A look at the technology, design, and people behind the Mission One motorcycle

The world’s fastest production electric motorcycle was built in San Francisco’s Dogpatch—an industrial neighborhood bordered by the city’s waterfront. It is an amalgam of drydocks, former steel mills, and factories. Constructed in the 1860s and having largely survived the 1906 earthquake, the zone maintains a smoke-stacked atmosphere of sturdy stone and brick, the streets redolent of coal- and oil-powered commerce. It is appropriate…

Read & Discuss

The documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire looks at our relationship with plants—from the plants’ perspective.

Bees, as we all know, unwittingly help flowers reproduce as they collect nectar. But humans have a strange and symbiotic relationship with plants, too—and it’s one in which we are manipulated more than we realize. That relationship is the subject of The Botany of Desire, a documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s eponymous 2000 book that will air on…

Read & Discuss

Change your underwear—change the world. That’s the idea behind PACT, an apparel company tailored for people who want something more sustainable in their shorts. Launched in 2009, PACT sells premium men’s and women’s underwear online—but their mission goes beyond your boxers. PACT Donates 10 percent of its sales to nonprofit organizations, sources its material from a sustainable supply chain, and uses its underwear as a blank canvas for artists and designers.

PACT’s founders, Jeff Denby and…

Read & Discuss

Put on your aprons and pass the saw: The next wave of the food-awareness movement is do-it-yourself butchery.

Early on a recent Sunday morning I boarded a train to San Francisco’s Mission District to learn how to butcher a whole hog. The class, taught by the chef-turned-butcher Ryan Farr, was held in La Cocina, a non-profit shared-use community kitchen that Farr is using as a temporary venue until he opens his new butcher shop, to be called…

Read & Discuss

A look at the technology, design, and people behind the Mission One motorcycle

The world’s fastest production electric motorcycle was built in San Francisco’s Dogpatch—an industrial neighborhood bordered by the city’s waterfront. It is an amalgam of drydocks, former steel mills, and factories. Constructed in the 1860s and having largely survived the 1906 earthquake, the zone maintains a smoke-stacked atmosphere of sturdy stone and brick, the streets redolent of coal- and oil-powered commerce. It is appropriate…

Read & Discuss

The documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire looks at our relationship with plants—from the plants’ perspective.

Bees, as we all know, unwittingly help flowers reproduce as they collect nectar. But humans have a strange and symbiotic relationship with plants, too—and it’s one in which we are manipulated more than we realize. That relationship is the subject of The Botany of Desire, a documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s eponymous 2000 book that will air on…

Read & Discuss

Change your underwear—change the world. That’s the idea behind PACT, an apparel company tailored for people who want something more sustainable in their shorts. Launched in 2009, PACT sells premium men’s and women’s underwear online—but their mission goes beyond your boxers. PACT Donates 10 percent of its sales to nonprofit organizations, sources its material from a sustainable supply chain, and uses its underwear as a blank canvas for artists and designers.

PACT’s founders, Jeff Denby and…

Read & Discuss

Put on your aprons and pass the saw: The next wave of the food-awareness movement is do-it-yourself butchery.

Early on a recent Sunday morning I boarded a train to San Francisco’s Mission District to learn how to butcher a whole hog. The class, taught by the chef-turned-butcher Ryan Farr, was held in La Cocina, a non-profit shared-use community kitchen that Farr is using as a temporary venue until he opens his new butcher shop, to be called…

Read & Discuss

Chris Cosentino is using historical recipes to turn offal—the entrails and organs we usually discard—into a new American delicacy.

If you were cooking 2,000 years ago, you would have to use local, organic, and seasonal ingredients. And, because meat was hard to come by, you would use the entire animal, including the offal (literally “off-fall”)—the entrails and internal organs of your slaughter.

At San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant, chef Chris Cosentino is reviving old recipes that incorporate offal and other…

Read & Discuss

Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. explores the gargantuan machine behind our nation’s food industry.

The generally abysmal food that ends up in our restaurants and supermarkets is the cause of widespread obesity and diabetes, and is produced by a few giant corporations operating in plain sight of the FDA and USDA. To whit, in the grand tradition of such films and books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and, to some extent, Upton…

Read & Discuss

California’s classroom conditions are among the worst in the nation, according to studies by the Air Resources Board and the Department of Health Services. Some 85,000 trailers—euphemistically dubbed “learning cottages” by manufacturers—pepper the state’s poorest districts. Cheaply built and designed to be towed down the highway, the trailers were originally intended to provide a temporary solution for student overflow. However, they’ve become a permanent problem, as 2 million students now attend classes in them every day.…

Read & Discuss

Alice Waters isn’t the only one pushing the effort to convert California to wholly sustainable agriculture. If even the government agrees it’s possible by 2030, what’s the holdup? It’s late February at Whole Foods in Berkeley, California, and a half pint of organic blueberries is selling for $5. I admire.. Read & Discuss

Can “casual carpool”—the Bay Area’s grassroots solution to traffic—go global?

Every weekday, between 6:00 and 9:30 in the morning, a stream of cars and a line of pedestrian commuters converge at a Safeway supermarket in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California. Without a single raised thumb, the individual passengers fill the empty seats in the waiting vehicles. Once a car has three people, it jumps onto the nearby Highway 24, bound for the Bay Bridge. Thirty…

Read & Discuss