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<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, January 31, 2026</title>

Takin' care of business...

Daily Smile: Saturday, January 31, 2026

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Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

Columnists

Six mayoral candidates want to run Kauaʻi County. On a Saturday afternoon in Līhuʻe, a few took turns at the microphone explaining how the island would feed itself.

The businessman Megeso-William Denis put it least cautiously. He believes in “total food independence,” he said. The island should stop leaning on outside sources.

The crowd, gathered to mark the 20-year anniversary of a food-security nonprofit, took this in without a murmur. No one asked whether an island that grows almost none of its dinner can be made to grow all of it. No one asked who would still be living there if it did.

The other five disagreed mostly about method. A county agriculture department, zoning rewritten so farmers can house themselves, government grocery stores — the means varied, the destination did not. Kauaʻi feeding Kauaʻi is a good so self-evident that the only live question is how fast to arrive.

These islands have run the experiment already. For five centuries before Captain Cook, Hawaiʻi was as food-independent as a place can be. It was sealed off in the middle of the largest ocean, fed by what its people drew from soil and sea.

The archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch has spent a career 

 what that isolation produced. The population climbed for centuries, struck a ceiling around 1450, and held there for a time. Then the dryland farms of Maui and Hawaiʻi were worked to the soil’s nutrient limits, until their surplus shrank rather than grew. The oral traditions remember famines when people survived on ferns.

What the islands could grow shaped how they were ruled. Kauaʻi and Oʻahu have the valleys and year-round streams for irrigated terraces, and a steady surplus kept their kingdoms settled. Maui and Hawaiʻi leaned on dryland fields instead, worked at the mercy of the rain. So those islands bred the restless, conquering kings, in part because a kingdom that cannot grow more food can still take from its neighbor.

When Cook’s ships returned in 1779, the kings of Maui and Hawaiʻi were at war. The unification that followed was finished, in the end, with European muskets.

We can look back on that world and see a garden, not a barren field. We can afford to, because we live on the comfortable side of the divide. The 85 to 90 percent of our food that arrives by sea is only the surface dependence. Beneath it run federal aid, state transfers, tourist dollars, and the quiet giving of people who made their fortunes far from any field.

The conversation on Kauaʻi runs on that last kind of money. Civil Beat’s “Hawaiʻi Grown” 

 is funded in part by the Ulupono Fund, established by Pierre Omidyar. He also founded Civil Beat and has long been its principal backer.

Omidyar made his money at eBay, a company whose apocryphal founding legend has him building a marketplace so his fiancée could trade her collectible PEZ dispensers. The dream of growing our own dinner is underwritten, in part, by the global trade in plastic candy toys.

The same sleight of hand appears wherever self-sufficiency is preached. The island that means to free itself from foreign energy will do it on solar panels from China. China makes more than four-fifths of the world’s photovoltaic panels. Kauaʻi will store that energy in batteries from the same China. Autarky, it turns out, is brought to you by globalization.

Nor does the fantasy belong to one party. The degrowth left and the bunker-stocking right find in it the same flattering promise — that a community, or a household, or a single man, might arrange life to need no one else.

There are good reasons to grow more food here. It tastes better when it hasn’t crossed an ocean. Open land is worth keeping in cultivation rather than left to become a fire hazard. Farming is honest work, and a shelf of local sweet potatoes is a fine thing to have when a shipping lane snarls.

Some of what the candidates propose is sensible. Rewriting zoning so a farmer can build a house on the land he works removes an obstacle the county itself put up. Whether a thin harvest calls for a brand-new county department is another matter. The instinct to meet every shortfall by adding to government is its own quiet tell. The error is not in wanting more gardens. It is in the small, smuggled step from growing 

— from a sensible hedge to a daydream of sovereignty.

The daydream is least affordable now. The farming that fed old Hawaiʻi was punishing, and it rested on a population that was large and still climbing. Ours is shrinking and growing old. The state lost residents again last year, as it has for most of the decade. Our working-age people are leaving for cheaper lives on the Mainland faster than children arrive to replace them.

Kauaʻi has held its overall numbers, but this masks a hollowing out. At that same forum, Councilmember Felicia Cowden warned that the island is pushing its own people out and will soon have no workforce left. A place cannot wall itself off from the world while its own young are filing toward the airport.

Suppose the island managed it — every acre planted, every farmer housed, the container ship turned away at the harbor. The farmer would still rise each morning and search the sky. He cannot make it rain, or call up the sun. He cannot hold off the storm that flattens a field the week before harvest, or the blight that takes a crop overnight. He clears the ground and sets the seed and pulls the weeds, and then he waits on weather he cannot command. Rain comes as a gift or it does not come at all.

