image from video courtesy Discover Your Kuleana

(BIVN) – Last week, Waimea’s own Chef Ippy Aiona led a conversation with a panel of farm to table experts, as part of a Discover Your Kuleana gathering at the Parker School Theatre. 

Aiona, fresh off his national series “Eating Our Roots,” sat down for a talk with Mills Stovall of the Waimea Butcher Shop, Dana Shapiro of the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Co-op, and Scott Cathey of Waimea’s First Light Farm. 

The event also featured tastings prepared by some of Waimea’s top culinary talents, including Merriman’s Waimea, FORC restaurant, and Heartbeet Catering.

“It’s our kuleana to eat locally produced food, because these guys are our lifeline,” said Aiona in a video interview shared with media. “The farmers, ranchers, fishmongers. They’re our lifeline. They’re what keeps us going. We eat the fruit of their labors daily yet we don’t talk about them daily.”

image of Chef Ippy Aiona speaking, from video courtesy Discover Your Kuleana

“It’s a way for us to thank them and give them the opportunity to be in the spotlight,” Aiona said. “Because in our industry, it’s usually the chefs that get the spotlight when it comes to food, but that’s just not who really should be getting it. It should be the people that are actually growing the product and the people that have their hands in the earth.”

“We’re trying to raise awareness of what these guys are doing, and we’re hoping that at the end of this, when the the audience is at the store, they’re going to think about this,” Aiona said. “They’re going to think about what we’re talking about and they’re going to say – ‘okay, you know what I’m going to buy? That local tomato instead of that hot house Mainland tomato’.”

Discover Your Kuleana is “a volunteer-led initiative that emerged in early 2023 as part of a Hawaiʻi Community Foundation initiative to embrace community voices in the use of Parker Ranch Foundation Trust’s Richard Smart Fund.”