Few food terms have become as loaded as lard, weighed down by the connotation of excess and enlisted as a prefix in the harshest obesity put-downs. But after a century of slander, the four-letter pork product is undergoing a reputation renaissance.

He gives a great rundown of the gorgeous dishes being made today with lard at some of the top restaurants in America, explains how it came to be so demonized (Proctor & Gamble and Crisco had a lot to do with it), and leaves us with some hope for a better world through better pigs.

Read James Temple’s Loving Lard on SFGate »

Read More of The Green Fooder Blog »

This is a truly amazing, heartfelt public statement. This guy was clearly struggling with some deeply conflicting emotions in making the decision he made. 

I recommend that anyone who’s still feeling that politics has degenerated into a series of cold, calculated power moves and perpetual campaigning (this can’t be a good move for his re-election outlook in conservative SD) should watch this clip and be reminded that it’s not all that way.

San Diego Mayor Stands Up For Marriage Equality

Corporations who play this game of economic musical chairs are in for a rude awakening – because the music just stopped. 

This, a pithy line from Umair Haque’s take on the world financial crisis happening right now, sums it up. To put a finer point on it, he says this:

the macro crisis isn’t really a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a liquidity crisis, or a solvency crisis. It’s an institutional crisis: the economic institutions of capitalism are in shock.

Haque uses Starbucks as an ongoing example of the wrong way to proceed, as well as the right opportunities for re-forming the economy of the future.

And in the comments, something from Ethan Bauley  really struck a chord with me:

Design is everything. MBA should be renamed MBD: Master of Business Design. Holistic business design that balances all disciplines is the future of value creation.

This concept isn’t new. BusinessWeek named Bainbridge Graduate Institute—with their MBA in Sustainable Business—among the top design schools in the world.

Read more of Haque’s article: Why Traditional Recession Tactics Are Doomed To Fail This Time »

Bainbridge Graduate Institute + MBA in Sustainable Business »

The New York Times Larry Rohter talks here about how companies are thinking in new (or really old) ways about manufacturing and retailing:

When Tesla Motors, a pioneer in electric-powered cars, set out to make a luxury roadster for the American market, it had the global supply chain in mind. Tesla planned to manufacture 1,000-pound battery packs in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, then bring the mostly assembled cars back to the United States.

But when it began production this spring, the company decided to make the batteries and assemble the cars near its home base in California, cutting more than 5,000 miles from the shipping bill for each vehicle.

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization —NYT

After mocking Obama, McCain says inflate your tires on Anderson Cooper 360º

And I hear tell that the amount of savings in gas that would result from everyone inflating their tires properly would surpass the amount of oil we could recover from ANWR … and we wouldn’t have to wait 10 years for results; it’s instant!

Here are some more links from people smarter than me:

Department of Energy (DOE) fueleconomy.gov Web site 

Report on vehicles with under-inflated tires (PDF) and the report methodology 

View the slide presentation here.  

See the interview data here. 

Transportation Research Board special report on tires and fuel economy from 2006  

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) did a study in 2007

Here’s what the California Energy Commission had to say about tires and fuel efficiency