices for food and the transportation costs caused by high import rates, the high import figures weaken the ability to feed the population independently (Kent 2016, 38). At the same time, Hawai‘i Island in particular is still one of the most fertile places in the world, even after decades of monocultural land use and military presence⁹ (Hobart 2016; Juvik 1998; The Hawaiian Islands, History). Nevertheless, in 2010, the Hawai‘i foodbank released numbers indicating that ‘79 percent of client households served are food insecure, meaning they do not always know where they will find their next meal’ (Hawai‘i Foodbank 2010; Kent 2016, 47).

This misfit and the suffering caused by the people in Hawai‘i having to work hard to earn enough money to buy imported, pricey food is described by Kāne with the following words: ‘They’re slaving their whole lives away, just to earn pieces of paper, to go and trade that piece of paper for food, when they can grow that food in their backyard. To me, that’s insanity’ (Kāne, November 2021). Within Kāne’s use of words, a colonial, imperialist connotation is expressed: Hawaiians slave their lives away to adapt to an economic system that often forces them to work more than one job to earn enough for the buying of food which could be locally grown. Kāne’s statement clearly can be interpreted as a description of food colonialism (Perez 2013), the consequences of settler colonialism, and the historically perpetuated cultivation of capitalist logics. This, in turn, keeps them too busy to grow, take care of, and harvest food themselves, as he concluded.¹⁰ In his view, it would make a lot more sense to live off the land and therefore work the land that can provide one with food all year round, as he himself does. Expanding local food production could also create jobs and boost the local economy, at the same time, an expansion would also entail incalculable risks, such as the spread of new pests or water scarcity mainly due to climatic changes (Kent 2016, 39).

Another interlocutor referred to the consequences of western/ imperialist land use in the following way:

[F]rom a state level perspective, you know, our challenge is to take a system that has severed Hawaiians from our traditional sources of knowledge production rights, a system that has created that erasure to civilise and to teach our children to adopt their values and erase that from and to create knowledge consumers, right, which makes them become dependent on that knowledge, it makes them normalise the idea that we live in one of the most fertile places in the world, but 90 percent of our food is imported, right? So that’s become normalised. We don’t question that. We don’t question the fact that – why aren’t we forcing Costco and Walmart to use locally grown foods and support local farmers and that kind of thing. (October 2021)

Contemporary populations in Hawai‘i, then, are used to having most of their foods imported due to the historical and violent displacement of traditional farming practices, as Kāne said within informal conversations in February 2022. He further explained that people have been separated from the knowledge of what a different way of eating might look like. In this economy, which made it impossible for them to maintain a self-determined way of food cultivation, they could only be consumers, not producers. As Laudan argues, good food is food that is freely chosen and that allows for the enacting and shaping of your own life, a life in which choices are not dictated by the most powerful segments and actors of society (Laudan 2013). Acquiring relevant alternative knowledge is not trivial, either, as another educational practitioner emphasised in February 2022. Many people could not identify with the learning content that the financing organisation of my interlocutors’ network offered because it was too ‘continent-based’. The food selection described was considered just as inappropriate as was the lack of consideration of Hawai‘i’s cultural systems of belief, world-making, and infrastructure. At the same time, the dependence of many of Hawai‘i’s inhabitants can hardly be linked solely to a lack of knowledge about how to cultivate the land. Rather, it seems to be both an expression and a consequence of centuries of perpetuating and augmenting imperialist values and capitalist structures. Another interlocutor explained that the normality of shopping in supermarket chains instead of growing food also had to do with aspects of social injustice and historical trauma, given that the local populations were harshly sanctioned for practicing traditional ways of life. All these aspects had a severe impact on the local food system. But even if it appears, at first glance, that the prevailing food system in Hawai‘i had no connection to a ‘precolonial way’ of food consumption, the link is complex: Western fast-food culture can be interpreted as a postcolonial result and cultivating one’s own garden despite capitalist and financial constraints can be classified as a decolonial practice. Both, postcolonial contingencies as well as the decolonial modes that are geared towards mitigating such contingencies, can unfold at the same time. The statements that were shared with the first author mostly mirrored an understanding of disconnection to past food systems. It needs to be emphasised though that this does not represent the first author’s empirical data in total. Almost all of her interlocutors wished to reconnect with their environments in a way that they explicitly correlated with a more ‘traditional’ mode, relating to what they clearly defined as ancient Native Hawaiian practices of land use. Most of them also took efforts to accomplish both, that is, to keep their own farm and work on the land in their (free) time and to pursue a job with a steady (though not high) income to gain money, which to spend for other affordances such as, for instance, gas. In their research, Kimura and Suryanata also highlight the importance of civil society practices and efforts in ‘shaping their food system’ (2016, 1). A more elaborated example of reconnection will be given in the following section.

