 Aloha and welcome to another episode of Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. I'm your co-host Matt Johnson, unfortunately Justine is not with us today, but she promised me she'll be back next week. As always we are talking to Hawaii's movers and shakers and our local food system. So talking to farmers, chefs, foodies, writers, and as always we have a couple of great guests. If you want to join the conversation please tweet us at atthinktechhi and you can also check out the show afterwards on YouTube at Think Tech Hawaii. So our guest today we have with us Krishna Sranatha and Aya Kimura both are professors from University of Hawaii and they are introducing their book today Food and Power in Hawaii where they are both authors and editors and so we're excited to kind of talk about the book and also talk about some of the other authors involved. So it's a compilation of essays. So it's very timely publication so we'd love to hear more about how this all came about. So yeah thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks a lot for having us. Before we get started why don't you go ahead can you just introduce the book for us and talk a little bit about it. Okay well as you mentioned that there are a number of authors who are involved in this and you are saying that this is timely but in an interesting way actually issues on food and agriculture is always timely in Hawaii because it's always on everybody's mind and we have how many are you like 10 12 contributors in this and they include a number of professors University of Hawaii at Manoa as well as UH West Oahu and then some of our graduate students former now they are graduates already and then also some farmers and you know activists that were involved in this as well too. So the essay varied in a format some of them were more analytical and giving the context of what we're looking at the changes in our agriculture and food system and others would be more personal narrative of some people who work in the field itself. Okay and so the contributors are a combination of I guess professors like yourself and then you have actual farmers out in the field there's also community activists so it's a really neat plethora of experiences and backgrounds. Yeah hopefully that's what we hope. So we have eight chapters that are mainly written by professors like us and they are I think they have two audiences the book has actually two audiences the one is people in Hawaii and we wanted to push policymakers activists and farmers and ranchers to think about food politics in a way that's more nuanced and we wanted to pull in literature from agro food studies that's like sociology of food politics of food literature that's a growing and exciting field in academia and the second audience for this book is really those scholars who are working on the similar issues on food and agriculture elsewhere around the world and so to speak to them we wanted to have the combination of both scholars as well so we have eight chapters in between we have narratives what we call narratives well so that's written by for example Michelle Galimba who is an in a rancher from big island and she wrote her essay by herself we have farmers she's a great writer I've seen a lot of stuff before yeah it's a really moving story of her family and how she tried to cultivate the local market here specifically for beef yeah exactly and as a woman I think she's a really interesting you know sort of person to talk about her experience as a mover and a shaker of food system in Hawaii I think women tend to be very invisible in food system but at the same time you know they are a very significant food producer as well as consumers and so she is one author of that narrative and we have Chris Rove and Dean Okimoto and they were interviewed by Nicole Milne who is now at Kohala Center in the big island so their experiences hopefully are captured in those narratives as well and then we have another by Hele Kawelo who does the fish pond restoration and it's a Pai Pai oh yeah yeah and her story was captured by interviewed by Monique Vernesco from West Oafu so it seems like it's a really good well-rounded compilation of stories where it's researchers like yourself but then actual practitioners people out doing it so if someone who's not familiar with local agriculture in Hawaii or is familiar with it it seems like it'd be a really good well-rounded group of stories and I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of it well talk about one thing we were talking before the show that was interesting to me is so Christina your background you're with the geography department and Aya you're with the women's studies department so talk a little bit about how the two of you hanging out on campus one day and you're like hey let's put together a bunch of essays on local food, democracy, how did this come about well so this actually took a long time to birth you know it's like a long child-birding process and the story in Jion was really close back six seven years ago so it's a long time to make a book and that's when I had an order to organize a series of talks under the rubric of what are the lecture series so what are the lecture series I endowed the lecture series that's housed in the church of the crossroads of University Avenue in Honolulu and they bring in scholars and activists from around the nation to talk about peace justice and sustainability and so when I chaired the committee to organize that so that comes in every two years and so when I had that opportunity to organize that we decided to focus on food democracy and brought we brought in Francis Marlape who's the author of the that for small planets you know a big seller in back in the 70s I think so we brought her in organized a bunch of events and after that we were like maybe we should write more about the issues here what's going on here in Hawaii because very little was and I don't see hesitating to