While many in Hawaiʻi are making more of an effort to eat local, Oʻahu chef Yuda Abitbol is taking it up a notch.
The Kalani High School alum recently completed a month-long food challenge where he only ate what he could hunt, farm, fish or forage — right down to the spices. Yuda documented his challenge on his Instagram, @followsthewai.
He plans to hold various types of foraging classes throughout September. HPR talked with Yuda about his food challenge and what he learned.
Interview Highlights
On his years of experience foraging food
I spent the last like 10 years just finding stuff and stumbling upon things, hearing rumors from other people that there might be this plant here or this plant there, and then spending like years trying to find them and then finding them. With that 10 years of experience, it wasn't too hard for me because I have the forest basically like memorized, where the trees are, the seasons that they make their fruits, the best time to harvest. And then I have a system now too. When I harvest, I do a big batch, then I process it, which is all really time consuming stuff. But if you do it in layers, and you stockpile over the years — I have peppercorns from three years ago that are still good and salts that are really old, that are still good to use and stuff.
On the types of proteins and animals he harvested
I started the challenge a week after my last hunt. And the last hunt that I did was a wild pig. I shot one on the side of Wilhelmina Rise with a bow and arrow, and I had all that meat. And then I also have different hunts in my freezer. So in my freezer, I have like a cornucopia of different things, lobsters, crabs, all vac sealed and labeled on the dates of when and where I got them. I had access to that. Because to do a one month challenge and work and pay rent and be a part of society, it's almost impossible to go out every day and gather your fresh meals. Like to go get meat every four days, or however long it would take me to go through an animal. On Oʻahu, basically impossible, I mean, it's not impossible, but I would have to give up work, and then I wouldnʻt have a way to pay rent, and I had to kind of make it realistic for me.
On trading what he had foraged with the community
I was like, oh, man to do this challenge in a more cool way would be like, how about we just make it where I can't accept anything without giving something back. So it was like, go pick a bunch of fruit from the fruit trees at my house, and then I would take that thing that I have an abundance of, and I would post it at my store like, "Hey, I have a bunch of fruit," and then get egg lady from like Mākaha hit me up and be like, "I have eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, chicken eggs." And I'm like, "Oh, man, I haven't had an egg in two weeks. That sounds so good. Let me give you all my starfruit." And then I like, would snowball stuff too, and this is something I did when I first started foraging when I was 22, it was a lot of fruit foraging. And it'd be like, go to the forest and grab wild bananas, like a rack of wild bananas, and then break them off into small brown bags. And then I would go and see a really nice guava tree in someone's yard in Mānoa. And I would go and knock on their door and be like, "Hey, I see all your guavas are going to waste. Can I pick some and I'll give you these bananas in return?" So I start with a resource that I already have, like an abundance of, or I can find an abundance of, and so it reminded me of that. And I did that because I was in kind of a survival mode back then, just like trying to live like independent as a young man in Honolulu, skating and biking around and going to work in Waikīkī and stuff. I leaned into that during the challenge, and it really was amazing to see how many people hit me up.
On the biggest lesson he learned during the challenge
Being able to know that you can get your own food is such a reassuring feeling. I know no matter what situation I'm in, I can kind of figure out how to get food or how to feed my friends and family. And I think in Hawaiʻi, it's something that was such a huge part of the culture here for so long, until what happened 200 years ago. You see it in the outer islands. That's what really inspired me. Because what I did isn't anything new, really. It's not even like a groundbreaking thing, because it's what we were living like 200 years ago and it's what the Hawaiians were living like, their whole existence.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 20, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Tori DeJournett adapted this story for the web.
