Parking Challenge by Tony Perrie

It’s 7:42 a.m., 51° and headed to 58°. More rain is on the way. Details for the next 10 days are here.

The Bay Citizen writes about local butchers, including Bi-Rite’s Chili Montes, and their efforts to make sure the meat they sell was raised humanely:

Sam Mogannam, owner of the upscale Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, said his customers were very savvy about where their meat came from.

“It’s pretty easy to display a heavily edited picture of a happy pig in a pasture,” he said. “You ultimately have no idea how their animals are treated.” So Mogannam encourages his head butcher, Chili Montes, to spend time developing close relationships with farmers. Montes visits most of the farms, traveling as far as Uruguay. He inspects the animals’ housing conditions and the types of feed they receive.

Read more here.

Johnny O recasts those Sutro sunsets into polka dots.

And for those of you interested in urban farming, Grist has an interview with Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal, authors of a new resource book on farming in the city.

Here’s one snippet of Q&A:

Q. In the intro, you write that the average urban backyard can grow all the fruit and veggies for one person in 25 x 40 feet, and that it makes economic sense to garden if you have more time than money. Is this book geared, in part, towards low-income readers?

Carpenter: Yeah, definitely. I’m low-income, Willow is probably low-income, too. People are like, “You should eat organic food,” but when you go to Whole Foods or the farmers’ market, it’s so expensive. So this was our DIY way to eat organic, healthy food. If you do it right, it can be cost effective.

Rosenthal: I wouldn’t say that it’s only geared towards low-income people, but toward people who are interested in making their own solutions. It’s not going to be as useful for people who want to purchase everything at the garden store or hire other people to do work in the garden. To make an impact on the way that the food system is structured for environmental good, it’s necessary for people of all walks of life to grow food in the city.

OK, stay dry, fire up the oven for your favorite ribs, and get ready for the game.

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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