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| Minh & Wass |
| Michael Crowell in his palm plantation |
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South from Pa‘auilo, State 19/Mamalahoa Highway slithers in and out of steep gullies dense with jungle vegetation. Turning off at Kolekole Beach Park, I discover that the view from the road barely reveals the primeval beauty of this side of the island: Eden-like in spots but with swinging thunbergia vines and tangled stands of albizia and wild guava, chaotic and ominous in their disarray.Lesley Hill and Michael Crowell bought a onetime sugarcane plantation on the edge of this jungle. If the sugarcane business was dead, this was its corpse: rutted, beaten land with the stench of crushed, fermenting cane. “We couldn’t find a single earthworm,” Hill says. “In places, the topsoil had been scooped off and all that was left was hardpan. The erosion on the island is unbelievable. We had to save this land from running down to the ocean.”
After years of loving rehabilitation, it’s productive land again. Views extend from Mauna Kea to the Pacific, and while some areas feature orderly plantings, the sheer abundance gives the farm an almost feral quality. Near its open-air Balinese-style structures grows a huge range of fruits, from Meyer lemons to durian, a spiky, basketball-size Southeast Asian fruit equally renowned for its custardy flavor on the tongue and its gag-inducing odor to the nose. The farm’s main crop, however, is hearts of palm. Following successful trials with bactris, a spineless palm native to Central and South America, the couple planted 35,000 seeds.
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| Minh & Wass |
| Palm hearts and leaves exude a mildly sweet flavor. |
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My exposure to hearts of palm has been limited to canned stuff so underwhelming in flavor and texture that a big whiff of durian would seem a welcome antidote to its blandness.Machete in hand, Crowell goes to a palm and hacks off a section. He keeps thwacking and whacking until he removes the stem’s sheath, revealing the pristine white heart.
“Vegetable ivory,” he declares.
I bite in and the palm crunches sharply, releasing a mildly sweet flavor. Even tastier is the section of young leaves, translucent white tissue that unfurls like a scroll.
Crowell and Hill’s Wailea Agricultural Group regularly sells hundreds of pounds of hearts of palm a week, which prompts the question of just who is buying this stuff. With Hawaiian restaurants featuring regional cuisine, there’s certainly a local market. But the Islands remain the most isolated inhabited place on Earth.
Welcome to the age of express shipping: The farm takes individual orders for freshly cut hearts of palm from chefs all over the mainland and can have them delivered within two days. “Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable,” Crowell says. “I’ll be thinking, ‘You guys are in Chicago or New York and we’re in the jungle, all the way out here on a corner of the Polynesian Triangle.’ ”
Big Island, small world.
