On gratitude, responsibility, freedom, and figuring out what I actually want.

I should have the world by the throat.

By some people’s definition, I probably do.

I live in Hawaiʻi. I have a nice home, a family I love, work that has challenged me for decades, and more blessings than I could reasonably count.

I know how fortunate I am.

And yet, lately, I’ve been carrying around a question that refuses to leave me alone.

Am I spending my life the way I want to?

Not the way I should. Not the way other people need me to. Not the way someone looking at my life from the outside thinks I ought to.

The way I want to.

Because here’s the uncomfortable reality.

I’m 56 years old. If I’m blessed with another twenty good years, that gives me roughly 7,300 days.

God willing, I’ll have more.

But twenty years is not an unlimited supply of Tuesdays.

And I have some decisions to make about how I’ll spend them.

The life I built

There are pieces of my life that haven’t fit together quite the way I planned.

That’s life, of course. Plans are lovely things until other people, unexpected circumstances, and reality get involved.

Somewhere along the way, I became the person who handles things.

The work things. The family things. The property things. The things nobody else quite knows what to do with.

I’m good at it.

Possibly a little too good.

Being the capable one has its advantages. People trust you. They rely on you. You get things done.

But there’s a peculiar downside to becoming everyone’s problem solver.

Eventually, people forget you might have other things you’d like to do.

And sometimes, so do you.

I love my family. I love the home I’ve built. I don’t begrudge the years I’ve spent caring for people or doing what needed to be done.

But I’m beginning to question how much of the next twenty years I want to spend being the person who makes everything work.

Not because I want to abandon anyone.

Because somewhere underneath all those responsibilities is another person.

Me.

And she’s got a few ideas of her own.

Do I really want a motorhome?

Sometimes I imagine buying a Class A motorhome and traveling around the country.

Just me, the open road, interesting places, good food, and a laptop.

I could write about what I find, eat my way through small towns, and discover what’s happening in communities across America.

I’ve been to every state except Alaska.

You would think Alaska would be sitting at the very top of my bucket list, waving its arms and demanding attention.

But somehow, it is, and it isn’t.

The motorhome sounds wonderful.

Then I start thinking about everything that comes with owning a motorhome, and I wonder whether I’ve just invented another expensive responsibility with wheels.

Maybe I don’t actually need to drive across America.

Maybe what I need is the freedom to decide I could.

That’s a different thing.

The woman who left no fingerprints

I’ve spent most of my professional life working behind the scenes.

Agriculture, politics, advocacy, communications, public policy. I’ve worked on campaigns and complicated issues that affected industries and communities across Hawaiʻi.

Much of that work involved writing.

Statements. Strategies. Campaign materials. Articles. Testimony. Messaging. Arguments that needed to make sense to people who didn’t necessarily agree with one another.

And often, the less visible I was, the better I’d done my job.

I used to pride myself on not leaving fingerprints.

The people who needed to know what I contributed knew.

That was enough.

And to be clear, I’m not starting a publication to spill the beans about anyone. I value the relationships, discretion, and trust that made my career possible.

But here’s something I’ve been thinking about.

For decades, I’ve helped other people tell their stories, build their organizations, and advance their ideas.

What about mine?

I’ve wanted to write publicly for at least ten years.

And for someone who has written professionally for much of her adult life, that’s a rather ridiculous thing to be afraid of.

Yet here we are.

Writing has always been both fuel and an outlet for me. I can sit down to write and lose hours without noticing. Sometimes I don’t realize how long I’ve been at it until my hands start aching.

I love taking an idea apart, asking questions, following the threads, and discovering where they lead.

I love building things. I love researching something that catches my interest, figuring out the details, and understanding how it works.

Give me an interesting idea and a few uninterrupted hours, and I’m perfectly happy.

And increasingly, that’s how I want to spend more of my life.

What does freedom actually look like?

For years, I thought freedom might mean traveling more.

And I have traveled plenty. I was working remotely long before COVID made it fashionable. Back then, working away from the office meant more improvising, less reliable access to information, and occasionally wondering whether the technology was actively conspiring against you.

COVID changed that.

Remote work became normal. The tools improved. I could do more from home.

Now, instead of traveling constantly for client work, I spend much more time closer to home, raising my teenage granddaughter.

Life has a sense of humor.

But here’s what I’ve realized.

