When You Vacation in Hawaii, Eat Your Fruits and Veggies!

August 15th, 2008

Visitors to Hawaii are stimulating enormous growth in an industry whose scope is unique to the Hawaiian Islands: Tropical Specialty Fruits such as atemoya, longan, lychee, mango, persimmon, rambutan and starfruit.

It’s just been announced that Hawaii’s growers of those breeds produced — and sold — 2.3 million pounds of fruit in 2007, an increase of 59 percent from 1.4 million in 2006!

In the last few years, visitors have caught on to Hawaii Regional Cuisine, which uses locally-grown ingredients and flavors them with ethnic contributions from all over the world.

In most excellent island restaurants, the salads are special. The simplest “house salad,” enhanced by the simplest house dressing, somehow tastes more lively, and the leafy ingredients – simple though they may be – seem more robust, more “fluffy,” than vacationing diners are used to, and those visitors seem to love the difference. They also love the mild-yet-vivid flavors of the mild-yet-vivid flavors of the locally-grown fruits and vegetables used.

There’s a reason for that. Hawaii’s tropical climate provides a year-round growing season. That creates flavors more intense than the flavors of even greens grown in “seasonal” climates. In Hawaii’s farming areas, plants grow in volcanic, muddy soil that’s fertile, easily worked, and loaded with minerals. Chefs in Hawaii choose their salad greens with passionate care. They look for bright colors and greens that look crisp, moist and fresh. (Brown or dark green spots and withering leaves are a sign of aging.) They look for heads of lettuce that are tight. To determine whether a head of lettuce is fresh, a chef will turn it over and look at the base. If it’s starting to turn brown, he or she will look for one that looks more freshly cut. Most chefs establish relationships with farmers they trust to provide the very highest-quality greens, precluding the need for them to examine every plant that arrives at the restaurant’s kitchen.

Today, more than 40 fruits and vegetables are grown in Hawaii on more than 5,500 farms. 50 years ago, there were fewer than 3,700 such farms growing 28 varieties. Until settlers started arriving from other lands in the nineteenth century, Hawaiians had only mountain apples, sugarcane, bananas, coconuts, and kukui nuts for fruits, and only taro, breadfruit, sweet potatoes, yams, ti roots, and some seaweeds and ferns to serve as vegetables. Captain James Cook brought seeds of pumpkins, melons and onions. Farmers learned from Europeans how to grow watermelons, strawberries, oranges, and many Occidental vegetables. Don Marin, a remarkable presence in the islands, introduced other vegetables and a variety of fruits that have become staples: guavas, pineapples, limes, lemons, prickly pears and mangoes. Settlers from the Orient brought – or imported – the seeds or stocks of plants they needed to prepare the food to which they were accustomed: fruits such as persimmon, lychee, Satsuma orange, dragon’s eye and pummelo; vegetables such as daikon, won bok, gobo, dasheen, soybean, rice, bitter melon, and eggplant. Hawaii’s new wave of chefs uses the gamut, and diners in Hawaii’s restaurants are enjoying the results.

Accordingly, Hawaii’s visitors are invigorating a very important industry to these special islands.

Posted by Jim Winpenny

Entry Filed under: Big Island, Kauai, Maui, Oahu