4.2. Re-engaging Foodways across Generations

Due to the structural dissemination of the Hawaiian language but also of cultural practices such as Hula or ancestral ways to grow endemic food, former local culinary knowledge is not necessarily part of everyday food practices. With the colonial rules of sanctioning local cultural practices, the value of these practices was dispelled. As one interlocutor explained, ‘some parents and grandparents do not value growing food like our generation does’ (October 2021). Also, the career pathway of a farmer could be perceived as a ‘low career path to take’ (October 2021), due to low income but also in terms of prestige.

Makao, one of the first author’s research partners, told the story of his family’s connection to growing kalo.¹¹ He described himself as hailing from a Native Hawaiian family and lived on Hawai‘i Island, although he and his family lived on O‘ahu in the interim. He himself belongs to a younger generation of his family and referred to generational differences:

When you think about, like, my grandfather, for example, so good at just observing, he was a mechanic [?], but he grew up in a remote, remote community in Waipi’o Valley. That’s where he was born, and he grew up raising Taro. And so my whole life, he’s always had Taro in his yard. And he’s just naturally like, knows what’s going on in the environment around him, like he can just tell. And I don’t even know that he realises – how attuned to nature that he actually is. And so there’s kind of been some generational gaps, I think, in a lot of our communities, where the elders of our communities just held that because that was how they live, that was how they grew up, that’s how they had to survive, is in order to be attuned to their place and recognise the signs of what’s going on around them. And as we become more modern and kind of disconnected from, you know, our food coming from our land that we’re taking care of. We’ve also lost connection to some of those practices. So, I think we’re just in a process of trying to bring back that connection, although our lifestyle might be different, that doesn’t mean that these practices aren’t still important. And so that’s, that’s really what we’re trying to do. (Makao, March 2022)

Even though several interlocutors, who described their relation to Hawai‘i in similar ways as Makao, have found ways to continue taking care of the land both on the basis of agricultural tasks and via off-farm professions, it seems that for Makao’s family the lesson learnt from personal experiences was that one cannot take care of land and live a fulfilled life in ‘modern times’. For them, the goal was to get ‘ahead’ and qualify within the capitalist terms of a tourism economy. Makao instead is now challenging this narrative by pursuing a profession according to the goals that the older generations have abandoned, and he is now thriving since, as he said, he feels provided with a sense of security and a protection from poverty.

In Makao’s family, it was (only) his grandfather’s generation that grew up growing endemic crops in the backyard. As a result of that, he not only held specific knowledge about cultivation but also was and still is as, Makao called it, differently attuned to a place than Makao and his parents. Ontologically speaking, his description of the grandfather includes the notion of an affective closeness between humans and the environment and of taking care of the land in a specific way (mālama ʻāina). Even though his grandfather grew up learning and applying the cultural practices, these practices became less valuable throughout his life, as Makao explained:

And so my grandfather, [left at a really young age and moved from Waipi‘o Valley, Hawai‘i Island to Honolulu on O‘ahu.] He grew up, you know, out planting kalo, hunting, fishing in order to feed his family. And I think his way of keeping a little bit of home with him was to continue gardening, that was just the way that he grew up. He’s the oldest of 12, and so his younger brother, one of the youngest, stayed here and had to do that kind of work. They worked for the poi¹² factory. And so my grandpa's younger brother, you know, he would have to haul the 100 pound bags of Kalo around and do that kind of work and they lived in poverty. (Makao, March 2022)

Learning how to grow kalo did not only imply that one is learning how to grow a vegetable that will nourish oneself and one’s family. Rather, it is considered as a means to get into contact with one’s ancestors and thus reconnect in a more substantive embodied, emplaced and spiritual way with the land. The taro plant is understood as one of the most important ancient crops since it carries central cosmological importance: the plant emerges from the grave of the stillborn child of the gods Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, and only then Hāloa, the first human ancestor, which people in Hawai‘i claim their descendance from, was born.¹³

[T]he two (kalo and man) are bound together as brothers through parentage and a profound reciprocal kiaʻi [guardian of the land] relationship. Each feeds the other; both survive. (Kagawa-Viviani et al. 2018, 5)

Learning how to grow kalo and how to process it, nevertheless, did not help Makao’s grandfather and his brother when they lived on O‘ahu. On the contrary, economic conditions forced them to become manual labourers at a poi factory, and, as Makao described it, live in poverty. He emphasised that, as children, the grandfather and his brother experienced the hard labour in the poi factory and still went hungry. Living in Honolulu, the family could not grow their own food, as they did in Waipi‘o Valley, and so relied on the low salary of hard labour, which was still not enough. Speaking English and working in the tourism sector with its higher income was therefore understood as a way to escape poverty and hard physical labour, as Makao further explained. For this reason, also his uncle did not support his wish to work on the ʻāina (within agriculture), let alone become a farmer because of what he experienced in his life:

