alternative economies for alternative futures dean itsuji saranillio As a child growing up on the island of Maui, I remember my mother, Elo ise Saranillio, singing a funny song to the tune of the McGuire Sisters’ 1958 hit “Sugar Time.” Changing the word “sugar” to “cabbage,” she sang, “cab bage in the morning, cabbage in the evening, cabbage at suppertime.” She told us that when she was growing up at the McGerrow plantation camp on Maui, her mother, my grandmother Masako Inouye, went on strike at the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. (HC&S) sugar plantation and served as a strike captain. In 1958, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) laborers went on strike to seek a living wage, and cabbage farmers from Kula helped to feed the workers and sustain their strikes. I suppose the song made us laugh because as opposed to a romantic white American life of eating sugar all day, we were more accustomed to thinking of sugar as something that caused bitterness, like forcing a family to eat cabbage for three months. My father, Dick Saranillio, told us about how his oldest brother, my uncle Fred “Junior” Saranillio, worked in the school garden while they at tended Lanai Elementary School. When my Uncle Junior could not scramble enough lunch money for himself and his siblings, he would forgo lunch at the cafeteria and eat the vegetables he helped grow. My father only found out when he caught his older brother eating carrots by himself. When my brother and I were in elementary school, my father took us every weekend to Olo walu to dive for ish and tako (octopus) with threeprong spears. He taught us what was “good eat” and to catch only what we needed. Before we were born, upon his return to Hawai‘i after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he would go diving to feed himself and stretch what money he had. He also did this when he went out on strike as an ironworker. By teaching us to dive, and to clean and prepare ish, he said that no matter what happened, we would always have the ability to feed ourselves in healthy ways.