see like whether it was or is written about agri-food movements in Hawaii that's accessible to outside scholars in the mainland and so that was the sort of early genealogy of that I need to come on that too you know come come here but I think one thing to note also is that diet for small planet was written in the 70s and the landscape of global agri-food system has drastically changed over the last 50 years or so that you know even though we were motivated by that we're looking into what are the contemporary challenges that people who are interested in agriculture and food in Hawaii are faced with so and as I mentioned especially seven years ago we didn't have any money that has been written and I came to Hawaii 19 years ago and I've always worked in agriculture and food originally in Indonesia and then when I was in Colorado California I started working on that as well too so when I came here I became immediately an observer because in geography people usually associate that with maps or GIS that's a first question that's what I said earlier are you studying the map of agriculture farms I said well you know geography is a study of place and and it's a relationship between people and environment and agriculture and food is really like sitting in a dynamic nexus between people and environment and how the how people's cultural social and politics and the economic structure affect the landscape the agricultural landscape in this case and how do the environment the physical environment itself shape what we can do and what we want to do with our environment so that's that's how I've always connected the geography of agriculture and food and I put it as a like I teach a class on agriculture food and society in at UH at the undergraduate as well as at graduate level and which department is that under the geography department yeah that's a geography class and people sometimes ask me about like why I teach that in geography oh I thought everything would be in the College of Tropical right yeah then usually I mean like it's important to study those to understand what's going on in the farm but I always think about what I teach is to situate them in a multiple scale like not just looking at the local level but also regionally or within the global agriculture and food system because we're all globalized now yeah and I think it makes a lot of sense I mean we're talking earlier about how you know the land and the geography of where someone's farm is obviously going to dictate a lot of you know what they're going to be able to grow but then there's also the cultural aspects of you know we're talking about there's a lot of Asian immigrant farmers in Hawaii so they're bringing the crops that they're used to growing and does that fit whether or not with the terrain where they are and then it takes it to the next level of the market there's a market going to support the crops that they're growing and I think you know we see that a lot where you know maybe there's a lot focus on the terrain and also the cultural aspect and then when it's time to get the product to market sometimes there's a gap I think that's something we see on my end working with CSAs and food hubs so I had talked a little bit about your background so women's studies what and you mentioned a little bit about you know working with Michelle Gallimba and how there's not enough women in agriculture talk a little bit about your connection what got you interested in this yeah I get this question so you're in women's studies for YouTube food and sustainability connection yeah so I teach in women's studies but my background is master's in environmental studies and my training in PhD is sociology and rural sociology so I'm using food as a lens to look at social relations including gender race and class relations so my research has focused on the politics of food capturing those multiple aspects around food and but still if you're sort of not convinced that food is also gender commodity we might think about say you know who are food insecure right and who have hard time accessing say nutritional and affordable and culturally appropriate food in Hawaii it's women all over represented amongst the food insecure in the United States and around the world and if we think about the role that women play in food servicing industry you know waiters and people who are working in a food service industry it's highly feminized industry so women tend to be invisible in food consumption again production but I think their role is really vital so that's where sort of my women's studies focus coming in and so and then there's a so and then both of you wrote an essay yourselves in the book as well before we talk about some of the other topics you guys want to talk about your topics and we only have about 60 seconds before the break maybe just give us a little teaser and then we'll get into it and okay well I actually authored three and yeah in addition to the introduction overall I authored three chapters one is on the paradox of important agricultural lands like designating important agricultural lands but turned out to be causing something that's not completely intended okay and then the next one that we co-authored was the use of volunteer farm volunteer in in the woofing programs programs and we had some guests on before talking about that okay that's good and then another one that we're looking into this emergence of the seed industry the seed corn industry which is probably very controversial yeah we call it like a seed of contentions so I don't have the time to yeah go deeper into that well we'll have a little bit of time when we come back from the break so yeah we'll be right back after a quick break hi I'm Steven Philip Katz I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Hawaii and I'm the host of shrink wrap Hawaii which is on Tuesdays at three o'clock have a great summit take care of your mental health hi I'm Stacy Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on