This is my Earth Day plea to stop the collection of Hawai‘i’s endemic fishes for the Aquarium Industry.
Read more on my photo blog ->
Happy Earth Day!
Earth Day Photo: Green Sea Turtle and Yellow Tangs
April 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Amazing Whale Origami
February 19, 2011 By 2 Comments
One of my favorite things about the Maui Whale Day celebration is the maze of 36,000 Origami Whales. Each whale is lovingly crafted, decorated and arranged on long strings as a colorful visual statement and memorial of the lives of whales killed since 1986.
See the Maui Whale Day photos on Flickr ->
Buy Back The Beach
January 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I grew up in a concrete jungle. Several of them, actually. My dad was a journalist and we moved several times to various cities within Asia. I became self aware in a high rise, and lived in many more since.
When I lived in the California’s Bay Area as an adult, I used to love trekking around in the open spaces with my camera. It’s something I never took for granted. It’s also one of the things we cherish about living on Maui. I’m all for progress, but one of the reasons we’re known as “paradise” is our land still looks pretty.
So when I was asked to live tweet at the Maui Coastal Land Trust’s 10th Annual “Buy Back The Beach” benefit at the Old Lahaina Lu’au this Saturday, I couldn’t say no. It’ll be a great event for a very worthy cause, and there still time for you to get a seat or table if you’re on the island.
Whether we see you there or not, join in on our tweet conversation with the hashtag #BBTB or watch for me me at @PeterLiu47.
Harvest Day Party
April 16, 2010 By 1 Comment
Earlier this week, South Maui Sustainability held a Harvest Day Party at their Kihei Elementary School Garden. Volunteers Chef Nio Kindla, Kathy Becklin, Susan Wyche and Stuart Karlan led Ms. Manglicmot’s 19 eager kindergarten students around the garden and showed them how to harvest their own vegetables.
Chef Nio talked about the importance of teaching kids that food comes from the land, not from supermarkets, and how communities can benefit from the inspiration of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, where he showed the kids the difference between a tomato and a potato, and where catsup and french fries come from.
Alan Joaquin, inventor of The Wiki Garden product used in the project, visited from Oahu with his wife Tannya of Hawaii News Now and their son Kaimana to be a part of the festivities.
Kids with their tomato harvest at the Kihei Elementary School Garden.
Chef Nio Kindla teaching the kids how to make a salad as Kathy Becklin looks on at the Kihei Elementary School Garden.
They brought them to Chef Nio, who made a deal with them that they had to try everything before they decided they didn’t like it, knowing that they hadn’t seen or tried many of the items before. He then proceed to show them how to wash and assemble the vegetables into a salad.
Kids with the salads they made with Chef Nio at the Kihei Elementary School Garden.
When the salad was prepared, the volunteers lay out beach mats so the kids could sit around the bowls enjoy the fruits of their labor. They did indeed try everything.
One of the clear favorites was the green beans dipped in a catsup Kathy Becklin made using tomatoes picked from the garden—a locavore treat. Watching the kids’ enthusiasm over eating the vegetables they handpicked themselves was an extremely rewarding experience. These are kids likely to eat their veggies when they grow up.
A second group of kids were sad and disappointed when the sky opened up and pouring rain prevented them from having their turn at the harvest, but they were treated to a large bowl of salad, which came back empty. Next time.
Jamie Oliver's Campaign To Save America's Kids
March 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
After we moved to Maui in ’06, I started looking at the list of things I no longer had an excuse to avoid dealing with in my life—things I’d always been too busy or too in-denial to deal with while living the high speed, high adrenaline Silicon Valley lifestyle.
One of those things was my health. I knew I had a cholesterol problem in the early 90′s when I was told as much after donating blood one day, but I ignored it. Too busy. True, but an excuse nevertheless. I exercised, tried to eat right, but I traveled a lot in my jobs—high stress travel assignments where I basically ate whatever I could whenever I could while running from airplanes to hotels to conference rooms. And when I wasn’t traveling, I was still pulling 80-hour weeks and grabbing food whenever and wherever I could, not really paying attention to what it was. Food was fuel.
Being past my mid-forties when we arrived here, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and find out how unhealthy I really was. After submitting myself to the battery of blood tests, I was relieved to find that the numbers weren’t really as bad as I expected, and I wasn’t terminally ill, but even after some changes in the diet and developing an exercise habit, I still ended up on cholesterol meds, and my glucose levels were just enough over the standard range to put me in the “pre-diabetic” list.
Three years later, after cutting out all processed sugars, white starches and the like, and running on the beach almost every morning, I got myself off the list by a hair. During that time, I got curious about food. I should add that I do have some culinary training thanks to my wife giving me a gift certificate to a local cooking school for our 10th anniversary, so I thought I knew something about food, but I didn’t know how ignorant I was about the food industry until I read books by Michael Pollan and watched films like The Future of Food and Food, Inc.
America has been brainwashed into some pretty unhealthy eating habits thanks to the food industry, and watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which started airing this month, has really brought the message home. America is literally eating itself to death.
If we as a nation are going to live through this, we have to educate our kids. Watch the series, then sign the petition, and cook a healthy meal with your children tonight.
