FREE event Featuring:
HANA – In sleepy Hana, a breadfruit revolution is unfolding.
The 8-year-old Breadfruit Institute, overseen by the National Tropical Botanical Garden of Hana and Kauai, aims to export tens of thousands of breadfruit treelings starting in 2011 to provide a sustainable food source for the hungry around the globe.
This initiative culminates a five-year Breadfruit Institute project to propagate the tree from its tissues – not just its roots – in collaboration with a research team at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan.
The 10-acre orchard inside the entrance to Hana’s 464-acre Kahanu National Tropical Botanical Garden contains the world’s largest breadfruit collection, with 260 trees representing 137 varieties, said institute Collections Manager and Curator Ian Cole in Hana.
TARO FEST
» Where: Haleiwa Farmers Market, at Kamehameha Highway and Leong Bypass near Haleiwa Beach Park
» When: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday
» Call: 388-9696 or e-mail HaleiwaFarmersMarket@gmail.com
EVENTS
Recipe contest (call or e-mail for details), poi-pounding demonstration, talk story with North Shore kupuna, taro farm tours, dishes by Hawaii chefs, makahiki activities and entertainment. Plus, taro submissions to break the Guinness world record (call or e-mail for details).”In a Hawaiian genesis story, a stillborn baby’s grave site grows the first taro plant, which feeds his younger brother, the first Hawaiian. The tale is at the root of the culture’s reverence for taro, called kalo in Hawaiian.
“Poi and family are one and the same,” says Aunty Betty Jenkins, a North Shore kupuna who is one of the guiding forces behind Haleiwa Farmers Market’s taro festival on Sunday. “Kalo connects us to all Hawaiians, to all of our neighborhood, to all community. It’s very spiritual.”
A new generation is now standing alongside elders like Jenkins to perpetuate taro’s cultural relevance. For Daniel Anthony of the organization Mana Ai, that effort centers on eating. “First and foremost, Mana Ai promotes the eating of taro in any way, shape or form,”
For centuries botanists were unable to reproduce and ship the plant, which is native to the Pacific Islands. But a team of researchers led by Diane Ragone of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai, Hawaii, has discovered how to propagate it en masse to ship to regions in Central America and Africa where it would grow best (and where hunger rates are highest). Now Ragone has 40 requests from governments, NGOs, nonprofits, and farmers across the globe to integrate the fruit.
Could the Breadfruit Help World Hunger? | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com