think tech Hawaii Stacy to the rescue see you then I'm Ethan Ellen host of likable science here on think tech Hawaii every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world scientists who talk about their work in meaningful easy to understand ways they'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking way of knowing about the world you'll learn interesting facts interesting ideas you'll be stimulated to think more please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on think tech Hawaii for likable science with me your host Ethan Ellen hello hi and welcome back to Hawaii food and farmer series I'm your co-host Matt Johnson as always you can join the conversation by tweeting in at at think tech hi and we are deep in discussion here with Christina and Aya two professors from University of Hawaii and we're talking about your new book that was just published in September food and power in Hawaii visions of food democracy which actually you guys are authors and editors or it's a compilation of essays from researchers activists farmers addressing different issues in our local food economy I'm sorry for the break we were starting to get into some of the meat of the of the book you're talking about seeds of contention with biotechnology also land use issues I'm going to list out some of the other topics here that are also current farmers so the age gender ethnicity that's definitely issues that need to be addressed and also access to nutritious nutritious foods I think food insecurity is very important topic that we should discuss yeah well that's let's jump in right now let's talk about that especially from your perspective in women's studies right so in one of the motivations of really editing the book for us was to intervene in this policy discourses that really focused on food localization and increase of the food production volume and I think as recently as maybe a couple of months ago the governor talked about doubling the food production by 2030 and which is a somewhat controversial statement people weren't quite sure what that meant right exactly and so I think there are a lot of nuanced arguments and analysis that we have to do before we say like just set the policy goal in terms of the volume of tonnage of food or calorie wise you know let's increase the food self-sufficiency you know that tended to dominate the policy discussion but we felt that that really failed to capture new complex dynamics within the food system and one of the things that really falls outside of that sort of tonnage focused arguments of policy objective is the issues of food security and or and also the quality and diversity of food production ways I mean if you think about like how do we get to that the policy goal of saying doubling the food production the most efficient and perhaps the quickest way is to do monocropping urge scale that is highly intensive and we could potentially achieve the goal of doubling the amount of stable food but then we might have to think let's say if you do that thing that would mean the dependence on imported fertilizer imported hyperchemicals they are both of them are highly petroleum dependent so we are creating different kinds of dependency so those kinds of nuances I think tend to get lost and another thing is that and that's the sort of the the topic of chapter written by George Kent who is a political science professor at UH Manoa but he says that you know the poor people needs need to be centered and focal point when we think about local food resilience that you're talking about and we have relatively high poverty rate in the state I think one in six residents according to the new Hawaii Pusse Center's report is under poverty line and we have you know high food insecurity rate I think one in six or even higher households are food insecure in the recent statistics so George's argument is that if you really push for local food production that might really compromise those poor people's access to nutritional nutrients and healthy food so I mean that's interesting I think that kind of ties in a lot of these different access and we'll kind of tie back into what you were just talking about Aya but Chris one thing you're talking about that was interesting to me is the land use policies uh important ag lands which is a relatively new um maybe the past 10 years was introduced legislature it's actually 78 the mandate was the constitutional convention so give us a little background on IAL and and what's your take on that okay IAL was first mandated in 1978 and was not implemented right away there's always a problem about getting legislations to to really push it forward until we got controversial issues and the trigger that ended up reviving the need for IAL was the controversy of the golf course resort that was built in on the big island the Hokulia development and and that's that subsequently led into the passing of the 2005 and 2008 IAL that you probably are referring to right yeah and um and so and so basically what that means and correct me I'm probably gonna mess this up but IAL if you're a landowner you can basically designate designate certain land as important ag land and then you're able to change the zoning of of other lands that you are yes there is like a provision like that and as far as we know we haven't really I don't know what the more current one but nobody has to really take an advantage of that okay so I'm not saying that there have been abuses but the focus that we're looking at is like that the intention of IAL was to prevent urban expansion the sub the sub urbanization of Hawaii and then we also try to see if we can revive agriculture and neither of that has been completely rich because IAL ended up having a lot of exemptions that led into the proliferation of smaller subdivisions that counties have the ability to regulate even if they don't go into the land use commission so our point was more that