Down With Big Lettuce, Up With Fish Who Farm

Quartz reports on the transformation of a Japanese floppy disk assembly line into… wait for a it… a hydroponic greenhouse! Lettuce is grown in vats in a clean room, never to see the light of day.

If you are a satisfied with Big Lettuce, so be it. But we here in San Francisco like to kill two birds with one stone. The founders of Mission Street Food are doing an aquaponic Kickstarter. Not satisfied with merely serving delicious food from a a truck then popping up in a Chinese restaurant and then making delicious hamburgers in a Vietnamese grocery store and then a bowling alley and then opening another restaurant in a former taqueria that was previously a donut shop open 25 hours a day, and then transcending waffles, Anthony and Karen and crew have taken it to another level — they want to employ fish to grow lettuce that will be served in their new restaurant, Perennial.

WAIT WHAT FISH THAT FARM

Yes you read that correctly. Each day, fish will come in to work, swim around, eat food scraps from the restaurant, and “nutrify” the water in which the lettuce enthusiastically grows. (Just don’t tell the fish that they are on the menu too.)

Anyway, the Kickstarter is in its last week and they’re almost there, so hop on over and help them out!

Also, I’ll be talking to Anthony and Karen on Burrito Justice Radio over at BFF.fm this Wednesday from 12-2. So tune in to hear a bit of San Francisco’s restaurant history along with some of its future.