The Food Basket on Hawaiʻi Island is launching its 10-week “Food is Medicine” initiative. Kūpuna from the Keaʻau Community Center will take weekly cooking classes with recipes chosen by Keaʻau High School agriculture students.
Each recipe is curated based on ingredients grown by the students, with some support from local farmers in case of a bad crop or limited resources. Participants will learn how to prepare each recipe and will get to take home two extra food packs to use throughout the rest of the week at their own homes.
Kerri Okamura, the program’s director at The Food Basket, said this is a way to connect generations, allow students to mālama ʻāina, and support local.
“Increasing access to local produce is important for everyone's health, and it's also important to teach our community how to use local ingredients in their recipes,” Okamura said.
“I think it's important to teach our keiki and our students how to give back to the community. This whole program is an opportunity for them to give back and connect with the kūpuna — that's very important as far as sustaining a community of caring.”
Keaʻau multimedia students will also be involved in the program by filming instructional videos on how each recipe packet is prepared. Okamura said the team is partnering with the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo to monitor participants’ biometrics — things like blood pressure and sugar levels — on the first and last day of the program.
“This is to see how increasing access to healthy, fresh produce on a consistent basis will improve people’s health,” Okamura said. “So it’s really this multi-level collaboration across different groups to make this happen.”
The $20,000 program, funded by Hawaiʻi County, is in its pilot phase and will be free for all participants. Registration has not yet opened, but Okamura hopes folks at the community center can start to sign up soon. The program has a tentative start date of late February or early March.
