The first time I entered San Francisco’s Bi-Rite market was to buy a couple of really bad tomatoes — hard, pink, tasteless ones — as props for a talk I was about to give. From a block away on 18th Street in the Mission district, the shop, with its glaring Art Deco façade, looked exactly like the sort of bodega or convenience store where you’d find such tomatoes in the produce section, and probably little else.
That misimpression vanished the moment I stepped inside and confronted counters mounded with heirloom tomatoes and festooned with hand-lettered signs telling which farms — all local — had grown them. And that was just the start. From the grocery aisle to the meat counter and deli in back, the cramped space was a cornucopia for all things sustainable and artisanal. Sigue leyendo