having that becomes like IAL becomes the goal instead of the means because originally the goals was really to have more agriculture and prevent the expansion of subdivisions but eventually what we saw is that the IAL become the goal in itself and neither of the other goals or kind of like touch which is actually leading to my other points about like a lot of our agricultural policies and actions has been driven by this controversies or crisis so the land use in agricultural lands were the trigger back in the 2003 I think during the Hokulia controversy and then the seed companies became another controversy you know so whether it's another food the spike of the food prices in 2008 and 2009 became another controversies of the self-sufficiency so these were kind of like incidents that unfortunately lead into simplifications of what's really going on with agriculture and food system and that's why we thought like if we start this conversation and just like open up what's what's really going on because just solving important agricultural lands are not going to help farms become more viable just addressing biotechnology and pesticide makes it more like a technical issue it doesn't address anything about what's really challenging small farmers you know because they are not really like directly related they are related through many different steps and so that's my my two cents about why we want to open these conversations and it's similar issues we're talking about just increasing the amount of food that's being grown it just can't be labeled that simply because we just say oh we want more ag land well then we've seen that with important ag lands and then also with the seed companies coming in and then growing seed corn on ag land it's kind of meeting that initial lower level of what we're trying to accomplish but if you take a step back and you know what are we really want to see in terms of why being a more food secure place it's we're seeing that you can't look at these in silos it's almost like it has to be a complete package that addresses all these these topics in in one and all along we always hear from small farmers that would say that like well you know once so we didn't have lands it would be very difficult to start farming but even after we have lands we have problems and a lot of them would be talking about how can we get affordable laborers so that's where the foreign market housing is another big issue and a lot of firms that we work with talk about and and then farm volunteering becomes another solution or so-called solution you know but so talk a little bit about i'm interested too like a lot of times people say woofing you know is is based on woofing is where people can come and basically there's a trade where you have to work so many certain hours and you're provided with some kind of housing and basically room and board what are your what should you take on woofing well it's other similar programs it's supposed to be a win-win solution because farmers solve their labor problem and then for the woofers they have life experience they come to a place that especially in hawaii it's very popular so what could go wrong with that i feel like you're about to tell us well it's not wrong but it's not not a total win-win it's only a short-term solution which is only delaying the inevitable because usually when farms become more professional they would really like to rely on their workforce that they can depend on and volunteers are itinerant at some point they would leave and there are a lot of woofers that actually stay for a long time but you know you can't depend on that so farmers end up being in this initial stage for a long time so it's delaying the inevitable we never address but like how can we really get into this solving the labor questions right and so the for the volunteers their primary intention is really not just to work in the farm but they also wanted to have a life experience experience a place and place right yeah so certain farms are more equipped to do that and others are not so certain farms become like favorite destinations and others that are smaller usually the smaller one also have a harder time so we've talked to like a woofer that didn't enjoy it as much because he was the only one okay in in a lot of responsibility on that volunteer it's it's not the the idea but like going to a bigger farm that kind of accommodate half a dozen and they have a community small community in of themselves too so it's not as simple it's it's kind of a a band aid probably at the most it's coping mechanisms i think it's good if the farm and also the volunteers address that and know that and see it as a short term right in a solution but longer term issues need to be addressed yeah so unfortunately we're out of time really i know this so fast can you just do a quick plug for the book again where can people find your book i think it's at the major bookstores like native bookstores and it's available on amazon and i don't know where it yeah the easiest one is probably online so amazon and also u h press u h press i think you can get discount if you order before the end of the year oh okay i think you said like a 20 discount okay i think that's what they said yeah but um native books carry that as well okay so at nomea at the word word center word center great and then you have an event coming up that's oh yeah and let me just plug in this another okay real quick uh world town planning day at kakaako the hcda building and uh this year we're talking about growing local agriculture and we're going to have jeff melrose from the big island yeah and then uh i'll be speaking there too with kim larry one of another author and we're going to have our books in there too all right great well chris and aya thank you so much for joining me today super informational and we'll love to have you guys back and also talk about your future publications even after this one so thank you so much