When I imagine having more freedom, I don’t necessarily imagine living somewhere else.

I imagine waking up in my own home and deciding what I want to do.

Writing, creating, and building.

Working on a project that interests me.

Watching football.

Having a good meal.

Spending time with my family.

Maybe heading out for an adventure when the mood strikes.

Maybe not going anywhere at all.

Some of my happiest days look remarkably ordinary.

Like today.

I’m writing. I’m thinking about things I want to create. My family is nearby.

I don’t feel the need to be somewhere else.

What I want is more days like this—without the constant weight of everything I should be doing instead.

The problem with being needed

Of course, wanting freedom and having it are two different things.

There are bills to pay. Clients who depend on me. A property to maintain. People I care about who need help.

I can’t simply declare myself free of responsibility and expect the universe to pick up the tab.

Although if the universe would like to submit a proposal, I’m listening.

The financial part matters.

I want to build income from things I own. My writing. My ideas. Businesses and products that don’t require me to sell another hour of my time every time I want to earn a dollar.

I’ve always been selective about who I work with. I don’t move my moral compass for a job, a project, or a dollar. If I don’t respect someone or don’t believe in their campaign or what they’re trying to accomplish, I’m not working for them. Or with them.

Life’s too short for that nonsense.

The question isn’t whether I get to choose my clients. I already do.

It’s about building enough financial independence so I can spend more of my working hours creating things of my own.

And I’d like to stop feeling like every unclaimed hour is available to solve somebody else’s problem.

That part may be harder.

Because other people don’t always create those expectations on their own.

Sometimes we’ve helped build them ourselves.

We’ve said yes. We’ve stepped in. We’ve made things easier for everyone else because we could.

And after enough years, the arrangement begins to feel permanent.

But permanent is a long time.

Especially when you’re counting the years you have left.

So what am I going to do with them?

I don’t have a grand retirement plan.

I’m not particularly interested in spending the next twenty years doing nothing. I’d be bored out of my mind, probably by Wednesday.

I want to work. I want to write. I want to create things. I want to follow interesting questions down rabbit holes and occasionally emerge with something useful.

I also want the freedom to watch an entire football game without mentally calculating what I should be accomplishing instead.

Is that really asking so much?

I don’t think the next chapter of my life requires throwing out everything I’ve built.

Quite the opposite.

I love much of the life I already have.

What needs changing is how much of it I get to choose.

More ownership of my time.

More room for my own ideas.

Fewer obligations that exist simply because I’ve always been the one who handled them.

And more attention to the ordinary moments that make me happy.

Maybe I’ll buy that motorhome someday.

Maybe I’ll finally make it to Alaska.

Maybe I’ll write a book.

Or maybe I’ll spend a perfectly wonderful Tuesday at home, writing something nobody asked me to write, watching football, and enjoying the people I love.

I’m beginning to think that sounds pretty damn good.

Because I don’t need to escape my life.

I want more freedom to live it on my own terms.

And if I really do have twenty good years left, I’d like to spend them well.

Aloha,
Lorie 🌺

I remember the spotlight.

It was blinding.

Somewhere beyond it was an audience I could hear but could barely see. I was sitting onstage at the Honokaʻa People’s Theatre, sweating, wondering how I’d gotten myself into this situation.

And, more importantly, how I was going to get out of it.

I wasn’t prepared for any of this.

At the time, I was the executive director of the Big Island Farm Bureau. Alan Takemoto, who headed the Hawaiʻi Farm Bureau Federation, had asked me to read a statement representing the organization’s position at a public discussion about genetically modified organisms.

I knew Hawaiʻi Island. I knew agriculture. I knew farmers, ranchers, and the challenges they faced.

But the science and politics surrounding genetic engineering? I was barely beginning to understand them.

And I had just walked into a room full of people who had very strong opinions.

Nancy Redfeather sat to my left, another activist to my right, and Dennis Gonsalves, the Hawaiʻi-born scientist who helped develop the Rainbow papaya, sat farther down the stage.

Yoshito Takamine, founder of the Hāmākua Farm Bureau and a respected leader in Hawaiʻi, was in the audience. He was there to support me, along with a group of farmers I knew.

I would need it

The Scientist in the Spotlight

Dennis Gonsalves had helped develop a genetically engineered papaya resistant to papaya ringspot virus, a disease that had devastated Hawaiʻi’s papaya farms.

