San Fransisco - LA Sweetgreen roadtrip 4-29-2018

Tuesday morning- April 24th

I will be traveling with a Orion down the west coast with a final destination of Arizona. Orion works for a farm to table concept called SweetGreen. He builds personal relationships with the farmers to learn their system and values. We will be leaving San Francisco and visit farms throughout the west coast and the south states.

Orion and I begin on the road this morning towards a mushroom farm , high production high scaled.

I want to focus on the education aspect of this but I can’t help pulling an emotional human experience with it.

Orion and I visit Global Mushroom. Most everything is automated. Our guy Chris tells us that before they expanded he told the boss man about automation. Implementing this system into an old system doesn’t work. You can’t stop production to create a new way. You need to expand in to a new system as to make the old system obsolete.

The equipment mixes, weighs, drops the agricultural waste into wooden crate. Then those are carried sterilized and isolated. Next they are brought and dropped onto a moving belt that puts the secret ingredient in (mycelium inoculated rice hulls)

The Amycel** is dropped and mixed in, when the mix hits the tarp, the tarp is drag/pulled into the different layered chambers for it to start growing.

The heat from eating the waste cuts out oxygen limiting bacteria growth.

I loved witnessing this system because it showed you can absolutely elliminate a need for plastic bags.

Next was a strawberry farm. It was conventional, non organic, and of course covered in sheets of plastic.

I find the energy to relay plastic over the earth every plant cycle to be intense work. To them its cost effective vs dealing with weeds.

At the strawberry stand he offers us some snacks for the road , in plastic packaging and a plastic bag.

We arrive to the airbnb in LA and the view is breathtaking. Trippy , and makes me wonder how I manifested such an image. The pool is surrounded by sky scrappers and brings a futuristic feel to it. The sunset holds the rainbow of color onto the windows of skyscrapers, an even more surreal image.

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