And so, whenever – when I was growing up when I was talking with that uncle of mine about, you know, my interests [in working on/ interacting with the ʻāina]. He did kind of speak down on it, I think, because he thought about how hard he had to work as a young boy, but that they would still be hungry, like they would do all this work and be hauling all of this Kalo and stuff but it was to make such little money for themselves. And so it was a hard way to live (Makao, March 2022)

Makao, on the contrary, had always felt drawn to the land of his grandparents’ generation. He spent a lot of time on Hawai‘i Island during his vacations and felt strong family ties there. The area and the land hence felt like home to him. Whereas Makao was interested in learning more about the cultural practices but also the Hawaiian language, the generation of his uncle and parents still linked these practices with poverty, and were therefore less connected with Hawaiian practices per se, as Makao continued:

And then in my parents’ generation, like, total disconnect, didn’t really grow up raising food, gardening or anything like that, because the ideal is that to get ahead, you know, my parents didn't even learn Hawaiian in school. Although it was an option for them. People were really encouraged to learn Spanish or Japanese. So my dad learned Spanish and my mom learned Japanese. And the idea was that if you learn those languages, you’ll be better equipped to work in tourism and, and, you know, work in those industries that can make you more money. (Makao, March 2022)

Nevertheless, the roots of his grandfather’s growing kalo were still there and became a means to also reconnect his mother to other Hawaiian practices such as hula.¹⁴ For Makao, this process eventually set in motion his own reconnection:

And so, I think I was lucky enough that having my grandpa continue to always raise taro in his yard, and then my mom did find hula [as a cultural practice for herself]. And that was kind of the cultural practice that grounded her. And through that she found other cultural practices. And so, by the time I came around, like, those things were just happening in the house around me. My mom danced Hula my whole life from, you know, when I was a little boy, up until she actually finished as a kumu¹⁵. So my exposure to that was much greater than what the kind of exposure that my parents got. And so now, that also helped to build my interests [I] think. And so that’s why I've kind of turned back towards, perhaps with my grandparents and great grandparents would have done but again, we live such a different life even than two generations ago. So finding new ways to integrate that into the modern life that we live. (Makao, March 2022)

For Makao it was not only about learning the knowledge of his grandparents but also adapting it to the world he lives in today. Nevertheless, he also mentioned the emotional challenge of pursuing such different lives and values within such a small age gap.

Coming back to what another interlocutor said about Hawaiians being consumers only, Makao’s challenge was not only to gain knowledge and therefore become a producer himself but also constantly adapt and transform the knowledge (or agriculture practices) he learned within the specific regional context and time. In this sense actors like Makao not only re-learn foodways but re-engage with them in a way that is suitable to their everyday life. For example, Kalo today is not only grown on larger fields but in buckets on small balconies in Honolulu since people want to grow kalo but do not have the space to grow it on a field. They therefore adjust the practice of planting to their housing conditions.

As for Makao, after a lengthy search, he found suitable career opportunities that allowed him to pursue his agricultural interests and live on the island to which he felt strong family ties. Thus, so far and with reference to his life-course, he has not only felt and pursued an emotional connection, especially through his connection with the region, but has valued other attributes in terms of an understanding of living in poverty and wealth which he connected to speaking and learning Hawaiian, as well as living and taking care of the land of his ancestors. This approach to foodways was also reflected in other interlocutors’ statements. Among the people the first author spoke with, there was a high appreciation for what their ancestors had accomplished: ‘[T]he ways that Hawaiians were able to grow and produce food and manage like their ocean, and water resources. Like that was sustainability. That was like the gold standard’ (other interlocutor, February 2022). At the same time of course, contemporary people do not live in the same way, since a lot of infrastructural, political, societal, environmental, and economic criteria have changed. Kāne, for instance, described this as a difficulty within their lives: needing to adapt to a system that values capitalist lifestyles and values. It takes more than time to recognise how to use the local land.

