ʻIke ʻAi, the deep, experiential knowledge of food and eating, is foundational to life in Hawaiʻi. Our ancestors in Hawaiʻi and across the world developed skills and practices that governed how they selected, grew, prepared, and enjoyed food in a way that sustained individual, community, and environmental health. In our modern context, this type of knowledge is commonly referred to as food literacy.

While many excellent resources on food literacy and food systems education exist, this toolkit highlights content specific to Hawaiʻi and showcases the foods, agricultural traditions, cooking methods, gathering practices, values, etc. that influence what the people of Hawaiʻi love to eat.

Designed for classroom teachers and other community-based educators, this toolkit contains lessons, unit plans, and other resources to facilitate hands-on, engaging food education experiences for students, Pre-K through post-secondary!

The ʻIke ʻAi toolkit is connected to the work led by Dr. Albie Miles, UHWO Sustainable Community Food Systems.

• Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
• Full License
• Under this license, you are free to share (copy and redistribute) and adapt (remix, transform, build upon) the material in this toolkit following these terms:
  • Attribution– you must give appropriate credit (cite resource name, author and date accessed), a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. This may be done in any reasonable manner but not in a way which suggests you are endorsed by toolkit creators.
  • NonCommercial– material may not be used for commercial purposes.
  • ShareAlike– if you remix, transform or build upon the material you must distribute under the same license (CC BY-NC-SA
• No additional restrictions– you may not apply legal terms or measures which prevent others from doing anything the license permits.

All of the Nā Hopena Aʻo (HĀ) Outcomes can be found woven throughout the ʻIke ʻAi Food Literacy Toolkit. We intentionally chose not to align outcomes to specific resources and lessons, as HĀ is a comprehensive framework in which all six outcomes are interdependent.

The resources in this toolkit are Hawaiʻi-specific, and support teachers with integrating culture-based, and place-based education across all core subject areas using food literacy as the entry point, which helps students strengthen their sense of HĀ – Belonging, Responsibility, Excellence, Aloha, Total Well-Being and Hawaiʻi. These lessons and resources encourage students to examine the role of history, culture, and geography local food systems and how they can take action to promote equitable food access for their communities. They also drive home the idea that the environment, food, and people are interconnected and form interdependent relationships.

This toolkit’s resources are organized into four themes- Sense of Plate, Foods of Living Islands, ʻAi Pono, and Plate to Platter.

These themes mirror the four themes of the Hawaiʻi School Garden Curriculum Map (HSGCM), but with a slightly different “flavor” that is more focused on the food literacy themes found in Theme 3 Nourishment of the HSGCM, rather than garden-based learning outcomes found throughout the map. As part of this project, Theme 3 Nourishment underwent a metamorphosis to include explicit alignment to the Hawaiʻi C3 Social Studies Standards (HGSSS) and social justice themes.

See our descriptions below to learn more!

Note that although all HĀ outcomes are evident throughout all themes of the ʻIke ʻAi Food Literacy Toolkit, we provide a short description of some of the HĀ outcomes found in each theme below.