By all means, grow the gardens and let the land bring forth food. But whether food comes from the farmer’s market or the Matson container, we should bring it to the table with gratitude that God has fed us again. We ought, then, to let go of the oldest and proudest illusion there is: that the aim of man is to reach the point where he depends only on himself.

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I Stock Kauai

<title>Can Kauaʻi feed itself? Why food independence won't work</title>

Food independence is a luxury belief, says ASD columnist Sterling Higa, and it is most affordable to those who have never gone hungry.

Can Kauaʻi feed itself? Why food independence won't work

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

Business & Tourism

 — Oʻahu’s largest Latin American market — just opened its second location.

The business's second retail and wholesale location is in Waipahu. Its grand opening block party will be on Saturday, June 20, in Waipio’s Koa Ridge (in the Royal Koa parking lot). The event will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., but the retail store will be open for shopping until 6 p.m. The store is currently in its soft opening, and is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Saturday event will feature a variety of local food and beverage partners. Attendees can look forward to pop-up booths with authentic cuisine, music and an exclusive Mercado de la Raza gift (available while supplies last).

“I think a lot of people have been waiting for this moment, and we see lots of kids coming in (to our store), so we want to make it a family event,” says Alex Villarino, who co-owns the business with his wife, Megahn Chun.

“We’re in a very residential area, so we wanted to share a little bit of the culture, and introduce them (community members) to the culture and food,” Chun adds.

Mercado de la Raza has been open since 1994, according to Villarino.

“It’s a common thing in Mexico for a mercado to be known as ‘mercado de la raza,’” he says. “Raza means ‘of the people,’ kind of like ‘market of the people.’”

The husband-and-wife team says they wanted to open in central Oʻahu when it was time to expand to a second location.

“We learned there were a lot of people who were traveling from the North Shore, Kapolei, ‘Ewa Beach, Wahiawā and Mililani to our Beretania store,” Chun says. “We decided when we open a second location, it had to be in Central Oʻahu — just to be closer to everybody and serve these communities.

“It was a journey (to find the right location),” she adds. “It’s never easy to find the right fit.”

Chun recalls how she and Villarino would drive around at night, looking at potential places for their next location.

“When we saw this place, we asked our realtor to come and show it to us,” she says. “After we opened the door, I just felt this is the place. We saw a vision, and this is the place that it had to be.”

This second location has been in the works for about a year, according to Chun. The Waipahu store is bigger than the original store, and it features a warehouse section and retail store. Customers will be able to shop in the larger retail space, which is fully stocked with handmade tortillas, imported beverages and snacks, and more. There are also a variety of dishes, merch, flags and more.

“This is a hybrid location,” Villarino says. “We have one side that is destined to help more of the business owners that are on this side of town. On the right side, we have a retail location; we have a little bit more space here, so we’ll probably have a few more products.”

Customer favorites have included tamarind candy, specialty sodas, empanadas, and — in light of the World Cup — jerseys and flags.

“We have sodas from all over Latin America — from Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina and Peru,” Villarino says. “Sodas are a big thing.”

“It’s definitely a festive place,” Chun adds. “Anything related to empanadas (is popular) — we have ready-made empanadas you can put in the air fryer or oven.”

Partnering with and highlighting up-and-coming businesses is important to Villarino and Chun. At the Beretania store, a local Latino entrepreneur was featured every month, and their products would be sold in the store, according to Chun.

“We would set them up at the front of the store and give them a sales channel,” she says. “We had Raiz Tortillas, Madres Churros and more; we carried all of these locally made brands.”

“We serve a lot of established restaurants, but we want to give the opportunity to a lot of the smaller ones who are just starting,” Villarino says. “A lot of what we do is to support people.”

A dedicated community gathering space — which will host language workshops, cooking classes and other events — will open later this year.

“We can have a little more space for activations here, things that are more geared for the community,” Chun says. “We have a lot more children’s books; we want to have more children’s events, as well.”

The Waipahu store’s hours are the same as its Beretania Street location — 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Customers can park in the lot outside the store; street parking is also available.

“Food is the ultimate connector, and we’ve always taken pride in helping people find the exact ingredients that taste like home,” Villarino states. “We want families to walk into this new space and immediately feel a sense of belonging, education and community.

“I think it’s important to show that Latinas are good, hard-working people, and we’re ready to offer so much to the communities,” he adds.

Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays

Mercado de la Raza owners 061526

<title>Mercado de la Raza opens second location in Waipahu</title>

This Latin American market is celebrating the grand opening of its second store this Saturday, June 20, in Waipio’s Koa Ridge. The block party will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. This second location is bigger than the business’s original store on South Beretania Street.

Mercado de la Raza opens second location in Waipahu

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