Solving a Food Desert in Paradise

The 60-year-old also seeks to edu­cate locals and vis­i­tors alike about the health ben­e­fits of home­grown foods like avo­cado and papaya over the canned and processed goods trans­ported from the mainland.

Hana Fresh sells freshly picked crops at a road­side stand in front of Hana Health, the squat com­mu­nity well­ness cen­ter that sits between the pop­u­lar pro­duce stand and the farm, which also grows gourmet greens and exotic fruits for high-end restau­rants, resorts, and gro­cery stores on the island. Fresh food from the farm is incor­po­rated into the site’s senior meal pro­gram. The Hana Fresh Market also sells pre­pared foods and com­plete meals in addi­tion to pro­duce and locally sourced fish. Profits from the farm and stand help sup­port the med­ical facil­ity; last year $60,000 went to fund com­mu­nity health pro­grams, accord­ing to the nonprofit’s Executive Director Cheryl Vasconcellos.

For local res­i­dents, many of whom are Native Hawaiians, Hana Fresh offers one-stop well­ness shop­ping. “I’d love to see our elders go in for health check­ups and come out with a pre­scrip­tion for kale,” says Kalalau. “We’re work­ing on ideas like that now.” He and other staff lead tours of the farm, where vis­i­tors can learn about the chal­lenges of grow­ing food in the trop­ics and tra­di­tional Hawaiian med­i­c­i­nal ways.

Most tourists think of Hana—reached by nav­i­gat­ing a stun­ning stretch of “high­way” with hun­dreds of hair­pin turns and dozens of one-lane bridges—as a patch of par­adise with gor­geous water­falls, ver­dant land­scapes, and serene swim­ming holes.

But peo­ple live here too. And the roughly 2,200 res­i­dents of this remote area rely on Hana Health and Hana Fresh for rou­tine things most tourists take for granted, like pri­mary med­ical and men­tal health care, den­tal clean­ings, and access to nutri­tious food. Hana is a fed­er­ally des­ig­nated under­served area, and the organization’s mis­sion is to pro­vide a safety net and improve the health and well­ness of the com­mu­nity, par­tic­u­larly for Native Hawaiians and oth­ers who are at risk due to finan­cial, cul­tural, and geo­graphic bar­ri­ers. “Many of our patients go straight out the door from their med­ical appoint­ments to buy veg­eta­bles, pick up a salad or smoothie for lunch, or even din­ner,” says Mary Hanchett, a med­ical recep­tion­ist who has worked at the clinic for nine years.

The 35-year-old mother of two was born and raised in Hana, and relies on the farm stand as well. Hanchett is healthy, but she keeps close tabs on her blood pres­sure and cho­les­terol, since there is a his­tory of these con­di­tions in her fam­ily. “I’ve always been care­ful about what I eat because of my genetic dis­po­si­tion,” she says. “I do enjoy Hawaiian food—like pork—but I also eat a lot of veg­eta­bles and the farm and mar­ket make that easy for me to do. There was noth­ing like this when I was grow­ing up here.”

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