Page 33 of Big Island Neighbors
The woman standing out front was a familiar face, though Tara couldn’t put a name to it.
“Hi there! Do you have any more of that yogurt that I bought the other day? My kids devoured it all within twenty-four hours.”
“Sure.” That yogurt was going to be her breakfast for the next few days, but she could just as easily swap it out for something else if it meant another steady customer. So far, the friends and acquaintances who had been visiting the stand were keeping them afloat, if only just. “It’s in the fridge inside. I’ll be right back.”
She jogged back inside and found the half-gallon mason jar full of homemade yogurt. As an afterthought, she grabbed a quart-size jar of herliliko’icurd.
“Would you like someliliko’ifor flavor? I made it with passionfruit juice, local honey, and yolks from our own eggs.”
“That sounds amazing! Could I get some eggs too?”
“They’re right there in the cooler.” Tara pointed at the dry cooler they had in the shade of the farmstand.
“Perfect, thank you.” The woman paid quickly and hurried to get back to the increasingly rowdy group of under-fives that she had left in the car.
Tara paused to give one of her goats a scratch behind the ears before she trudged back into the house and turned the burners back on. She was making three different soups. The idea was tosell them frozen to her neighbors for easy meals. She had posted online to gauge interest and already had twenty people waiting.
“You’ve got to figure out an easier way for people to pay.” Cody was sitting just past the kitchen counter at the dining room table, doing homework on his laptop.
“I’m going to set up a box for people to pay.”
“What if someone takes the box?”
“I’m thinking we’ll attach it to the farmstand. That’s why I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Just haven’t had the time.”
“I could make one.”
“Would you?” She looked up from the soup that she was stirring and beamed at her son. “That would be amazing.”
“But what if people don’t pay?”
“Everyone who’s bought food from us so far is a friend or a neighbor. I trust them. And if someone’s hungry enough that they decide to take something without paying, well. Then I guess they needed it more than we did.”
“You’ll get more customers if they can pay with cards too.”
“Maybe a few, but I don’t have the time to be out there scanning cards all day. I don’t even know how to get something like that set up.”
“You wouldn’t have to. People could pay with their phones.”
“I don’t know how to do any of that.”
“I can figure it out. We could even QR code for people to scan, like some of those stands do at the farmer’s market.”
“That sounds great.”
They were quiet for a while, Tara chopping vegetables and Cody clacking away at his keyboard. Sometime later he asked, “Do you know that the island imports like ninety percent of its food?”
Tara frowned. “That can’t be true.”
“That’s what this article from a couple years ago says.”
“Wow. Maybe in Kona, but not over here. There are so many families like ours that grow their own food and local families that hunt. Ninety percent of the food in the grocery store is imported, sure. But how much of our food do we get from the grocery store? Ten percent?”
“We’re the anomaly, though.”
“Not in Pualena.” They lived in a world apart, where every household had its own catchment tank and fruit stands lined the roads.
Everyone she knew produced at least some food, even if it was just an old avocado tree in the backyard. And everyone shared that food with their friends and neighbors. Even those who didn’t produce much of their own were eager to buy local, farm-fresh food; she could hardly keep up with the demand for her homemade yogurt and cheese.
