The Rake Magazine

Author: Ann Bauer

  • Mother's Day: A Stupid, Manipulative Holiday

    I think we’re all in agreement (aren’t we?) that Mother’s Day as it is currently practiced is by far the most commercial, needlessly costly, guilt-induding holiday of all time. For years, I’ve insisted it was begun by a consortium of greedy florists and greeting card manufacturers, and I’ve told my children. . . .please. . . .never to observe it.

    Here’s the truth, sappy as it sounds: Being a mother is a privilege every day. Even when it sucks. Even when you’re punishing someone or cleaning puke out of the carpet or — and believe me, I know whereof I speak — picking up your little darling one after he or she has been caught doing something off limits by the local police. Doesn’t matter. Being a mother is better than anything, and we don’t need some utterly irrelevant day in May for children everywhere to stop and salute, sending flowers that cost 40 percent more than they would any other time of year and sitting through tedious, mediocre brunches where everyone eats too much.

    How, I ask you, does that celebrate the miracle of motherhood?

    But it turns out I was wrong about one thing (ONLY one, mind you): Mother’s Day was not a product of Hallmark. Its roots go back to ancient Greece where people paid tribute to Rhea, the Mother of the
    Gods, each spring. Then in 1872, some weirdo named Julia Ward Howe — who also wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which explains a lot — suggested the idea of an actual, official Mother’s Day. Something tells me if Howe were alive today, she’d be a rabid supporter of George W. Just a hunch. . . .

    Still, even though the history goes way back and has to do with something cool like a Greek goddess, I’m still against any kind of celebration. Particularly the ones that involve everyone getting dressed up in pastel costumes and taking photographs in which babies are squeezed until they smile, then sitting down to some putrid multi-generational meal.

    That said, if you MUST go out for Mother’s Day — and according to the restaurateurs I’m talking to who say this non-holiday is routinely their single biggest day of the year, many of you cannot quell the urge — then try Morton’s. At least they’re doing something different. Something cool. Something outrageously expensive, but not in a scam-like way.

    They’re serving a prix fixe menu, priced at $59 per person, that includes a salad, a choice of entree (beef, salmon, shrimp, or chicken), a side dish, and a gooey dessert. Plus — and this is the beauty part — you can get Mom a champagne cocktail with a hibiscus flower in the bottom of the glass that ACTUALLY BLOOMS (their emphasis, not mine) as the champagne is poured over it. If you don’t believe me, just see above. And this rare and delicate drink can be had for only $16.

    Now, forget everything I said before. This is your mommy. C’mon. Doesn’t she deserve a wet flower and a good hunk of meat?

  • Take to the Streets

    I’m of two minds about street food.

    Personally, I find it unsatisfying. I don’t like to walk and eat (too messy!), and I hate the taste of wooden sticks and skewers. Yet, there’s something about a bustling city street dotted with steaming food stands and vendors that makes me happy. I’ll take a stroll the crowd, even if I’m not moved to stop and nosh.

    But I’m well aware there are diehard fans of hotdogs in waxed cardboard boats, streetside falafel, and chili-roasted nuts served in canny little paper cones. In fact, the great Calvin Trillin made his mark as a food writer by sniffing out the best little stands from Singapore to New York.

    If you’re one of Trillin’s minions, you’re in luck. Because not only is tomorrow (Thursday, May 8) the opening day of MOSAIC Marketplace on the Nicollet Mall, it’s actually supposed to be intermittently sunny outside. And — get this — so far as anyone can tell, it isn’t going to snow!

    Every Thursday from 12 – 5 p.m., these local restaurants will be cooking up global fare:

    Manny’s Tortas

    La Loma Tamales

    Pham’s Deli     &
    Holy Land

    And there will be live entertainment, too. Tomorrow will be a crisp 64-degree day with a gentle northeastern breeze, plus a troupe of Celtic dancers jigging and reeling their way up and down the mall. Here’s the full schedule of acts:

    May 8 – St. Paul Irish Dancers
    May 15 – Tapestry Folkdance
    May 22 – Jawaahir Middle Eastern Dancers
    May 29 – UNL Dance Squad
    June 5 – Mayan Dancers

    Of course, Thursday is also Farmer’s Market day on Nicollet, so after you’re done eating, watching, and — perhaps — dancing along, you can pick up some fresh asparagus. What could be better than that?

