IT'S OFFICIAL: The Agriculture Department has confirmed my suspicion that no one is growing rice on the island of Hawai'i nowadays.

I was looking for a local source. It's certainly not ideal to be buying rice and other grains grown in California, thousands of miles away, in a different climate. But what are the alternatives?

As far as I know, grains have traditionally not been a part of the Hawai'ian diet. The staple food of the old-timers was poi -- the root of the taro plant, baked for hours and hours in an earthen pit, then pounded between stones and mixed with water, to form a bluish-gray paste. This was augmented with fish and wild pig meat (and maybe other animals), vegetables and sea vegetables, fruits and nuts and seeds.

But whole cereal grains are the center of the Macrobiotic universe!! Macrobiotic lore even postulates that the introduction of whole grains into the diet is what catalyzed our evolution into human beings!

FOR OVER A YEAR NOW, I've been eating grain shipped all the way from California; doing my best to adjust the yin and yang balance by combining rice and other grains, and eating them with local, Hawai'ian veggies and fruits. It seems to work well enough, but I still don't like to be importing the grains from such a far-away climate. And there's the fundamental dilemma already mentioned: whether to eat grains at all here, since they were not included in the traditional diet. (I was interested to discover that rice was introduced in Hawai'i in the 1800s by the Chinese, and was exported, along with other Hawai'ian produce, to California in the Gold Rush days. Now the trade with California is all coming this way.)

I considered making poi my staple food, and it didn't seem workable. I've never eaten poi made in the traditional way -- but the modern version available in stores seems way too yin for a staple food. I feel sure it's not baked and not pounded; I suspect the taro roots are cooked in water (probably pressurized) and then puréed in giant, industrial blenders -- making the final product much more yin than traditional poi (not to mention, quite expensive: upwards of $4 a pound).

So, given the choice between eating the modern version of poi, making my own traditional poi, and keeping whole grains (even though imported) as my staple food, I've chosen the latter.

PLEASE, if anyone reading this knows of anyone in the Hawai'ian islands growing rice or other cereal grains for sale, and send me an email.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED the very special nature of cereal grains? A grain of rice or wheat, barley, oats, rye, etc. -- what are they? Each grain is technically a fruit and also a seed. Other fruits contain seeds; but, with cereal grains, the fruit is the seed. Instead of being hidden inside a mass of pulpy flesh, the grains grow atop a hollow tube of grass, in a small, tight cluster. Somewhat similar to the head of a human being, atop the hollow spinal column, eh?

These grains are tremendously packed with vitality. Like any seeds, they contain the genetic blueprint and the capacity to reproduce the entire plant; and they may retain their viability longer than any others. Prehistoric cereal grains have been found and actually germinated! (I grew some "prehistoric" wheat once, from ancient grains.)

Macrobiotic lore includes the suggestion (at least) that cereal grains may owe this uniqueness to an extraterrestrial origin; that they may have been brought to Earth by visitors from outer space (can you think of a more complete, more compact, less perishable food for a long space trip?); even that the introduction of cereal grains into the Earthling diet catapulted us from pre-human to human.

This is not a far-fetched idea. There are credible authorities who say, in fact, that extraterrestrials have had a much greater hand in human evolution than simply getting us hooked on their favorite food! Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D. -- a behavioral scientist and anthropologist who has worked since 1989 with large numbers of people who have had encounters with ETs -- is convinced that "Star Visitors genetically engineered primates in order to create homo sapiens" approximately 350,000 years ago.

Dr. Boylan rejects the "missing link" theory of humanity. He says, "There is a missing link because there is an absolute discontinuity between primitive species and homo sapiens. Traditional archeologists ... cannot find this missing link because there is none. There was no evolutionary curve. .... There is no preceding species to connect us."