OF THE LAND
The Life
Middle-school students Cappi Winters and Rhea Davis serve elementary students. The cooking class at Kua O Ka Lā gives them a fresh fruit snack on Friday mornings. – Photo by Karen Valentine
group of middle-school cooks is hanging out by the blender on a picnic table at Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School (KOKL). The kids just whipped up coconut-liliko’i smoothies… oh!—and grilled beef and lime with yacon (a tuber that looks like a potato but tastes like an apple). They’ve prepared coconutsweet-potato salad, cucumber salad and stir-fried kale… banana tamales with pineapple, ‘ohelo berries and fresh-squeezed coconut cream… and steaming cups of mamaki tea. The occasion? The planning committee for the Hawai’i Island Breadfruit Festival is having lunch with the staff of Kua O Ka Lā. The kids prepared this feast AND fed fresh fruit to the elementary school in just two hours. “I work them hard,” says their teacher, Mariposa Blanco. Her class, ‘Āina Life Culinary Arts, cooks only locally grown foods. This means coconut oil, kalo, breadfruit in season, wild pig and the photography teacher’s cow. There are greens, tomatoes, and peppers from the school garden, plus an array of veggies from Puna area farms. The chefs and diners adjust themselves to a whole new palate. And that’s the point. Changing people’s palate means expanding or shifting the range of tastes a person enjoys. The current “local” palate prefers white rice, meat, eggs, gravy, and sugary drinks. Think Loco-Moco
or SPAM musubi with an Arizona Green Tea, and you’ve got the picture. Unfortunately, a diet based on these kinds of foods is high in fat, salt and sugar. It’s a pathway to diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Furthermore, it includes few locally-grown ingredients. Our society burns an expensive pollutant—oil—to ship food here. Changing our palate—‘Āina Life style—means learning to enjoy food made with fresh, whole ingredients grown or gathered on our island. “I know it sounds gross, but it actually tastes good,” wrote one dedicated cooking student. She was referring to all the vegetables. And the class works with fruits and veggies galore! Every Friday, the culinary arts students wash fruit, cut it up, and serve it to the younger grades for snacks. Next, they listen as Blanco—known as Aunty Mariposa to the kids—introduces the ingredients and dishes of the day. She shares plant genealogies: where the vegetables grew on island and where in the world they originally came from. For example, tomatoes were domesticated in Central and South America, while kalo migrated from Southeast Asia through the Pacific. Together, Aunty Mariposa and the students invent recipes: salsas, salads, soups, stews and surprising fruity desserts. They cook familiar dishes like beef stew (with ‘ulu!), comfort foods such as purple ‘uala shepherd’s pie and dishes they
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MARCH/APRIL 2012 | www.KeOlaMagazine.com | 23
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