• Food trucks provide valuable service • Stick to the issues, end personal attacks • Team’s name no longer appropriate • Monk seals are amazing Food trucks provide valuable service I have hesitated a bit to write an open letter
• Food trucks provide valuable service • Stick to the issues, end personal attacks • Team’s name no longer appropriate • Monk seals are amazing
Food trucks provide valuable service
I have hesitated a bit to write an open letter in response to the column about Kauai’s food trucks. In the interest of full disclosure, I will let you know that my wife and I are two of those spoken of last week. We own and operate a food truck called Put it in a Pita. We are also friends with a number of others who operate similar trucks. I wish to give the writer of the article the benefit of a doubt and think he was just having a bad day. He spoke of the cost of food on these trucks as being exorbitant, especially when compared to “real restaurants.” I wish I could explain the full costs associated with trucks but that would take too much.
However, I know of not a single person here on the island who owns one of these difficult venues who is making a killing. All of us are working long, hard hours and for the most part, I have seen that the customers are getting an awesome meal. Granted, there are a couple that are less than ideal, but the same is true of all the brick and mortar restaurants as well.
Earning a living on beautiful Kauai is not always easy, and I applaud all of those who, instead of sponging off of others, have risked all they have, scraped together whatever monies they could and have opened a rolling restaurant. A typical restaurant can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to open, a talented chef with a strong work ethic and lots of sweat can get up and going in a food truck for a fraction of that cost and then feed his family. Why beat up good people for doing such a thing?
I have eaten at Pacos Tacos, Little Greek, Rafael’s, Rainbow Jo’s, and a number of others and I have always received a fair, yummy meal in exchange for the money I gave them. There is room for all of us, be that food trucks, full restaurants or fast food places. I would even love to see someone plant a small New York style hot dog stand right in the middle of some of our beaches. I always loved those hot dogs! Maybe someday. Until then, I invite all of our island friends to continue to enjoy excellent food wherever they find it.
Craig Lindquist, Put it in a Pita
Stick to the issues, end personal attacks
To all of the mean, nasty and malicious Facebook posters and bloggers out there. I am not sure when it became acceptable in reporting and journalism to attack a person’s imperfections. No one’s perfect. The fact that you try and use a person’s attributes, like the color of a person’s skin, the way one is dressed, or where they are from to intimidate, bully and slander people into silence, is unacceptable.
I understand if one doesn’t agree with another on an issue, but to use personal attributes to take away from the topic of whether we should allow three of the largest chemical companies in the world to spray poisons next to our schools and hospitals is pretty lame. I am confused as to why where a person comes from should have much relevance on whether minimal disclosure and basic buffer zones are needed to protect us from pesticides. Or why Syngenta, DOW, and Pioneer think it’s OK to sue our county so they can secure their right to continue to spray poisons next to our schools and hospitals.
I will be the first to admit that people on both sides of this issue have strayed down that nasty path, but everyone needs to take a breath and remember we are all in this together. We should be debating the facts and the issues, stop the ad hominem attacks and move forward on building something together that can be a sustainable and healthy future we all want for our island.
Dylan Hooser, Kalaheo
Team’s name no longer appropriate
There is a lot of good that happens on Kauai. We moved here in 1999 and have witnessed many instances of that.
But unfortunately there’s a lot of not-so-good too. In the mid-1800s, the American Indians were gathered up at gunpoint and marched from their homelands to lands that had been “prepared” for them. My ancestors were marched from Wisconsin and Indiana to Kansas and Oklahoma, very different from the landscapes where they’d lived for centuries. They were then herded onto reservations. As a genealogist researching the Potawatomi (Indian) tribe, of which I’m an enrolled member, I’ve personally visited their village sites, traveled the routes they took, prayed at their stopping places and written part of their story.
During these years there was a bounty placed on them. First, for their scalps (the French taught that trick) but later for their skins, thus the term “Redskins.” I read a posted flier from the time indicating a $200 bounty for the skin of an American Indian. You can find it online.
Needless to say, it upsets me when the Pop Warner franchise here chooses to call themselves “Redskins.” I wonder if, knowing the history of that term, they’d still use it.
On the Mainland, there is a nationwide movement to remove that term from sports teams. It is going slowly. Some teams refuse to give up their mascots (Washington comes to mind), saying they’re “honoring” us. It has been suggested teams would hesitate to use other derogatory names and mascots to “honor” those cultures because of the uproar. As a former tribal employee I saw an editorial suggesting several of these names. Somehow, they were ignored.
All I’m asking is for more sensitivity — and yes, the discontinued use of derogatory mascots.
Susan Campbell, Kalaheo
Monk seals are amazing
My husband and I just came home from two amazing weeks on Kauai. We return every year in January and stay in Kapaa, where we always look forward to the best days of our year and are never disappointed.
This year we encountered something that made our trip even more special and memorable: monk seals. We met several, close up — the first one on the beach right in front of our hotel. She was also the one we saw on another beach a few hours before our plane home (causing us to stay too long and almost miss our plane). We learned all about them from the immensely knowledgeable Monk Seal Response Team members on site, Lloyd and Mary Miyashiro. These people are not only clearly devoted to the welfare of these wonderful creatures, but they made every interested visitor feel a part of the monk seal experience.
On our visits to your lovely island we have been to the canyon and the lighthouse and the North Shore and to many beautiful beaches. We have delighted in the roosters and the turtles and the breaching whales.
But of all the attractions Kauai offers for visitors, the most enchanting are the monk seals.
Thank you for your hospitality to the “dogs that run in rough waters” and to us.
Joanne Green, Olympia, Wash.
