Poor cauliflower! It is a vegetable that did not get much attention until someone decided to mince it and call it cauliflower rice. It always seemed to be a stepchild, some calling it ubiquitous as it is ever present but it doesn’t get much attention.

It’s 3 a.m. and you’re halfway through a 12-6 a.m. graveyard shift at the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu. Fortunately, you slept before your shift began so you’re feeling alert while you alternate between performing checks on the global seismic and sea level data analysis systems and doing research aimed at improving the speed and accuracy of earthquake magnitude estimation.

The oldest food festival, the Kona Coffee Festival, will be held November 3-12. The very first festival occurred in 1970 with the intent to preserve, perpetuate and promote Kona’s unique, nearly 200 year heritage.

Kilauea is now erupting at the summit for the fifth time since 2020! The ongoing eruption offers an opportunity for Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) staff to learn and collaborate with partners at the University of Hawaii at Hilo (UH-Hilo) Geology Department.

It is nice to go out to eat at different restaurants to see how other chefs present their dishes. One such is Meridia at the Hapuna Westin Hotel. Chef de Cuisine Junior Ulep tries very diligently to make dishes using 95 percent Big Island products, whether it is sourced from OTEC, a Kona coffee farmer, a farmer like Raymond Kawamata from Kawamata Farms or even in the garden in the back of the restaurant.

Volcanic eruptive activity may take many forms, from gently erupting basaltic fissures in Hawaii to intense explosive eruptions like those of Mount St. Helens. Volcano observatory scientists are keenly interested in understanding such events and their implications for hazards. Two types of eruptions have been the focus of recent studies at Stromboli in Italy.

Dr. Lis Gallant has spent the last two and a half years at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow studying the lava and cinder cones from the 2018 eruption of Kilauea. She is making a short move up the hill this week to join the department of geology at the University of Hawaii Hilo (UHH) as an assistant professor.

Last week was Julia Child’s birthday. She was such a powerful force in the culinary world, and to think: she didn’t really cook until she went to Paris!

Last month a Volcano Watch article discussed the bicentennial of the first visit of westerners to Kilauea caldera, led by English missionary William Ellis, in 1823. Ellis did not just visit the summit region; he had approached from Ka‘u, traveling along what eventually became known as Kilauea’s Southwest Rift Zone (SWRZ). Ellis first witnessed evidence of Kilauea’s restlessness there, in the form of a vast, 4.8-square-mile (12.5 square-kilometer) lava flow that had erupted just a short time before.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has named watercress the world’s healthiest food! It received 100 out of 100, with Chinese cabbage just behind at 91.99, Swiss chard at 89.27, beetroot at 87.08, and spinach (sorry Popeye) at 86.43.

Understanding the eruptive history of volcanoes in Hawaii requires a tremendous amount of time and effort examining deposits. Typically, older eruptions have less material exposed at the surface because younger eruptions bury them, or wind and rain erode them. Such is the case for one of Kilauea’s largest explosive eruptions, which is not exposed near its source at the summit and must be studied further afield.