The Rainbow papaya was a remarkable achievement in agricultural science.

But scientific achievement didn’t seem to matter in that theater.

What I remember most was the hostility.

Questions came loaded with accusations. The atmosphere was tense and personal, and Gonsalves became a focus of the anger.

I was out of my depth, uncomfortable, and beginning to realize this wouldn’t be the ordinary agricultural discussion I’d expected.

When my turn came, I read the Farm Bureau statement in a shaky voice.

There were boos and derogatory comments from the audience, but they let me finish.

And finish I did.

Then I shut up.

I sat there shaking like a leaf, under that blinding spotlight, wishing I could be anywhere else.

There was no graceful way to leave. I still had to sit through the rest of the evening.

So I stayed.

Sweating.

Fuck Them. Let Them Hate.

When the evening was finally over, I made my way out of the theater with Yoshimoto Takamine and a group of farmers who had come to support me.

Yoshimoto had spent decades working in agriculture, politics, and community affairs. He understood public controversy in ways I hadn’t yet begun to appreciate.

As we were leaving, he offered his assessment of the evening.

It was the first time someone I worked with had ever said anything like that to me.

I didn’t know quite what to make of it.

I was accustomed to the idea that if you worked hard enough, explained an issue clearly enough, and treated people fairly, you could find some common ground.

I wasn’t naïve about disagreements. Agriculture had plenty of them.

But this was different.

Some time later, after another contentious public meeting left me in tears, Yoshimoto offered more wisdom.

He always called me by my full name. Never Lorie.

“Lorena,” he said, “if they’re not talking about you, then you’re not doing anything right. You’re doing plenty right.”

I didn’t forget those words.

It would take me years to fully appreciate what he was teaching me.

He wasn’t telling me that criticism didn’t matter or that everyone who disagreed with me was wrong.

He reminded me that I couldn’t measure my work’s value by how much people liked me.

And in the years ahead, that would become a lesson I needed more than once.

What I Didn’t Understand

It would make a better story if I told you I walked out of that theater suddenly understanding the politics of science, the psychology of persuasion, and how public opinion can be shaped.

But I didn’t.

I walked out shaken.

I knew very little about genetic engineering then. I didn’t know enough about the broader political movement that was gathering momentum around biotechnology in Hawaiʻi.

And I certainly couldn’t have imagined how much of my professional life it would eventually consume.

Over the following years, I would learn far more than I ever expected about genetic engineering, pesticides, agriculture, legislation, advocacy, and the complicated relationship between science and public opinion.

I would also learn that people brought far more than facts to these arguments.

They brought their fears, experiences, loyalties, cultural beliefs, political identities, and deep convictions about who deserved their trust.

Those concerns couldn't all be answered by presenting another scientific paper.

But not every claim deserved equal weight simply because someone believed it passionately.

Learning to distinguish legitimate questions from unsupported allegations, genuine disagreement from political theater, and persuasion from manipulation became a large part of my work.

It took years.

And sometimes, it was exhausting.

The People’s Theatre

I didn’t appreciate the irony of the theater’s name that night.

I was far too busy trying to survive the evening.

But I came to appreciate it later.

And every year since, the irony has grown a little richer.

The Honokaʻa People’s Theatre.

In the years that followed, arguments that began in rooms like that one spilled into legislative hearings, county council chambers, newspaper columns, grocery stores, and ordinary conversations across Hawaiʻi.

I came to understand how powerful public sentiment could be—and how difficult it could become to have a reasoned discussion once people had decided which side they were on.

The actual science could become almost beside the point.

And there I was, years earlier, sitting under a spotlight in the People’s Theatre, thinking I had come to read a statement.

I hadn’t understood that I was stepping into something that would shape much of the next twenty years of my life.

Twenty Years Later

I still believe in facts.

Perhaps more strongly than ever.

But I no longer confuse having the facts with winning an argument, changing someone’s mind, or earning their trust.

Those are different things.

Evidence can tell us what research supports. It cannot automatically determine what someone is willing to believe.

And people who disagree with us aren’t necessarily ignorant or dishonest. Sometimes they’re asking different questions. Sometimes they’re working from different experiences. Sometimes they have legitimate concerns that deserve answers.

And sometimes they've simply been sold a tall, cold glass of fear.

