Chefs in paradise
Where to stay, eat and visit
Slideshow: See the bounty

This coastline seems ill-suited for farming. But the kiawe, a mesquite originally from South America, loves it here. The trees’ roots reach down through a layer of silt and then between the lava crags to tap into water trapped beneath. The trees grow huge, and three or four times a year they blossom with brilliant clouds of dangling yellow flowers — the source for Volcano Island Honey, considered by many to be the finest in the world.

It takes countless numbers of flowers to make one pound of honey; it takes one bee a whole lifetime to make one tablespoon. The result is purity in a jar: white, with an elemental richness, a concentrated blast of the Earth’s sweet essence.

Minh & Wass
Volcano Island Honey Co.’s Richard Spiegel, with some of his workers

Volcano Island Honey Co. is one player in the revolution that has transformed Big Island agriculture. The demise of the sugarcane industry and a growing demand for gourmet items have created a cadre of entrepreneurial small farmers who produce an endless array of specialty crops and products: vanilla, hearts of palm, mushrooms, and chocolate.

The Big Island is a remarkably fertile place, where 200 kinds of avocados and 100 varieties of bananas thrive. “More types of fruit grow here than just about any place in the world,” says Ken Love, a South Kona fruit grower. “Ships bound for Asia or Europe stopped here in the 1800s with what they had picked up in South America or the tropics. They came here, threw out their garbage, and it all began to grow.”

Ranging from sea level to nearly 14,000 feet in elevation, the Big Island is almost planetary in its geographic diversity. Less than a million years old, it’s one of the youngest places on Earth — and thanks to the lava flows from the Kilauea volcano that continue to add new land, the Big Island is getting younger all the time.

Both literally and metaphorically, this is a brave new world. As I travel the island and listen to farmers’ stories, I find myself pondering a no doubt pretentious but fundamental notion. When people change their lives, do they in some way also change their world?

For Richard Spiegel, such questions come with the territory. A native of New Jersey, he came of age in the 1960s. He practiced law briefly, traveled across the country in a Volkswagen bus, and eventually lived what he describes as a mountain-man existence in Washington state. Then, while cutting wood for the winter, he was seriously injured in a saw accident and realized he couldn’t recover in such a remote spot. He called a friend who lived in an old Shinto temple on the Big Island and came here to heal. That was 30 years ago.

Spiegel had kept beehives back on the mainland and soon started beekeeping here — the origin of Volcano Island Honey Co. Beekeepers had worked the kiawe forests for 100 years before he arrived, but it’s technique that really distinguishes his artisan honey. Combs of honey are hand-selected from 150 hives rather than the thousands that many beekeepers maintain. By not using heat as in conventional honey extraction, Spiegel preserves enzymes, allowing his product to crystallize without processing; the operation is entirely organic.

For all of his idealism, Spiegel also recognizes the irony of his situation. As he puts it, he’s a onetime hippie who eschewed sugar, only to end up producing gourmet honey at $15 per 8-ounce jar. It’s like those bee stings that zing him back to reality: Spiegel understands that when he speaks at business schools about organic small farming, he won’t be taken seriously unless his honey succeeds not just artistically but financially too.

“The edge of hypocrisy follows me all the time,” he says. “We touch the Earth but sell at Neiman Marcus.”