4.3. Foodways of ‘Health’

The first author’s empirical impressions were not only related to the agronomic use of the land and the cultivation of kalo. The knowledge about foodways was not limited to the planting, caring for and harvesting of endemic plants which, for a long time were not recognised by the majority of people, but included the practices of how to eat these plants. For this reason, the educational practitioners Deb and Leilani did not only teach the participants/ children how to grow the food. More importantly, they also taught them how to harvest, preserve, and prepare them. Sometimes students would not know how to eat the specific food they grow because they either do not know the plant due to the extinction or displacement of endemic plants, or because they only know the supermarket version of the prepared food. It should also be emphasised that the educational policy framework of the Hawaiian Office of Education P4 (practices, projects, programs, and policies), which ʻāina-based-education is assigned to as an educational concept, explicitly states that not only students of Native Hawaiian descent benefit from the incorporated strength, place, and culture-based experiential learning: Kukahiko and colleagues illustrate this with the pedagogical markers of retention of content or lifelong learning, among others (Kukahiko 2020, 197). Even though the majority of the teaching and learning contexts, which the first author visited, were attended by teachers and learners of Native Hawaiian descent, the entire student body cannot be described as homogeneously Native Hawaiian. Therefore, alternative terms for ‘traditional’ foodways and their related linguistic expressions were in use, too, such as ‘local¹⁶’, ‘endemic’ and ‘non-invasive crops’, in order to make them more accessible to participants without Native Hawaiian family connections.

All the food that was grown in the garden went back to the students in the school community and the community meal (Deb, March 2022).

[W]e realise a lot of folks, they would say no to taking the food home because they didn’t know how to prepare it. So, then we created that family poi program that I mentioned earlier, where we teach them how to make the implements and teach them how to cook the kalo and turn it into food. And it’s those skills that not all of us are grown up with. And so, on some level people will be like, Oh, that’s just a poi program, what does that have to do with ʻāina-education or whatever. But it’s when you’re changing practices and families in really small ways, like just teaching them: How do I make kalo for my family? That changes, does actually, it has big changes, right? Your one meal a day maybe changes to be our traditional food, or, you know, kids seeing their place as something that feeds them and not just, you know, land that they play on our land that where my school is located. Like it’s actually a place that feeds us. So all of it is a part of it. But what makes it even cooler is, right, if you teach the story about the food that they’re making, right? If you teach them if you bring in an elder who teaches them how to garden, right? Or if you, right, so it’s all those added layers of. So it’s not just a garden, right? They see it as connected to this larger thing. (Leilani, February 2022)

Another interlocutor, Leilani, who worked within an informal education setting, stated that they had created a poi program after learning that not only knowing how to harvest the plants but also preparing food out of it was challenging for the community members they have worked with. By consuming unprocessed food produced without flavour enhancers, moreover, re-engaging with meals such as poi was also a means to prompt a direct sensual and gustatory re-evaluation for some of the participants. In her description of her experience, Leilani referred to several levels: On the one hand, she mentioned the adaptation of the learning content and the addition of the poi program. This created a different way of engaging with the plants, but also with the land itself. It was therefore no longer ‘just’ the environment that surrounded oneself, but an interaction that was created, even if it did not exist without obligations or care. As a third point, she pointed out how another hot meal a day could already be a big change for individual families.

While talking to the teachers at the school the first author was volunteering at, she learned that some children were suffering from an insufficient diet at home due to high costs of living. The school was a public middle school and the socio-economic backgrounds of the families whose children attended the school did not correspond to those of upper-class and white privileged families. One of her interlocutors shared with her that for a lot of the children, lunch at the public school was the only hot meal they would get during the day. Nevertheless, Deb said that even though some of them would not go home to share a hot family dinner, they did not like the food offered for lunch in the cafeteria (March 2022). They would come to the lesson in the afternoon knowing that they would get a snack and ask what they would get. The snacks provided by the teachers were often combined with fresh products from the school garden such as tomatoes as a salsa for tortillas or a stew/ soup made of the vegetables from the garden. The teacher told the first author that the children preferred to eat the food that they had helped growing in the garden. Nevertheless, during the lessons they were also taught how to prepare endemic crops to make them match a diet, which students might enjoy: the first author also took part in a cooking class, in which participants were taught how to prepare a potato salad from locally grown ‘ulu (breadfruit, L. artocarpus altilis), which was the so-called harvest of the month, at that time. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, that is, primarily in 2020 and 2021, much homeschooling also took place in Hawai‘i. After restarting and assembling the children at school in 2021, the teacher recognised that many of the children were showing signs of hopelessness, neither believing in themselves nor in the benefits which the future held for them. The teacher said that not only harvesting the food at the school but eating and potentially sharing it with others was a way to find hope and empowerment which, in turn, supported their emotional well- being:

And I think, […] it’s the hopefulness to have that they realise that, hey, I can make food right here in the garden, I can grow food at home and share it with my family, hey, we can all collectively share the food we grow (Deb, March 2022).