  • Cabaret: Tits, Ass, and Monopoly Money

    In the 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, an American Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, falls in love with a rambunctious Englishman who is — as she is — having an affair with her bisexual boss. Whereas in the 1966 stage play Cabaret, it was Sally who was English, her boyfriend who was American, and there was a wholesome subtextual storyline about their elderly landlady’s romance with a Jewish fruit merchant.

    In the Ordway’s current production of Cabaret, there’s a little bit of each mixed in.

    Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of ’66, with an English Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. And when Sally turns up pregnant with a baby she claims could be anyone’s, he immediately volunteers — no qualms about her decided female-ness — to make her his wife.

    In between there are dance numbers introduced by the "emcee" (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with an impossible loud and grating voice. He’s impossible to love at first, as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign’s "C," but by intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad.

    There is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw’s patron and friend. Ludwig is a tall, ebony-haired Aryan who somehow riles the entire club into raising their arms to the Third Reich. The fall-out comes first when gentle Herr Schultz, the fruit seller, has a brick hurled through his window. And then when Bradshaw, the stalwart American, gets beaten because he refuses to put up with all that Gestapo guff.

    I wish I could say that I loved this play. I do love the Ordway; I think it’s as stately a theater as the Twin Cities has. The set was amazing: morphing from nightclub to modest rooming house with the twitch of a few items, by evening’s end lit with colored bulbs that gave it a festive, garish air.

    There were some truly outstanding performances — the best by far by Ms. Hunt who infused her Fraulein Schneider with imperious yet tentatively regal carriage. Her voice was pure starch and honey. I could have listened to her all night. Unfortunately, though, most of the songs were sung by Tari Kelly who played Sally Bowles. And while she was a dead ringer for Minnelli (at least from Row S) her theory seemed to be that sheer volume would make up for feeling or finesse.

    The dancers were lovely and scantily-clad in a pleasing, authentically bawdy 1930’s Berliner sort of way; God knows, I like hot pants and fishnets and sequined bras as much as the next red-blooded American girl. There’s even a very charming moment during Money Makes the World Go Round when Monopoly money drifted from the rafters and into the audience, twirling in the twinkling lights.

    But in the end, as the curtain came down, I felt as if all the brilliant parts of the Ordway’s Cabaret had not quite added up to something as whole and extraordinary as I would have liked. True, they missed the mark by a very small margin — and this may be fixed by Tuesday, the official opening night — but as it is there are uneven edges. The first act was too long; the second felt incredibly rushed.

    More important, the story was not consistent. I wanted either a playboy love interest or a wide-eyed gee golly one, not a weird mish-mash of the two. And without that, the production fell just short of what it should.

    Not that you would have known to see the audience at the end. I know. . . .I’ve been beating this drum for years. But NOTHING to my mind marks Minnesotans as more universally ignorant than the standing ovation, which is obligatory at every single concert, opera, comedy routine, and play. I am sick and tired of going to shows that are good but not great and watching everyone around me jump out of their seats like so many obsequious, brainless cows.

    Yes, I feel strongly about this. But to my mind, it’s like over praising a child for efforts that fall short. How is a toddler to learn if you keep showering kisses down because he or she piddled almost in the potty? By doing this, you simply reinforce the puddle on the floor.

    And so it is with the stage, where standing ovations for performances that are almost but not quite extraordinary, like Cabaret, lower the bar. Which given the talent and resources and venues we have here in town is a goddamn shame.

  • Starting Out in the Evening

    Remember those days when you would wait for your parents to leave the house so you could invite your girl- or boyfriend over for an evening of videos and cheap wine and illicit sex?

    Well, here’s a funny thing. Those days return, when you’re 42 or so. . . .You discover there’s a Friday evening coming up. The kids are going to be out — one at a sleepover, the other doing whatever high school seniors do — and you plot. You get a DVD from Hollywood and a cheap bottle of wine and think about how you’re going to have the house all to yourself.