Because fear sells.

Fear can move people to action long before they’ve stopped to question what they’re being told. And people who understand how to exploit it can turn complicated issues into simple stories with heroes, villains, and very little room for questions.

Sometimes a compelling story outweighs the evidence.

Sometimes the story is designed to ensure the evidence never gets a fair hearing.

The challenge is knowing the difference.

I didn’t learn that lesson overnight.

That night was only the beginning.

I went into the Honokaʻa People’s Theatre to read somebody else’s statement.

Nearly twenty years later, I’m still thinking about what happened under those lights.

Only now am I finally telling the story in my own words.

• A She Writes for Food manifesto

Food and agriculture are where I’ve spent most of my career, working where agriculture, advocacy, communications, policy and public opinion collide.

For a long time, I assumed that was my industry—without realizing how much bigger the conversation was.

Somewhere along the way, I realized the hardest questions around food weren’t really about food at all.

They were about science, economics, politics, identity and the stories we tell ourselves about how things ought to work.

We know what it feels like to stand in a grocery store and wonder why something costs so much.

We know the difference between a tomato that tastes like a tomato and one that traveled 3,000 miles to get here.

We know family recipes, favorite restaurants, farmers markets, school lunches, Sunday dinners and the foods that somehow taste like home.

Food feels simple.

It isn’t.

I’ve watched a Hawaiʻi ranching issue that began with conservation easements and state agricultural leases take decades to work its way through laws, agencies and policy changes—and still end with something closer to a workaround than a clean fix.

That’s what happens when you start pulling on the thread.

Pull on the thread

Follow almost any plate far enough and you run into land, water, labor, transportation, business, science, culture, politics, policy, ownership and regulation.

You run into questions about who makes decisions, who pays for them and who benefits.

Eventually, all those enormous systems end up somewhere very small:

At our kitchen table.

That’s probably why I never managed to stay neatly inside one category.

So I made my own.

She Writes for Food is less about food as a subject and more about food as a way of looking at the world.

I want to know why something costs what it costs.

Where the money went.

Why a program that sounds wonderful on paper can be nearly impossible for a normal person to navigate.

Why we keep talking about supporting local agriculture while making it increasingly difficult to farm.

And I want to understand the rules, incentives and systems beneath whatever everyone else is arguing about—and then explain them in plain English.

The questions get bigger

That curiosity has carried me far beyond food.

Into politics.

Money.

Work.

Business.

Technology.

Family.

Hawaiʻi.

And increasingly, into the questions I ask about almost everything:

What’s true? What matters? What makes sense? And what should we do with that information?

Because we do not need more noise.

We have plenty.

Endless feeds. Hot takes. Marketing funnels. Political outrage. AI-generated answers. Experts contradicting one another. And approximately 447 people online ready to explain why you’re doing everything wrong.

I’m interested in something else.

Taking complicated things apart.

Looking at the numbers.

Following the incentives.

Reading the fine print.

Asking better questions.

Talking to people who actually know what they’re doing.

Then translating what I find into something useful.

This won’t always be about food

Sometimes that will mean food, agriculture, land or public policy.

Sometimes money, business or technology.

And sometimes it will be more personal: work, family, responsibility, getting older and deciding what deserves our energy in the next chapter of our lives.

Because food connects almost everything.

Pull that thread far enough and the questions get bigger.

How do we build communities that actually work?

How do we support the people producing the things we say we value?

How do we tell the difference between a good idea and good marketing?

How do we make better decisions when almost everyone wants some portion of our money, attention or outrage?

And maybe most importantly:

How do we spend what we have well?

Our money.

Our work.

Our attention.

Our time.

Our lives.

I don’t have tidy answers.

That’s not really the point.

I want this to be a place where we can investigate the questions.

Where curiosity is welcome.

Where changing your mind when the evidence changes is considered a strength.

Where politics doesn’t have to become a team sport.

Where data and lived experience can sit at the same table.

Where Hawaiʻi is not scenery in the background, but a real place with complicated problems, extraordinary people and lessons worth paying attention to.

And where we remember that a good life isn’t necessarily about accumulating more.

Sometimes it’s about paying closer attention to what we already have.

Food will always have a seat at this table.

It just isn’t the only thing we’re talking about anymore.

I’ll be here each week, following the numbers, asking better questions and bringing back what’s worth knowing.

