FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Preserving the slow ways of old

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

One of the few easy and enjoyable hours in the past month of holiday madness for me was the annual meeting Dec. 7 of Slow Food Hawai'i, the local branch of the international organization that seeks to preserve traditional food ways and hand-made foods.

The purpose of the group is not merely to eat and drink — although the very word used for the chapters, "convivia," hints at Slow Food members' enjoyment of their gatherings. The organization's aims are to raise money for various types of preservation projects, to identify the foods that need attention, and to educate society, particularly young people, about the differences between "slow" (natural, old-style, widely variant) and "fast" (highly processed, homogeneous) foods.

The organization has established a committee to nominate island foods for Slow Food's "Ark" project — a symbolic ship in which to, as the Web site says, "load gastronomic products threatened by industrial standardization, hyper-hygienist legislation, the rules of the large-scale retail trade and the deterioration of environment." Once a food is accepted into the Ark, its growers or makers become eligible for various kinds of assistance from financial aid to marketing.

The Ark so far is focused on vegetables, vegetable-derived processed products, animals and animal-derived processed products, not cooked dishes. Hawai'i Ark committee chairman Kent Fleming, a Big Island agricultural economist, said the foods discussed at the first Ark committee meeting in Kamuela in November included poi taro, ohelo berries, o'opu (a fish), Kona coffee, breadfruit, okolehao, grass-fed beef, Kona and a'ama crab, and methods of cooking, such at the use of the imu and the forno (Portuguese masonry oven).

I left the event musing about what I'd like to put in the Ark. Others popped quickly to mind: mangoes, given how many trees have been cut down in our increasingly urbanized landscape; passionfruit, which used to adorn chain-link fences in every neighborhood; salted salmon; and old-style sun-dried pipikaula.

If you'd like to join in the discussion, Fleming has set a meeting of the Slow Food Ark committee at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 5 at Bali Indonesia Restaurant. To sign up, e-mail him at fleming@hawaii.edu; also see www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/agtourism/.