Sustainable Initiatives by Andrea Dean

In preparation for the North Kohala Eat Locally Grown Campaign and the Kanu Eat Local Challenge I am eating only locally grown foods for 60 days.. starting on September 3rd. To me “locally grown” means only foods grown, harvested, hunted and fished in Hawaii. I will try to source first from my North Kohala community, then Big Island and then the State.


9/2
I don’t know why, but a strange junk food craving has set in immediately prior to my perceived deprivation. I am on Maui for a few days staying at my girlfriend Mary’s house and she brought home Milano cookies and Cheetos. How did she know that I have a deep and ancient relationship with Cheetos? They were my preferred snack food when I was growing up. It was hard to separate me from that bag. Thankfully, Mary had a bit of a stomach virus and I had the whole bag to myself.





I wanted to start my experiment on September 1st, but since I was taking a trip to Maui I revised my start date to September 3rd. That meant that I would have no time for lengthly sourcing or preparation, I would just have to start winging it. Today I flew in from Maui and only had time for a quick stop at the KTA food store in Kailua-Kona before heading home to Hawi and starting to eat local the next morning. KTA has a long history of supporting local farmers and locally made products through their Mountain Apple Brand. I came out with: Mountain Apple Brand milk, Molokai Sweet potatoes, fresh soy beans, two types of cucumbers, red cabbage, green cabbage, celery, Hamakua Springs tomatoes, bananas, eggs, Puna Goat Cheese feta and spreadable and ka’u oranges.





One of the comments that I often hear is that eating locally grown food is more expensive than imported food and, therefore, only for the food elite. In order to examine whether or not this is true, I am keeping track of all my expenses. I am not sharing my food with my husband and son (I am not known for being the family cook, anyway!) so I can get an accurate accounting.


Since I am very into local foods, the night before I started my experiment I was craving one of my native foods- pizza. There I was cramming a not very good frozen pizza into my mouth at 9:30 pm at night. Shameful, really. Not even something I normally do, but it felt right in the moment.

A presentation on Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) with Michael Kramer, Accredited Investment Fiduciary and Managing Partner at Natural Investments LLC.


February 23, 2010 • 6 pm • Kona Stories in Kainaliu • Free


Utilizing mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other instruments, Natural Investments LLC serves clients large and small with customized portfolios that fulfill each person’s social and environmental concerns. With hundreds of socially responsible funds and managers investing in virtually every asset class, today’s investment portfolios can achieve the diversification and competitive performance of conventional approaches.


If you are looking for ways to make money while helping to fund solutions to the social and environmental challenges of our time, come learn more about Socially Responsible Investing from one of the leaders in the field of values-based investing.


Michael Kramer, M.Ed. AIF®, is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary and Managing Partner at Natural Investments LLC, Hawai`i’s only registered investment adviser which exclusively manages portfolios of socially and environmentally responsible investments. Natural Investments LLC is an investment adviser registered with the SEC with offices in five states which serves individual and institutional clients nationwide. Michael has lived in Kona since 1999, where he founded the Kuleana Green Business Program of the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce in 2005 and the Kona Earth Festival. He currently serves on the board of the Sustainability Association of Hawaii and the Hawaii chapter of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

OK, I’m delirious from working on the computer. It feels like I got nothing done today, but actually… I did. I upgraded my WordPress blog, which does not sound like much, but the automatic upgrade would not work so it turned into quite a little project. You won’t notice anything different, but everything is working much smoother on the back end where I live. This morning, I finally got the databases transferred over so Mary’s akamaipromotions.com blog will now work in perpetuity. I really learned a lot today- venturing into totally new territory with WordPress. I really wanted to get all of my new website pages done today- but I didn’t even get started! I did get signed up with google apps and am looking forward to ditching Outlook tomorrow and defecting to google.


We also make more progress on the Halloween masks, adding a thin layer of a putty and glue mixture to try to smooth the surfaces. Sand and paint tomorrow.


After grinding on the computer all day long, we took a walk down at Keokea and continued to experiment with the new camera.



We also got out and about to the Kava Kafe to play some chess and experiment with the new camera in the dark lighting.

Local beekeeper Richard Spiegel from Volcano Island Honey attended the Hawaii premier of the film The Last Beekeeper.