Wonderfully and not surprisingly, Hawaii is getting more serious about ocean pollution, including plastic straws. 500 million straws are used every day in the US but plastic straws are too lightweight for most recyclers to handle. One source I read said most straws end up in the ocean.

Since we’ve been in Hawaii this year, there’s usually been no straw or it’s a paper straw in our drinks. I recently heard that a plastic, single-use straw takes 5 seconds to make, 5 minutes to use, and 500 years to breakdown. But, according to strawlessocean.org, when it “breaks down,” it breaks into microplastics that harm the birds and fish, i.e., a 50% mortality rate.

So, it’s been a light bulb moment for me to take this pollution seriously. And the very very least I can do when eating at a restaurant is remember to say, “No plastic straw, please.” Join me?

Even though I wrote about this beauty earlier, I couldn’t have an Hawaiian Texture series without the keawe tree that practically defines texture. It’s twisty-turny limbs looks exactly like the scary forest trees in the Wizard of Oz. On the bright side, it’s considered the best wood for BBQ and imu fires and is known as a nursery tree because it creates good soil, partial shade, and wind protection for all the plants that grow near it. The trees provide food for people and animals as well as medicine, dyes, cordage, cloth, lumber, and of course, firewood.

This commonest of trees helps stabilize coastal land, but it is also an invasive species, introduced by a priest from the first catholic mission to Hawaii. According to website theprivatenaturalist.wordpress.com, “He planted a tree on the grounds of the Catholic Mission on Fort Street in Honolulu that he had raised from the seed of a Peruvian tree growing in the royal gardens of Paris. By 1840, the progeny of that single tree became the principal shade trees of Honolulu and was already spreading to the … neighbor islands….”

I’d love to bring some home for Eric to use in interesting grilling/smoking ways, but for good reasons, that kind of thing is prohibited. So, maybe I’ll just have to be content with getting some keawe-smoked sea salt. And of course I still have that delicious keawe honey.

I’m not a Spam girl but I just had to write about it because it is SO popular here; Hawaiian’s eat more Spam than people in any other state.

They love it so much they created musubi: cooked Spam on top of rice, wrapped in nori. You can find this even at the counter in gas stations. Our server at Mama’s Fish House (who could wax poetic about all the sophisticated menu choices) told us he grew up eating musubi and it is still a favorite snack.

So in the spirit of research, David and I had the “House Made Spamp Musubi” at Aloha Mixed Plate today: “We provide the nori, fuikake-shittake rice and house made spamp, you wrap it up!” Sort of surprisingly, it was delicious!

Spam even inspires criminals. In 2017, there was a rash of Spam thefts in Hawaii. Apparently retailers believe organized crime was involved! Huh?!?

David and I felt so privileged Monday to hear five crewmembers speak of the history of Hokule’a and their experience as part of her 3-year World Tour. It is such a powerful tale from many perspectives, including how it was a catalyst for Hawaiians to come to know and reclaim their culture in the deepest possible ways.

The very short version of the story is that there has been a 2000-year-old relationship between the islands of Polynesia and the sea. But, as written on hokulea.com, all this was in danger of becoming extinct:

“The canoes that brought the first Hawaiians to their island home had disappeared from earth. Cultural extinction felt dangerously close to many Hawaiians when artist Herb Kane dreamed of rebuilding a double-hulled sailing canoe similar to the ones that his ancestors sailed. Though more than 600 years had passed since the last of these canoes had been seen…. [And] there was no navigator from our culture left. The Voyaging Society looked beyond Polynesia to find a traditional navigator to guide Hokule’a: Mau Pialug, a navigator from a small island called Satawai, in Micronesia. He agreed to come to Hawai’i and guide Hokule’a to Tahiti. Without him, our voyaging would never have taken place.”

Monday the Hokule’a sailed from Oahu to Maui and will be here for a couple weeks, educating the public, and especially the children, about the meaning of this voyaging canoe to the people of Hawaii and throughout the world. For a beautiful (and brief) story of Kala Tanaka, one of the women who is learning to master navigation, go to: https://www.gohawaii.com/hawaii-rooted/Kala-Tanaka

We like good coffee. We used to search for 100% Kona coffee but several years ago we learned about the coffee grown up the street from us at the Ka’anapali Estate Coffee. It is delicious—David’s favorite is Lava, mine is French Kiss. So the coffee is grown a couple miles from us and then roasted and sold here, at the MauiGrown Coffee Company Store in Lahaina. It’s one of our favorite stops: we buy it to drink here, we buy it to send home, we buy it for gifts. I’d say it’s part of our vacation texture!