“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

This was the answer given by a Pirahã hunter in The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. When asked how he would store the extra food he had brought home, the hunter explained a different kind of logic: in his community, sharing — not storing — food is how people ensure food security.

Logics of sharing and reciprocity are deeply familiar here in Hawaiʻi. Native Hawaiian concepts of aloha ʻāina, for example, blend reciprocity and accountability between people, land and waters — values also reflected in many local foodways. Yet approaches that assume surplus should be stored rather than shared — logics of accumulation — are familiar here too.

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In my work in Statewide Food Systems Coordination — a partnership between the State of Hawaiʻi and philanthropy — I see how the logic of accumulation shapes many public institutions addressing food system challenges, so that even organizations with shared goals can end up working at cross purposes.

What Are Silos?

The word silo may come from the Greek siros, “a pit to keep corn in,” or the Basque zilo or zulo, meaning a cave or shelter for grain.

Today it also describes how institutions sequester information, projects, and people in systems “incapable of reciprocal operation.” There may be plenty inside each silo, but little connecting them.

One example of how our siloed systems are failing Hawaiʻi communities is our hunger crisis, where one in three households is facing food insecurity. Hunger is a distribution, not a production problem, requiring solutions that address root causes such as inequality, safety nets, housing, transportation, land access and more.

Narrowly defined mandates that focus on agriculture, health, or economic development alone create walls that block the coordinated action communities need.

Accidental Adversaries

Silos can also turn organizations with overlapping visions and goals into “accidental adversaries.”

One example is the relationship between conservation, biocultural restoration, and agriculture groups. Large-scale producers may push for regulatory changes to reduce costs and expand production: margins are thin, infrastructure is costly, and without scale, survival is uncertain.

Restoration groups may focus on the risks of those same changes—harm to ecosystems, gathering areas, or culturally meaningful crops. Both are acting from legitimate concerns, but without communication they can miss opportunities to align.

Programs Of Reciprocal Benefit

Thankfully, many initiatives already embody collaboration, reciprocity, and ʻāina accountability.

You can support these 2026 legislative measures via the Hawaiʻi Hunger Action Network’s legislative priorities, Hawaiʻi Farmers Union 2026 Legislative Action Center, Transforming Hawaiʻi Food Systems’ Policy Hub, Purple Maiʻa’s Food+ Policy Dashboard and the Capitol website.

The following bills address hunger and food access:

• Farm to Families (House Bill 2208): Purchases fresh, local, culturally relevant food for families facing food insecurity while supporting local farmers.
• School Meals (House Bill 1779): Expands free meals to more keiki, aiming to cover all public school students by 2030.
• SNAP Modernization (House Bill 1518 / Senate Bill 3245): Improves access for households, kūpuna, and individuals nearing release from incarceration by reducing inter-agency barriers.
• Pre-release SNAP access (House Bill 1518): Seeks federal approval to provide SNAP benefits prior to release from incarceration, supporting food security during reentry.
• Right to Food Resolution: Calls on state and county agencies, with community input, to develop a statewide food security strategy to expand access to nutritious, culturally relevant food.

These bills support producers and practitioners:

• DLNR and Community Co-Management Agreements (House Bill 2218): Authorizes co-management of public lands with community groups to support stewardship.
• Green Fee Proposals: Align biocultural restoration, agriculture, and aquaculture with environmental stewardship, disaster and climate mitigation, and sustainable tourism.
• Ag & Conservation Stewardship Fund (House Bill 1953): Creates a cost-share fund for conservation agriculture to help producers manage natural resources.
• Healthy Soils Incentive (Senate Bill 2110): Invests in soil health, water retention, and carbon sequestration, linking agriculture, climate, and conservation goals.
• Irrigation infrastructure funding (Senate Bill 2800): Funds acquisition, repair, and maintenance of irrigation systems across state agencies.
• Cooperative Law Modernization (Senate Bill 2922): Updates cooperative law to expand cooperative models within and beyond the food system.

Right Systems, Right Relations

The story of the hunter and the work of Hawaiʻi’s food systems communities offer lessons in humility, perspective, generative conflict and restoring right relations.

Kimmerer writes: “I feel a great debt to this unnamed teacher for these words. In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity.”

Even silos exist within larger cycles, and stored harvest is meant to move, be shared, and seed the next generation.

Our silos, by themselves, will not sustain us. But by shifting, expanding, and reimagining silos as tools for stewardship and relationship, we can bring horizons of reciprocity into clearer view.