The kalo comes out of the ground looking like nothing much — a rough, brown corm, the underground stem of a plant that Native Hawaiians have tended for centuries. By the time a visitor leaves the farm at 47-540 Ahuimanu Road in Kaneohe, that corm has been cooked, laid on a papa, and struck with a pohaku kuʻi ʻai until it turns into something smooth, sweet, and unmistakably alive. That transformation, repeated every week, is the whole point of the Weekly Traditional Poi Making Workshop, which its organizers bill as Hawaii's longest-running weekly poi-making workshop.
The workshop is run by Hui Aloha ʻĀina Momona, a nonprofit that sits on a three-acre farm in Windward Oʻahu producing kalo, olena, pork, and ʻawa. The session is hands-on and unpretentious: participants learn the basic concepts of traditional poi making, use a board and stone made by a poi-making professional, and prepare their own fresh paʻiʻai or poi to take home and eat. The workshop averages about two hours and includes a tour of the subsistence farm. Fresh cooked kalo is also available at $10 per pound, and the event listing puts admission at $45 per person, or $25 for kids up to 12.
What makes the workshop more than a cooking class is the history behind the board and stone. Traditional poi making using a papa and pohaku kuʻi ʻai was banned in Hawaii in 1911. That year, Honolulu's Board of Health, responding to a cholera outbreak it believed was tied to poi, moved to shut the practice down. On March 2, 1911, Food Commissioner Edward B. Blanchard ordered poi factories to stop operating and closed all the poi shops in Honolulu. Sales were prohibited, and the Board of Health directed people to destroy their poi.
The consequences were immediate and severe. Poi was the staple starch of the Native Hawaiian diet, eaten with most meals the way rice anchors a plate elsewhere. Within days, the Board of Health was distributing more than 7,500 pounds of free poi daily to Native Hawaiians, produced under its supervision at the Kalihi Poi Factory. Crowds of Native Hawaiians — children to elders — lined up at four distribution stations. The free poi was meant for those who could not afford it, and everyone was supposed to pay; most did not. Some reportedly claimed poi at multiple stations in a single day when they were entitled to only one package. The episode, documented by the Hawaiʻi Digital Newspaper Project, captures how quickly a public-health order became a cultural crisis.
That prohibition cast a long shadow. It was not until 2011 — a full century later — that paʻiʻai, hand-pounded taro, was legalized again. Hui Aloha ʻĀina Momona was born out of that change. As the organization describes its own origins, it formed "out of the legalization of paʻiʻai (hand-pounded taro) in 2011, with the intention of manifesting and doing the work to sustain a bowl of poi on every table in Hawaiʻi." The workshop's own listing credits "a small band of visionaries" who came together in 2010 and, in 2011, changed Hawaii's laws to recognize this important cultural and traditional food practice.
Since then, the group has devoted itself to teaching indigenous farming methods and food preparation techniques. Beyond the weekly pounding sessions, it acts as a food hub connecting taro farmers to local families, runs programs distributing huli (taro seed stock) and ulu (breadfruit) saplings to new farmers, and farms taro at two sites in Windward Oʻahu. It has also served for a decade as the umbrella organization for Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea Honolulu, the July 31 commemoration of the 1843 restoration of Hawaiian independence, held at Thomas Square. Its stated mission includes putting "a board and stone in every home," and it stays involved in every step of producing papa and pohaku.
The work has a public face, too. In December 2023, Hui Aloha ʻĀina Momona hosted its annual board and stone sale at the Ahuimanu Road farmsite, part of the Kahaluu Maoli Market. Alohi Viliami Aeʻa, appearing on Hawaii News Now with her son Viliami, described the nonprofit's educational programs — weekly taro pounding workshops, community imu, and indigenous farming education — and showed off taro-based cooking that ranged from koena waffles (made from sweet taro scrapings) to cheeseburger laulau and pan-fried paʻiʻai fritters. Visitors to that market could tour the farm, learn to start a no-smell pig pen, and watch a cured wooden slab become a finished taro pounding board in as little as eight to ten hours.
That last detail is worth sitting with. A board and stone are not souvenirs; they are tools that have to be made, cured, and cared for, and the farm teaches the whole arc of that process. The weekly workshop is the entry point — the two-hour version of a much longer story about a food that was outlawed, a community that kept it alive, and a law that finally caught up.
For anyone curious about Hawaiian food systems, agroforestry, or simply getting their hands dirty, the invitation is unusually open. The workshop runs weekly, and the organizers welcome anyone interested in agriculture, food systems, or the cultural practices surrounding them. You show up, you learn the basic concepts, you use a professionally made pohaku and papa, and you pound your own paʻiʻai. Then you take it home and eat it.
It is a modest transaction — a couple of hours, a few dozen dollars — but it sits at the end of a century-long fight. The poi on the table is the same poi that was ordered destroyed in 1911. The difference is that now there is a farm in Kaneohe teaching people how to make it, every single week, and calling it what it is: a bowl of poi on every table in Hawaiʻi.