Pull up a chair.

Aloha,
Lorie 🌺

Let’s talk about aluminum foil.

Because if there’s a canary in Hawaiʻi’s grocery coal mine, it’s foil.

Not organic produce.

Not specialty items.

Foil.

What I Noticed

Standing in the aisle, I had the same thought before:

Why does this cost more than an actual meal?

So I did what any rational person does when confused by foil prices, I checked multiple places.

The Real-Life Comparison

- Big-box store (Hawaiʻi): Large roll, noticeably higher than last year but still the cheapest tin foil around.

- Online (Amazon): Similar size, sometimes cheaper, mostly not— once the shipping math enters the chat and then don’t forget the shipping delays (it could be summer before it arrives if at all).

- Local Grocery Store Chain: Consistently higher, even when on sale.

Exact numbers shift week to week.

The pattern doesn’t.

Foil in Hawaiʻi is expensive because:

- It’s bulky to ship

- It’s tied to global aluminum markets

- It moves through long fragile supply chains before it ever hits an island shelf

None of which you control when you’re just trying to wrap leftovers.

Why Foil Matters (More Than It Should)

Foil isn’t a luxury.

It’s a baseline household item.

When that gets expensive, it’s not a fluke — it’s a signal.

And this is before the next Young Brothers rate increase fully hits. I won’t even get started this morning’s on their 27.5% jump — except to say: it doesn’t disappear. It lands here.

Foil tells us:

- Transportation costs are showing up everywhere

- Consolidated supply chains have little flexibility

- Just shop smarter stops working at a certain point

Kitchen-Table Takeaway

If you’ve ever:

- Put foil back on the shelf

- Bought a smaller roll than usual

- Wondered if parchment paper suddenly became a personality trait

You’re not being dramatic.

You’re noticing the system.

And yes…it really is that expensive now.

This isn’t about foil. It’s about how everything gets to Hawaiʻi.

The Foil Math (Because I Checked)

For Thanksgiving, I used Costco heavy-duty foil:

• Paid $22.99 for two rolls

• Applied a $6 discount, bringing it to $16.99 total

• Used roughly ⅓ of a roll for holiday cooking

That puts my per-holiday foil cost at about $6 — still cheaper than Amazon’s standard 150 ft rolls, which run $0.43 per square foot and rip exactly when you need them not to.

For comparison:

• Costco Heavy Duty: ~$0.045 per sq. ft.

• Amazon regular foil: ~$0.43 per sq. ft.

• Reynolds via Amazon: ~$0.59 per sq. ft.

Higher prices exist. These aren’t even the worst.

This isn’t really about foil.

It’s about how everything gets to Hawaiʻi.

~ Lorie

Nothing extravagant. Nothing Instagram-worthy. Just a Hawaiʻi Thanksgiving.
And yet—there it was again. That familiar feeling: sticker shock, followed by the small, nagging voice asking if this is somehow your fault for not planning better.
It isn’t.

The Short, Blunt Truth

Thanksgiving groceries in Hawaiʻi are not expensive because you’re bad at budgeting. They’re not expensive because you didn’t coupon hard enough. They’re not expensive because you “should’ve shopped smarter.”
They’re expensive because the systems feeding our tables were never designed for islands—and we feel that failure most clearly when a holiday meal turns into a financial decision.
Every year around this time, we have the same conversation:
“Food is so expensive.”I don’t remember it being this bad. How are families supposed to do this?”

The answers usually float somewhere between inflation headlines and vague shrugs.
But here’s the part we rarely say out loud: We don’t experience prices as individual items. We experience them as a system.

Shipping. Storage. Scale. Land. Labor. Energy. Policy decisions are made in silos far away from grocery aisles.

So when turkey costs more this year, it’s not just about turkey. It’s about how fragile—and expensive—it is to feed ourselves when almost everything has to cross an ocean before it reaches our plates.

The Comparable Number (The One the Data Uses)

To be fair to the data, I did the comparison properly.
I priced out the same basic menu the American Farm Bureau uses for its annual “average Thanksgiving cost”—just purchased here, in Hawaiʻi, from a real store, with real prices. That cart came out to: $158.24

That’s not a lavish spread. That’s the Farm-Bureau-equivalent Thanksgiving basket; Hawaiʻi edition.

