Fresh Local Tropical Fruit in Kapa’a

On east side of highway. Everything this lady sells is fresh and good.

By way of contrast, I ate a banana from my hotel’s “continental breakfast” table this morning and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Thinking back, I recall that in Costa Rica, one of the world’s big banana producers, the bunches of bananas on the trees are ensconced in blue plastic bags permeated with insecticides. The Ticos call them “condoms.”

The bananas from this stand are small and sweet, with an almost citrus-like tang.

Rambutan fruits. (Not prickly, but soft on the exterior.) Inside is a tangy gelatinous fruit around a large seed.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

3 Responses to Fresh Local Tropical Fruit in Kapa’a

  1. Lloyd- The fruit is a rambutan. My absolute favorite, we ate them in Indonesia by the bag full. The taste is similar to lychee, but rambutan has a better texture IMHO. Fruit in that part of the world is amazing- everything is grown/planted/selected for taste- strictly for taste. They don't ship things across continents. The infrastructure demands and requires food to be seasonal and local. During the year, like 500 distinctly different bannanas come in and out of the market. Wildly different from our Costco model. Viva Tropical Climates!
    Mark

  2. Snacking In-Between Sidewalks:
    Mapping Abundance of Wild Edibles in the Bay Area’s Food Deserts

    http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/02/05/snacking-in-between-sidewalks-mapping-abundance-of-wild-edibles-in-the-bay-areas-food-deserts/

    UC Berkeley professors Philip Stark and Tom Carlson are self-proclaimed botanical rubberneckers. When both of them walk their daily route to campus, it’s rare that they’ll take a few steps without stopping in their tracks, bending down, and finding some food to snack on. Their wild snacks are what most people would call weeds.

    Weeds, they say, get a really bad rap. Instead Stark and Carlson want people to think of them as wild edibles, underprivileged plants, or forgotten foods. “They’re just an incredible resource and we’re not using them,” Stark says.

    Carlson and Stark are researchers funded by the Berkeley Food Institute studying the abundance, nutritional value, and potential toxicity of these wild edibles, or weeds, in the East Bay’s food deserts.

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