When travelling - be it on a long vacation or just a long weekend, we like to participate in food tours. These tours are generally operated by locals who take great pride in their community and want to show off the unique characteristics, stories and products of their community. We enjoy learning about food and its relationship to people, to try new things that we might not have had the chance to do on our own and expand our experience with a region. A good food tour isn’t just about eating and drinking – if that’s what you want – just go to a restaurant and order stuff. A good food tour is certainly about tasting, but equally as much, learning how food and the food industry interacts and relates to people and their land & culture.
Tasting Kauai offers three different food tours – on the north side of the island, the east side and the south side. We took the north shore tour. On this food tour you drive your own vehicle to the next location and meet up with the group where Marta and her husband, Dan, introduce you to the restaurant, their staff, their story and the items to be sampled. Everyone has a different favorite take-away from the tour. Two things I particularly enjoyed – one, learning about Hawaii’s Taro industry and how Poi doesn’t have to be like wallpaper paste and about Breadfruit.
The Breadfruit Tree produces high carb, nutritionally dense fruit. The tree thrives in hot climates, tolerates poor, dry soil conditions, requires little maintenance, has a high yield and produces fruit in just 5 years. With 80% of the worlds hungry living in subtropical to tropical regions, breadfruit is being used to address global hunger concerns. We visited a restaurant where the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) trained chef utilizes locally grown breadfruit in a number of ways - we sampled very tasty breadfruit bagels and breadfruit hummus.
Next time in Kaua’I we certainly will enroll in their other two tours – if we had more time on the island, we would have on this most recent visit. This is a great tour by a very engaging couple with a passion for food, people and their culture.