Different objectives were prevalent in the educational school programs: some were also about re-learning Native Hawaiian practices. This was partly related to Hawaiian language and culture classes. In a more practical sense, however, it was also about getting students to eat ‘healthier’: another interlocutor said that the program she was working at was specially designed to end childhood obesity and reconnect children to ‘healthy food’ in schools. She added that, especially with this goal in mind, school gardens were created and nutrition lessons for the pupils were organised. It was pointed out that projections estimated two out of three children would contract diabetes in their lifetime, so they should be educated early on about healthy eating options and choices. In turn, other funding was available for this, as these educational practices fell under the purview of health promotion. Of course, funding posits precarity and funding situations always depend on the current (lack of) political support for individual programs. While, for instance, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act 2010 characterised the Obama era, it was rather dismantled under Trump.¹⁷ Still, this dismantling was not brought to attention by Deb, Kāne, Leilani, Makao and others.

By embedding these descriptions in an anthropological account, it is important to ask which definition of health was taken as a basis and how the regional context was considered in these support measures. Supposedly healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables, for example, are not necessarily healthy in all contexts, especially if the land to be farmed has toxic residues or if there is no clean water to wash the food (Perez 2013; Yates-Doerr 2015, 170f). The educational program the interlocutor implemented took on a holistic approach, where students not only helped to grow and harvest vegetables and fruits for the school cafeteria, but were also taught how to grow endemic foods in a private, home context and in finding ways to make the food taste good to the students. This worked especially well when the students were involved in the preparation process and were given ideas about what (familiar) dishes they could prepare from certain foods. As mentioned before, preparing an ‘ulu salad instead of a potato salad, a meal that was well known through fast food and prepared supermarket meals, using ‘ulu provided better nutrients and is also a more sustainable and local (Polynesian) plant than the potato. One interlocutor repeatedly pointed out that it was not just about telling the pupils which foods were ‘healthier’, but that their work involved several steps in addition to introducing endemic foods. The aim was for the pupils to get to know their knowledge and actions as effective, for example, by passing on what they had learned to those around them or preparing dishes themselves. Leilani also referred to the aspect of health, but interpreted it more towards a community core for her educational project:

One of the hopes is […] this idea of […] returning on this pathway back to fulfilling our responsibilities to our land and community. Right. And so it can’t – the part of when you think of like the health of a community, right, the health of a community, part of the indicators of health is food security, right? There’s enough food in this place to feed our people. No one’s going hungry. (Leilani, February 2022).

In a conversation with the first author, Leilani made clear that she did not define a healthy community by the measurability of nutrition, but by how a community could take care of itself, more precisely its people. One aspect of this interpretation is ensuring that there is enough food for everyone, another is tied to the idea that passing on knowledge and making it available to everyone in the community is tantamount. Leilani also related her statements to food security. Her understanding correlates with understandings in recent anthropological findings that define ‘local self-sufficiency’ (Agarwal 2014, 1247) as a core objective of food security and sovereignty. Food sovereignty in these findings denotes

the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. (Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, Nyéléni 2007; in Patel 2009, 273)

This definition emphasises the right and the ability of the community to create and maintain a food system that meets the needs of all.

If Leilani’s statement is applied more strongly to the concept of food security, the local characteristics of Hawai‘i must be taken into account, where three concerns can be distinguished that threaten situations of security: ‘overall food supply, disasters, and poverty’ (Kent 2016, 36). While the overall food supply is related to shortages of food quality and quantity especially because of the high import numbers, disasters include not only ecological events such as earthquakes but also state-related emergencies. ‘Poverty refers to difficulties in obtaining adequate food by various categories of low-income individuals, and also the status of the economy as a whole’ (Kent 2016, 36). At the same time, anthropologists of food and foodways showed that in order to define food security or insecurity it is insufficient to only look at food access and availability. Rather, it is paramount to consider in more depth the social, cultural, and sensorially immersive practices of consuming, producing, and sharing foods in specific localities (Chao 2022; Darmanto 2022; von Poser 2013).

In this sense, Leilani’s approach of food security by not only providing food in the short term, but by feeding families in a more holistic way and being adaptive to concrete living conditions, aimed at effectivity on different levels. As a final point, she underlined that elders were also included in the program, and thus intergenerational learning took place. Leilani also mentioned that the programs were not only about fresh food, but also about training the next generation of farmers that would have nutrition knowledge and would be able to take on leadership roles in community contexts. In this way, exactly what Makao was able to experience in his family took place, a practice that was denied to many other families, where knowledge and experience have been lost. As a result, learning about growing and utilising crops would take on a new, more holistic meaning: ‘[It] is connected to a larger thing’ (Leilani, February 2022). This type of framing foodways created intergenerational, cultural connections as well as relationships to the land that are meant to provide people with the quality food of their locality.

