3 Important Things to Learn From a Farm to Table Restaurant
Hello and welcome to our first-ever blog post!
There is so much to learn in our farm tours, but we wanted to have a place where people can learn more about agriculture and sustainability online as well. Today we wanted to start off with the basics: the 3 main things we try to teach everyone who sets foot on our farm. So let's get started!
1. What "agriculture" means to us
Agriculture has the word "culture" in it. Culture is lifestyle, like how local people take off their shoes before entering the house. There's lots of different lifestyles. There's one lifestyle that very few actually choose to live and it's called growing food for other people; agriculture. To us, agriculture is more than a science, it is our culture. Technology is advancing very rapidly but it is still important to us to maintain that human element in agriculture and nurture that connection we have with the land.
2. Where food really comes from
We all know that food comes from nature. We know this fact in theory. This means that when we're sitting at a cafe enjoying a healthy acai bowl, we aren't usually aware of the origin of all the ingredients we are consuming. What does an acai berry look like? Where were they grown? Where are the bananas from? We assume a farm. But we don't know the process required by nature, by plants and animals, in order to produce the ingredients necessary for us to survive.
At our farm, we show the process from start to finish. It takes a lot more time and effort than you'd expect to grow the food we eat every day.
3. We love "ugly produce"
If you only saw fruits and vegetables in grocery stores, you'd think that they were all symmetrical and practically blemish-free. The same way that if the only people you saw were models in fashion magazines! In reality, produce comes in all types of unique shapes and colorations when they are grown on the farm. The trouble is, the grocery stores only want the "pretty produce" because as consumers, we shop with our eyes. This means that a lot of perfectly good food gets wasted because it doesn't "look the part."
Fortunately, at Kahuku Farms, we started a farm to table cafe to serve the not-so-photogenic food in delicious and beautiful plates. Bananas with blemishes on the peels get used in fresh dairy-free smoothies. Long eggplant that got bent while it was growing finds a new purpose in a grilled veggie panini. This way, we get to share the freshly harvested fruits of the farm while being sustainable and giving "ugly produce" a little confidence boost!
Thank you for reading and please let us know what topics you would like to learn more about!
Mahalo Nui Loa
Such brilliant ideas! Glad you put them online for us to read!! 🤗
Sounds like you guys have something pretty special going on there.