Fishing and Eating Like Ancient Hawaiians

On the South Kona coast of Hawaii Island, there is one of the last Hawaiian fishing villages in the world, and it's Ho'okela. They still practice traditional fishing in the old style, in a canoe, chumming the water the way that generations of Hawaiians have done. It is something that needs to be experienced firsthand. If we don't continue to learn these things, that knowledge will be lost. My name is Mark Noguchi, my friends call me Gooch, and I'm a chef here in Hawaii. My belief is in preserving the techniques and ingredients that we have in this place that I call home. When we talk about Hawaiian food, there's before Western contact, and then there's post-Western contact. One of the biggest misconceptions about Hawaiian food is how it's always presented in this gigantic, you know, luau with the imu and the kalua pig, and then the fire knife dances, which that's not even Hawaiian. Hawaiians, they ate simply. It was largely a very ocean, opelu, and vegetal-based diet. The reason why I'm going down to Ho'okela today is to spend the day with one of the Hawaiian families who have graciously called their friends and family to come down and share their practice. Hawaiian practices around fishing and planting and growing is all about sustainability. We fish with nets and catch what we need. Opelu is a mackerel, and it's the mainstay of the fishing village here. If you were to try and go in the water and catch them with a spear or something else, they're going to just leave. They're not going to stay around. You need to feed them. You would prepare their bait, which was 100% vegetable. We call that the palu. That's put into a bag, and the bag is thrown into the ocean, and when it's yanked, all the palu or the bait is let go. The fish aggregate and come around and feed. We don't separate ourselves from the land. We don't separate ourselves from what feeds us. So it was important then to sustain those aggregation areas, and they did that by feeding the fish during the off-season without even catching them. And this was a means to train the fish to come back to the same area all the time. It's almost like ocean farming. So after you harvest all of this fish, you got to clean it. And you see aunties, and you see husbands, and you see friends come around. Everybody knows that there's a job to do. Today, we're going to prepare opelu in as many ways as possible. Fried, seasoned just with po'okai, keeping it super simple. We're also going to have opelu raw, which is just cut up, and it's just lightly seasoned. Opelu lomi, where you take it, and you lomi it, and you turn it, and you mix it with other ingredients. Onions, tomatoes, green onions, seasoned with just chili pepper and salt. We also have poi today, fresh poi. Poi is taro, it's been cooked, and it's been mixed with water, and it is one of our staple starches. We also have ulu, which is breadfruit. Breadfruit is another traditional Hawaiian staple as well. And this is how we eat, every day, simple. One thing that we always do, we bless the food. It's a non-denominational mahalo to all the hands, and all the spirits, and all the people that have come together to put all this food together. And then you eat, you just sit around and hang out. That's when the stories come out. That's everything that we've worked for, for that day. It reinforces, for myself, the importance of being able to know the difference of what it is that we're cooking and serving. In today's day and age, where we are all worried about our resources, there are people still doing their part to preserve an ecosystem. It lends hope for us to continue to preserve the place that we call home. We need to take these lessons that aren't shared worldwide. We need to be able to take these lessons and apply them to our daily life.