5. Discussion

As presented in the conceptual and theoretical frame of this article, we consider foodways as phenomena that are significantly shaped by the following three aspects: The historical-local backgrounds of contextual practices, global transition and transformation processes, and in terms of the relationality and sociality of linked lives as shown in the life courses of, for instance, Makao and Leilani. In the empirical results, these aspects are illustrated with very specific references to historical, intergenerational, and health-related dimensions within the setting of educational practices.

Section 4.1 addresses how foodways that had been in existence were dismantled by settler colonialism and the U.S. annexation with severe social and political consequences. These historical ruptures are also evident in the expression of a disconnect. One informant thus described Native Hawaiians as deprived of their ability to be producers of their own foodways and instead pressed into the mold of consumers. Section 4.2 addresses the practice of re-engaging with Hawaiian foodways. Through Makao’s narrative, it became clear that we are dealing with an intergenerational practice that can be understood in terms of life courses as a generational, linked-lives practice. This is partly due to the historical genesis that has shaped family narratives such as Makao’s. While grandparents may have grown up with close ties to traditional foodways, they also experienced poverty and stigmatisation in (imperialist) Hawai‘i, which, according to them, should not be passed on to their children. From the outset, the latter oriented themselves toward the ‘new’, lucrative worlds of life such as tourism. Makao’s generation, i.e. the youngest or second youngest family generation, is now again connecting to Hawaiian foodways to a comprehensive extent, even professionally. Certainly, this needs to be understood within Hawai‘i’s specific historical context, but it also carries a broader meaning: foodways are also both sustained by and created by younger generations. This could also be a reference to the educators, e.g. when Miles and colleagues speak of a community-based organic farming social enterprise that ‘grows’ young people, ‘Māla ‘Ai ‘Ōpio: The Garden That Grows Young People’ (Miles et al. 2019, 87). Various in-school, out-of-school, and other support programs here provide targeted education and training for young people. In this regard, however, the research findings also underscore the assumption that it is the young and subsequent generations who are actively promoting the practice of re-engaging Hawaiian foodways.

Re-engaging is therefore not a simple practice of bringing out traditional practices and implementing them one-to-one. ‘Traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous farming systems that once fed a large and healthy pre-contact population are now being integrated into twenty-first-century practices of conservation science and sustainability’ (Miles et al. 2019, 86). Miles and colleagues frame it as an integration but, based on the first author’s fieldwork, we argue that it is far more complex. It is a practice of knowledge generation, dissemination, and permanent adaptation, a translation and a transformation into their current lifeworlds. Her research participants describe these lifeworlds, for example, through practices such as regular Costco shopping or uncertainties about how the so-called canoe crops can even be prepared and then satisfy the taste buds of the twenty-first century real world. Other scientists put the cultivation of kalo and the production of poi in particular in direct connection with the political strengthening of a distinct Native Hawaiian identity:

[T]he planting of kalo is an act of resistance, a way for Kānaka ʻŌiwi¹⁸ to recall, re-immerse and revive the pathways of their ancestors not only in the cultivation and harvesting of kalo for poi, but as a tangible and cultural provision in the quest for food security, food sovereignty, and resilience. (Aikau and Camvel 2016, 545)

This type of (food) sovereignty manifests itself in the research data, especially in Section 4.3, which explicitly addresses the benefits of emotional health but also of building a ‘healthy’, sustainable, and nutrient-secure community. Sovereignty in this context is not (just) about regaining political freedoms but is more strongly linked to notions of healthy people in healthy communities that can nurture the needs of its members. Regarding the discourse on obesity, it is important to note that the reduction of large bodies in the Polynesian context to overweight and therefore supposedly unhealthy bodies is rather reduced.¹⁹ Following Yates-Doerre's ethnographic results in Guatemala (2015), it can also be questioned for the Pacific context whether quantification and scaling of nutrition as well as supposedly under-complex solutions such as weight reduction actually lead to healthier bodies and therefore healthier people.

Telling patients to lose weight and eat more vitamins is surely easier than addressing the specificities of agri/cultural histories, the pleasures of taste, and the ways of relating to oneself and others that are a part of eating and feeding. (Yates-Doerr 2015, 171)

For the Hawaiian context, it is necessary to take into account a possible foreign determination of nutrition, among other things by a colonial food system, and to consider the question of overweight, health, and environmental interaction in a more differentiated way (Perez 2013). Especially the last quote of Section 4.3 shows, that health does not only refer to a specific form of nutrition or diet, but rather to a healthy interaction between place, environment, and food. Leilani therefore referred her understanding of the health of a community to the indicator of food security: It should be a healthy community system that can provide enough nutritious food to create healthy people and futures intergenerationally. Especially the human-human relationships can be understood as a practice to create a bridge between a historical disconnection and reconnection with Hawaiian foodways.

