Ka Wā Mamua, Ka Wā Mahope
THE TIME IN FRONT, THE TIME BEHIND
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One such invitation is the way in which language informs our orientation to time.
For English-speakers, the future lies ahead, stretching forward like a long ribbon of road; the past, we can leave behind. To remember the past is to pause and look back.
For those who speak ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the direction is reversed.
For Hawaiʻi's people, the accumulated past stands before us. It is the time in front—ka wā mamua. Our memories, our traditions, our kūpuna fill the visible field. The future is the time behind us—ka wā mahope—unseen and unknowable.
In this spatial metaphor, our eyes are fixed on the past, drawing on collective wisdom as we back our way across a landscape of possible futures.
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Curling koa line a Kauaʻi trail. Photo by Pekuna Hong.
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TRADITIONAL FOOD TECHNOLOGIES
Keepers of Time
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If language can encode our perceptions of time, then so too can our inherited food practices. In Hawaiʻi, and the world over, traditional food systems are temporal technologies—ways of syncing the mutual thriving of people and place to natural cycles of time.
The moon (called Hina-hanai-a-ka-malama or Hina-ai-ka-malama when referencing her cycles of waxing and waning) is one of our most trusted timekeepers. Her phases instruct when to plant, when to fish, when to harvest, and when to rest. Each night of the lunar cycle carries its own invitation. To ignore it is to move out of sync with the pull of a wider order.
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Moonrise over Popoiʻa. Photo by Pekuna Hong.
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The loko iʻa, the walled fishpond, is yet another kind of natural clock. These relics of abundance still scallop our shorelines, stone wonderworks that measure time by the rhythms of tidal flow, of spawn and season. Each generation of kiaʻi—caretakers and timekeepers alike—taught the next of when to open the ʻōhiʻa-wood sluice gate, when to wait while the ʻamaʻama fattened, when to harvest. Over 450 loko iʻa were known and named, providing essential protein (over 300 lbs per acre per year) for the kaiāulu. Time was not measured in hours, but in the slow and certain movements of water and life, a lapping reminder that time is not owned by the individual but shared across communities.
Kalo, our staple food crop, keeps a different measure of time with hundreds of cultivated varieties forming a living archive of adaptation, each one a record of human care and environmental change across centuries. The plant itself is known to us as Hāloa, our very first elder brother now enshrined in each corm. To tend to him is to take one's place in genealogical time, an unbroken line stretching back to the beginning.
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Tending to kalo in Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu. Photo by Pekuna Hong.
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And then there are the technologies to carry abundance across time. In Hawaiʻi, kaulaʻi, the hanging-to-dry of fish and other proteins, allowed the plenty of one moment to feed the scarcity of another, storing calories, yes, and also—resilience.
Traditional food technologies remind us that food was and is never just food. Our stories and practices around them are another way we keep time—cyclical, seasonal, generational.
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The Time it Takes
AGED VENISON CUTS
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Photo by Lucianna McIntosh.
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In calendared time, our Maui Nui ʻohana has worked over a decade to help find better balance for our community and places. The unique challenges of this species in our own time have stretched us through layers of approaches—replication, iteration, wild origination.
Sometimes innovation has meant turning to the future, new-fangled infrared technology unlocking precision in harvests and surveys. Sometimes it has meant backing our way through challenges with time-tested tools: keen observation skills (for factoring in seasonal shifts, weather patterns, and the nightly influence of the moon); strong shoulders; a sharp blade in a skilled hand.
Our latest advance is a return to one of the world's oldest food technologies: aged meats.
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14-day aged Leg Medallions. Photo by Adam Milliron.
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ʻOhana Reserve Aged Cuts are here—our way of letting time do its quiet work for a little longer. Flavors deepen, textures soften, and remarkable consistency is achieved—each cut becomes an artifact of time, of the time it takes to make incredible food.
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Language may not be absolutely limiting, but like our traditions—around the ways we eat and live and thrive together—language quietly points to the postures we might inhabit as we move through our own times and our own places.
Eia naʻe; further and more, language can point us forward, language can point us back, and sometimes, if we are listening closely, it can point us forward-back.
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E hele pū nō kākou!
Me ke aloha nui,
Kuʻulani Muise
Brand Lady & Co-Founder
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E hele pū nō kākou!
Me ke aloha nui,
Kuʻulani Muise
Brand Lady & Co-Founder
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In Case
You Missed It
NEW TO OUR NEWSLETTER?
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This is already our 24th Volume of what has been described as the longest Newsletter ever. We have archived Volumes 1-23 for anyone who might love some backstories and extra long-form content. |
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