Daniel Anthony has turned his family into imu-tarians. All their meals come out of the imu. We’re not just talking kalua pork and laulau, but also macaroni and cheese, chicken soup, chili, curry, baked beans, spaghetti, even cakes.

“We challenged ourselves to practice this for three months,” Anthony said, “and after that we went 10 days without imu food and everybody was cranky.”

So, every week Anthony digs a hole on his Kaneohe farm lot, fills it with wood and rocks, sets a fire, layers in pans of food, then covers it all in blankets and burlap, making a warm, steamy mound of imu-liciousness.

Everything — pasta, beans, cake batter — goes in raw and cooks as it would in an oven, with the added scent of smoke.

Since November 2015 the imu has been the primary method of meal prep for him, his wife and five children. Along the way he learned that the heat of the imu and its byproducts — the “char” of burned wood and rocks — helped nourish his land.

Below-ground cooking became key to Anthony’s aim of eating from the land, of the land and for the land.

“We really looked at our lifestyle as an agricultural practice,” he said. “The imu is the biggest component in our agricultural practice.”

That and poi. Anthony is perhaps the foremost authority on ancient Hawaiian kalo pounding — he estimates by the end of the year he will have pounded 100,000 pounds of kalo into paiai, the thick, fresh substance that can be eaten as is or mixed with water to make poi. “At 39 years old I probably have more taro pounded of anyone living.”

Poi and imu food are the staples of the Anthony house. “I haven’t bought or cooked a bag of rice in 15 years,” he said. “I’m one-quarter Japanese, so I think it’s OK to say I claim rice-ist status” — meaning he likes only the top, premium grades of rice, and since he can’t afford those, he just does without.

Instead of a rice cooker on the counter, the family has an umeke, or poi calabash, which is actually a big plastic tub. It has not been emptied in eight years, with each batch lending fermentation to the next, like a sourdough starter.

A loco moco at his house is an egg over imu leftovers over a slab of fried paiai.

But let’s get back to Anthony’s point about agricultural practices.

He bought his Kaneohe parcel three years ago, after searching for seven years for a place where he could farm and raise his family. The land had been fallow for 12 years, overgrown with weeds and trees, no topsoil left.

The first year went to building a house, the second two to clearing the land and planting. But nothing grew. The land was, he said, sick.

Enter the imu. Anthony found the heat of the imu killed weeds all around it, so moving an imu around his property helped clear the land. The imu char could be spread around to nourish the soil.

The wood that fuels the imu is from invasive trees — kiawe, mangrove, ironwood — that he collects in cleanup projects around the island. Another bonus.

He makes other fertilizers and pesticides using natural ingredients, such as the bones from meat cooked in the imu and the water used to clean taro for his paiai.

Bottom line: “Our No. 1 crop is dirt,” he said. “Basically the concept is you feed it and you give it medicine.”

And it feeds you: His land now yields a commercial crop of olena, or turmeric. He’s also raising pigs, chickens and the ti leaves used for the imu.

Anthony grew up in a farming and fishing family in Waianae, so his early training was informal and hands-on: “Your uncle is like, ‘Brah, get to work!’”

He’s since studied Korean natural farming practices and earned a certificate in permaculture design, or the simulation of natural ecosystems in agriculture. He also conducted an in-depth study of traditional poi-pounding in the Bishop Museum’s archives.

Through his business, Mana Ai, he sells paiai — many restaurants are regular customers — and he sells his hand-carved poi pounders and pounding boards and conducts workshops. He also trades for other food.

“I haven’t paid for fish in 10 years because I have a fisherman friend who hasn’t paid for poi in 10 years.”

Anthony envisions an imu cooperative of sorts, in which groups would acquire ailing parcels of land, heal them by moving an imu around the property every week, then turn the land over to a farmer.

Thus, slowly, is a sustainable food system born.

“The more imu I make, the more imu food I eat, the faster my land heals.”

LESSONS LEARNED AND SHARED

Jordan Keao, chef and owner of San Francisco’s ‘Aina restaurant, brought two of his chefs to Daniel Anthony’s Mana Ai farm in Kaneohe last month so they could learn to pound taro.

Keao buys 10 pounds of paiai from Mana Ai every week — he fancies it up, slicing it thin as a potato chip, then dehydrates and fries it to create a poi puff, like a chicharron, that he serves with Kona kampachi cured in kombu.

Keao is serious about his kalo scholarship. His aim is for his crew to use a pohaku ai (stone pounder) and papa kui ai (wooden board) to make poi in the restaurant, and to be able to explain the process and the culture to their customers.

“I want us to get to the point where we’re not just saying, ‘This is paiai,’ we’re saying, ‘This is the variety of the taro. This is where it was grown.’ And we’re saying it in Hawaiian.”