The characteristics of disconnection and reconnection are also reflected in relation to the emotional insights of the research partners. In Kāne’s descriptions, the lack of closeness with Hawaiian foodways was placed in the foreground. In this sense, a tendency to absence and external control comes through most strongly in his statements, which we see mostly captured in the term disconnection. In Makao’s, Deb’s, and Leilani’s narratives, affective efforts of care again occur, which are more strongly associated with practices of re-engaging with Hawaiian foodways and can thus be captured in the context of reconnection. In Makao’s description, the (generational) ambivalence between affective proximity and distance to ʻāina-based practices becomes especially clear. While his grandfather had an affective and engaged relationship with the land, for many other people of this and the following generation a conscious dissociation took place. In Makao’s narrative, care was exercised by Makao’s uncle on the one hand, in which he wanted to protect his nephew from supposed poverty. On the other hand, Makao described that he wanted to take care of the land and thus perform a kind of care work in the sense of a human-environment interaction. At the same time, he described that the land also gave him a home and roots in an affective way. This affective attachment, as well as the cultural practices such as hula, thus also gave back to him something positive and, in this respect, also took care of him. This case, then, concerns foodways and affects as practices of re-engaging between land and people. Deb and Leilani also described practices of taking care of the land. However, with a stronger reference to the benefit of the community: the process of learning to eat Native Hawaiian food again is foregrounded here as taking care of the neighbours (and students) and is also connected to transforming healthy people and communities that are more food-sovereign. Also, these excerpts can be understood as affects of caring for each other within a specific (school) community which are part of the process of re-engaging with what Leilani and others called traditional Hawaiian foodways.

6. Conclusion

In this article, we hope to have conveyed the idea that ‘[f]ood is a powerful medium to think about the society, the environment, and the culture’ (Kimura and Suryanata 2016, 13). In summary, we may conclude that food practices in contemporary Hawai‘i are not only shaped by localised and globalised politics across time and space. In relation to debates on gastrocolonialism, the empirical impressions also clearly show that the re-engagements of foodways can be understood as decolonial aspirations (Veracini 2022). Even as Hawai‘i’s historical development plays a significant role in shaping current foodways, these foodways then are far more (and more complex) than their historical genesis: they point to (inter)generational, ecological, and postcolonial disconnections and decolonial reconnections with transitions in our current world. People act neither generationally nor individually disconnected from each other. Instead, they shape their life-courses as affective, linked lives, partly in conflict, partly as processes of learning from each other. This makes clear once again that it is not only about re-engaging, i.e. a new negotiation and shaping of traditional, ancestral foodways, but that, especially through the linked lives perspective, the innovatively-shaped human-human relationships are central. The practice of re-engaging with Hawaiian foodways also reflects transformative approaches to current, societal challenges and can be understood as a powerful practice on the part of the people to create (Pacific) lived realities aimed toward future livable lives in respect to their human-human and human-environment relationships.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The first author’s research in Hawai‘i was made possible through funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The ethnographic setting as well as the empirical parts in the sections 3 and 4 were written from her perspective only.

2 The first author’s fieldwork insights and experiences can be divided chronologically into three parts, which were impacted by the restrictions on mobility due to the global Covid-19 pandemic: The beginning of establishing contact and conducting initial online interviews from Germany between October and December 2021, a fieldwork phase on site from December 2021 to March 2022 as well as a subsequent survey phase of online interviews until May 2022.

3 The decision to contact educational practitioners in Hawai‘i was influenced by the outcomes of a meta-ethnographic research that pointed towards ʻāina-based education as an outstanding educational concept in Oceania because of its precise design as well as its successful implementation (von Seggern 2021).

4 This section is only an excerpt of the first author’s efforts to build reciprocal research relationships in the sense of a decolonial anthropology; a more detailed description will be elaborated in her PhD thesis. Following Linda Tuhiwai Smith's appeal to decolonize anthropological research, the first author primarily pursued the strategies of personal development and consultation (Smith 2022, 229). Whereas the first strategy refers to the researcher’s personal development (in this case, Hawaiian language and storytelling course participation), the second strategy refers to consulting research partners on how the research outcome could become beneficial for them and/or their community. The first author’s methodological and ethical approach is also theoretically saturated by the work of Graham Hingangaroa Smith, who postulates the approach of an empowering outcomes model (Smith 1992) of white researchers in Indigenous contexts. Apart from that, however, the first author not only actively positioned herself in this sense, but was also positioned by the people who allowed her to work with and learn from them: Thus, as a white researcher, she was not fundamentally rejected. Rather, boundaries of activity and ethics of cooperation were shown to her, for example, which places and events were accessible to her or what she was expected to give back, such as sharing knowledge from the German implementation of sustainable education and passing on what she had learned about ʻāina-based education to new recipients.