📊 Hawaiʻi vs Mainland - Average Thanksgiving for 10

• Mainland (Farm Bureau): $60–$70

• Hawaiʻi (same menu, same logic): $158.24
  That gap isn’t indulgence. That’s geography, freight, energy, land costs, and scale showing up on a receipt.

Why the Grocery Store Isn’t the Villain; neither is the farmer!

I hear this a lot:
“Foodland is ridiculous. “Costco used to be affordable. “Don’t even get me started on foil.” (We’ll get to foil. Pinky Promise.)

But grocery stores aren’t the villains in this story. They’re the messengers—the point of contact between global systems and local reality.

When you’re standing in the aisle doing math like you’re on Beat Shazam, what you’re really doing is absorbing costs you had no hand in creating.

Almost everything in that cart traveled thousands of miles. Even if it was grown here, not flown here it still costs more to produce and deliver to your cart. Cold storage costs more here. Shelf space costs more here. Electricity costs more here. Labor costs more here. None of that is your personal failure.

But Here’s Where the Math Breaks

The $158.24 number is clean. Comparable. Defensible. It’s also incomplete.

Because that’s not what Thanksgiving actually looks like in most Hawaiʻi homes.
We don’t just cook “the national average.”We feed ʻohana. We add extra people. We add culture. Mac salad. Poke. Haupia. A second protein. Extra sides because someone’s cousin is always bringing friends.
When I totaled what Thanksgiving actually costs in my house—the real dinner, not the benchmark version—it landed right about $425

Not because we went wild. Because that’s what it takes to feed people here.
This is where the national metric falls apart. It has no way to price culture, generosity, or island reality.

This Didn’t Start With COVID — COVID Just Exposed It

It’s fair to ask the uncomfortable question:
Are groceries expensive because of shipping and islands and systems — or because prices were raised during COVID and never really came back down? (Spoiler alert; When a company raises prices they rarely go back down)

Or is it because Americans were spoiled by decades of cheap food? The honest answer is: all of the above.

• For decades, food in the United States was historically cheap — not because it was efficient or fair, but because many of its real costs were pushed out of sight.

• Farm labor was underpaid.

• Environmental damage was absorbed by land and water, not balance sheets.

• Federal policy rewarded scale and consolidation, not resilience.

• Consumers were insulated from volatility by a system optimized for cheap abundance rather than long-term stability.

• Cheap food wasn’t a natural outcome. It was a policy choice.

Then COVID hit — and that fragile bargain collapsed.

• Supply chains broke.

• Shipping costs spiked.

• Processing plants shut down.

• Labor disappeared overnight.

• Prices rose fast, and in many cases, they never fully came back down.

Not because every cost stayed elevated — but because highly consolidated markets don’t rush to lower prices once consumers have absorbed the increase. What was framed as temporary quietly became permanent.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s market power behaving exactly as designed.
And Hawaiʻi didn’t just experience inflation — we experienced amplification.
Because when nearly everything you eat is imported, every shock hits harder and lasts longer. A 10% increase on the mainland becomes 20–30% here. A “temporary disruption” becomes a multi-year adjustment. Headlines say inflation is easing, but grocery aisles tell a different story. That disconnect isn’t in your head.

It’s the result of a food system designed for the continent, not islands — one that assumes cheap land transport, massive scale, centralized processing, and constant throughput. Hawaiʻi sits permanently outside those assumptions, and we pay for it at checkout.

So when Thanksgiving costs about $425 in a Hawaiʻi home, that isn’t excess or inefficiency. It’s what happens when a system built on artificially cheap food collides with reality and places like Hawaiʻi absorb the cost longest and hardest.

A Brief Note on Foil (Because We Have To)

Let’s talk about aluminum foil.
Reynolds Wrap, two-pack, Costco: $25.99 (This btw is the best deal per sq ft you can get). I nearly passed out in the aisle.
That is more than an entire sit-down meal used to cost back in the day.

At that price, I’m washing and reusing foil as my tutu taught me.
That’s not “demand. ”That’s consolidation, shipping, and global commodity pricing colliding with everyday life.
Foil isn’t a luxury item. It’s a household staple. And it now costs like one.
That’s not a consumer problem. That’s a structural one.

What This Means for Hawaiʻi Families

If Thanksgiving felt harder to afford—more stressful to plan, heavier than it used to be—that’s not nostalgia talking. That’s lived reality.

