High school students from across the state gathered Saturday at the Kahumana Food Hub, Organic Farm and Cafe in Waianae to color fabric with dyes made from beets, turmeric, onion skins and other natural sources, plant seeds in newspaper pots and engage in other activities designed to spur their interest in agriculture and food sustainability.

The “We Grow Hawaii: A Youth Food Summit” was hosted by the Hawaii Youth Food Council, and many of the organizers are students themselves, eager to inspire their peers to become future food producers, policymakers and advocates for food system reform in Hawaii.

“My message to Hawaii’s youth would be that they have a voice too, and what they want to say and their opinions matter a lot,” said Gigi Kiyabu, 15, one of the food council members who organized the summit.

The Hawaii Youth Food Council is a program of the Hawaii Farm to School Hui and Hawaii Public Health Institute.

“Agriculture is important in Hawaii, and for many reasons, principally for food security, food equity, feeding ourselves, making sure everyone has access to fresh, local, nutritious food,” said Dennis Chase, program manager of the Hawaii Farm to School Hui. “Part of doing that is creating leaders of tomorrow in agriculture who are going to lead that change.”

In Hawaii’s current food system, food is largely imported and expensive, agriculture is a shrinking part of the economy, and those affected by hunger are disproportionately Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander households.

During the summit, the 30 or so participants took a tour of the Kahumana Farm Hub, whose operations include aggregating and processing locally grown fruits and vegetables and creating value-added products out of them.

Seed Levine, 18, demonstrated how to harvest and preserve seeds. Levine, who is starting a family-owned farm in Ahualoa on the Hamakua Coast of Hawaii island with the goal of mass producing locally grown seeds for farming, is one of Hawaii’s youth who is already trying to improve isle agriculture.

Levine said that most of the locally grown crops in Hawaii rely on imported seeds.

“It’s just confusing to me. How can we have locally grown food when the seed is imported?” Levine said.

The summit ended with the students splitting into groups to discuss various ways they can advocate for local agriculture and participate in Hawaii food system reform. Some were interested in actual farming and gardening; others wanted to engage in policy advocacy and county- and state-level lawmaking. Still others were interested in data collection to improve information on Hawaii agriculture.

One topic on which student voices should matter is school lunches. The state Department of Education is in the process of changing its menus to incorporate locally produced food after it was given a mandate to serve 30% local ingredients.

What school meals will look like has been an ongoing debate between DOE leadership and local health and food organizations, but the Hawaii Youth Food Council wants to ensure that adults are not speaking for students when it comes to what they prefer to eat in those meals.

“Kids care about taste, the look and nutritional value, and that’s not focused enough on at schools. It’s just about what’s good for the school financially,” Kiyabu said.

This is the first year the council has been able to hold its annual summit in person, as the first two years were kept virtual during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.