5 In this article, we use the terms of Native Hawaiians and Hawai‘i residents. ‘Native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli, the ‘true’ or ‘real people’) refers to the Indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. Native Hawaiians established their own monarchy, government, constitution, and had international policies and treaties establishing Hawai‘i as a nation.’ (Burns-Glover and McCubbin 2020, 341) Native Hawaiian identity refers primarily to the person's ancestry (Burns-Glover and McCubbin 2020). Due to the high intermingling of families with and without Native Hawaiian ancestry, also due to settler colonialism and in forced diaspora, there are many Hawai‘i residents who live locally but have no Indigenous ancestry, but also Native Hawaiians who do not live locally despite their ancestry (Arvin 2019). The social composition of Hawai‘i and its interculturality is also related to the cultivation of the land and the settler colonialism that took place. Since 1700, Hawaiian land has been cultivated by European and American settlers, who in turn migrated labourers from surrounding nations (Darrah-Okike 2020, 2). For further information on the legal status of Native Hawaiians and its differentiation from the status of Native Americans as well as racialisation processes, see Kame’eleihiwa (2016) as well as Darrah-Okike (2020), Arvin (2019), and Karpur (2004).

6 The names of the research partners have been anonymised.

7 Concerning the history of land tenure in Hawai‘i up to Cook’s arrival, we refer to Kirch and McCoy (2023), who provide an overview of the complex history of Hawaiian land use in different eras.

8 ‘The Hawaiian peoples’ tradition of intimate and varied human relationships to the land and sea was replaced with colonial occupation, which brought with it the extractive sugar and pineapple plantations. The colonial occupation and dispossession of Native Hawaiian people destroyed locally valued foodways and natural resource management practices, creating and amplifying the conditions of social and economic marginalisation that have endured to the present day. Today, Hawai‘i’s post-plantation agricultural economy is dominated by commodities such as seed crops, coffee, macadamia nuts, tropical fruits, and flowers largely oriented toward external markets with the local and diversified agriculture sector limited by a range of economic, social, and political obstacles.’ (Mauriello and Cottino 2022, 85)

9 Or, as Hobart phrases it: ‘It continues to be a great irony that a place with such ecological abundance no longer grows its own food.’ (Hobart 2016, 430)

10 Even though there are volunteer plants, that does not mean they grow without care. The fruit of the Papaya tree in the garden of the hosts of the first author rotted due to a lack of knowledge about pruning, diseases and harvesting patterns.

11 Kalo is the Hawaiian term for the cultivated taro plant (L. colocasia esculenta). Although the Hawaiian term was more common in the first author’s research context, the two terms are used interchangeably.

12 Poi is the Hawaiian term for one of the most important Polynesian staple foods prepared from the boiled and mashed root of the taro plant.

13 For reasons of space, the reference to cosmology in this article has been shortened drastically. For more comprehensive information, see, for instance, Beckwith (1970) and Campbell (1997).

14 Hula is a Hawaiian cultural practice in which a story or poem (mo‘olelo) is told through certain step figures and movements, beats of music or (spoken) chants or songs.

15 Kumu in this context refers to the Hawaiian term for teacher, mentor or guide, often used when cultural practices are shared and taught by one person with specific expertise in this field with/ to another. Kumu in general also means bottom, base or foundation.

16 Kimura and Suryanata explain the use of alternating terms for the Hawaiian context as follwoing: ‘Local is often used as a surrogate for other socially constructed and value-laden concepts including healthy, fresh, authentic, and traditional that denote quality.’ (2016, 2)

17 For further information on changes concerning school meals in the Trump administration see also ‘Are the Trump Administration’s Latest Rules for School Meals All Bad? 3 Things Schools Need to Know’ by Prothero 2020 (https://www.edweek.org/leadership/are-the-trump-administrations-latest-rules-for-school-meals-all-bad-3-things-schools-need-to-know/2020/01).

18 The term Kānaka ʻŌiwi refers to the Indigenous Hawaiian population, kānaka meaning human beings and ʻŌiwi native (Ulukau Hawaiian Dictionary: https://hilo.hawaii.edu/wehe/).

19 For example, Cottino (2015) clarifies in her research on Tonga that large bodies are considered beautiful and healthy bodies and that it is the Western reduction and categorical classification that is problematic.