You’re not bad at money. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re navigating one of the most expensive food environments in the country with very little systemic support.
When national averages ignore places like Hawaiʻi:

• Benefits don’t stretch.

• Aid programs miss real need.

• Cost-of-living comparisons fail.

• And families are told—implicitly or explicitly—that the problem is their choices.
  It isn’t.

The Kitchen-Table Truth

Thanksgiving in Hawaiʻi has always been about more than food.
It’s about showing up.
Stretching meals.
Feeding more people than planned.
Making do — without apology.
But we don’t have to pretend it’s normal for a basic holiday meal to feel like a budgeting exercise every single year.

When food costs are framed as personal failure rather than systemic design, the pressure is placed on families who are already doing their best. Naming that isn’t complaining. It’s clarity.

If you’ve ever stood in the grocery store and thought, Is it just me? — It’s not.
This is what it looks like when a food system built on artificially low prices, long supply chains, and mainland assumptions meets island reality. The gap shows up quietly, item by item, until it hits all at once at checkout.

This is why I write here.
Not to romanticize the policies or the struggle.
Not to offer shopping tips as policy.
But to translate what’s happening — plainly, honestly, and without condescension.
Because when we can name the system, we can stop blaming ourselves.

Pull up a chair.
We’ll keep making sense of it together.

Lorie
She Writes for Food

I’ve been listening.

To the land.
To the people.
To the gaps between headlines.
To the way Hawaiʻi agriculture is reduced to talking points, rather than understood as lived reality.

To the way food, politics, and power dance around each other here—sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly, like relatives stepping on each other’s toes at a family gathering.

And quietly, off to the side, I’ve been writing again.

Not for algorithms.
Not for approval.
Not for anyone who needs things neat and comfortable.

I’ve been writing to remember what I know.

That food is never just food in Hawaiʻi.
That agriculture is policy with dirt under its nails.
That politics shows up whether we invite it or not—at the market, at the water line, at the dinner table.

She Writes for Food was never meant to be tidy.
It was always meant to be honest.

This space exists for stories that don’t fit cleanly into press releases or campaign slogans.
For the people who work the land and the people who regulate it.
For the contradictions.
For the questions we’re told not to ask out loud.
For the things everyone knows but rarely says plainly.

If you’re new here, welcome.
If you’ve been here a while—thank you for your patience. I wasn’t gone. I was regenerating.

I’m easing back in with a Thanksgiving piece—because gratitude in Hawaiʻi is complicated, layered, and deeply political, whether we admit it or not.

After that, I’ll begin sharing pieces from a Hawaiʻi Agriculture Uncovered series.

Not hot takes.
Not hit pieces.

Just clear-eyed writing about how food systems, policy decisions, and power actually play out on the ground—who benefits, who bears the cost, and what gets lost when we refuse to look closely.

This isn’t a comeback tour.
It’s a return to working in public. Which most of you know this isn’t my standard operating policy. I usually win my biggest battles by staying out of the limelight and leaving no footprints in the sand.

But some stories deserve daylight.

If you’re here for glossy lifestyle content, this probably isn’t your kitchen.
But if you’re curious, grounded, and willing to sit with complexity—pull up a chair.

I’m writing again—calling the blazingly obvious by name and dismantling the legislative and marketing sleight of hand that relies on romantic notions and silence.

Lorie
She Writes for Food

This is where:

• Local food stories meet real numbers

• Community voices meet policy reality

• Science meets sass

• And yes — where we call out BS, gently, with data

If you’ve ever looked at your grocery receipt like it personally offended you… you’re in the right place.

What to expect

• Deep dives on the true cost of living + eating in Hawaiʻi

• Stories from our farms, aunties, and food producers

• Myth-busting and “explain it like we’re cousins at the park” breakdowns

• Local food politics (translated, not dramatized)

• The occasional recipe or money-saving hack that doesn’t insult your intelligence

Why subscribe?

Because Hawaiʻi deserves smart, clear, grounded food reporting — written by someone who actually lives here, shops here, votes here, and works inside these systems.

And because nothing about our food future is inevitable.
The more we understand, the more we can shape.

Welcome to the table.
Let’s eat, let’s think, and let’s tell the truth about what’s really going on with food in Hawaiʻi.