    Ah. . . .the romance of middle age.

    My husband and I recently ran into just such a Friday night. Teenage daughter at a friend’s house; adult son out for most of the night. We ran out to rent a film we’d been wanting to see ever since it hit Uptown for about ten minutes last winter then disappeared and opened a bottle of Tiziano Chianti 2005.

    The film was called Starting Out in the Evening, a sleeper from 2007 that sprang from a book by Brian Morton, whose entire canon I happen to have read.

    Morton is a fascinating writer. Around 50, Jewish, a New Yorker. He clearly has some personal demons to excise. Each of his books covers much the same ground: There is some combination of an older, Jewish, intellectual writer — a contemporary of Bellow’s and Roth’s — a 40-ish woman who is grappling with her desire to have children, a leftist, and an aged but understanding therapist. Morton is, in my experience, the most formulaic writer on the planet today. Yet what he produces is at once readable and fresh. Each time he enters the same territory he has something strangely new to say. He comes at it from a different facet. He makes this single story work, over and over again.

    So it is with this film. It’s the story of a 70-year-old novelist (Frank Langella) whose books have all fallen out of print. He is trying to finish that one last novel that will become his legacy when a graduate student (Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame) appears at his door to tell him she is writing her thesis about his body of work. Meanwhile, his daughter and — for all intents and purposes — best friend, played by Lily Taylor, is turning 40 and debating whether or not to trick her childless-by-choice boyfriend into an "accidental" baby.

    There were rumors Langella would be nominated for an Academy Award for Starting Out, and I think it’s a shame he was not. He is a burly, bullet-shaped elderly man, yet he managed to turn from obdurate to frail after his character suffered a stroke. The scene in which his daughter’s boyfriend must haul the old man out of the bathtub — chest to chest, dripping wet; in some way getting the "child" he was so determined never to have — was worth an Oscar nomination alone.

    But back to the evening, OUR evening and the wine. Chianti generally is made out of Sangiovese grapes. It is the cousin of other richer Tuscan reds, such as Montepulciano and Carmignano. But Chianti tends to be smooth and forgettable — a thin table wine with no real character.

    This one, however, blew me away — especially for the price, which is around $9 a bottle. Sweet strawberry and honey married with a sturdy, dry, deep forest oak, it’s a light but sophisticated wine. A perfect match for the quiet, poignant film. Exactly right for two exhausted parents grateful simply to be sprawled across each other like puppies in a large chair, drinking in the quiet on a Friday night.

  • Himalayan. . . .Just Go Already!

    Over the weekend, John and I went to a new restaurant on Franklin and 24th called simply Himalayan. To be honest, we didn’t have great expectations going in.

    Our experience with Tibetan and Nepali food in town has been lukewarm at best. There’s Everest on Grand, which is. . . .fine. And there used to be a place on Hennepin Avenue called Tibet’s Corner that had wonderful, haunting music but food that tasted strange, Americanized, ketchup-y, and bland. (It was no surprise to us when it closed.)

    Last month — while in Madison, WI, with our son — I ate at a modest but terrific little Nepali cafe called Himal Chuli and mourned the fact that such simple, clean, authentic ethnic fare had not found its way to the Twin Cities.

    Well, now it has!

    Himalayan is, perhaps, the most Spartan restaurant I’ve been inside in my adult life. There was zero investment in creating ambiance: no beaded curtains or pewter elephants or colored lights. This is a small, white box of a room with windows on only one side. There is a buffet table next to the cash register, a smattering of booths and tables, and a single photo of Mt. Everest on the wall.

    Yet, it is comfortable. We chose a booth and settled in. There was a lovely, light scent of lamb and spices coming from the kitchen. We ordered two cups of Masala Chiya (spiced tea with milk) and appetizers.

    We liked the Kathmandu Momo with meat ($6 for half a dozen), which were soft and savory. But even better were the Wo: lentil pancakes with ginger and fresh cilantro (a steal at four for $4.50). These reminded me of latkes — only meatier, with flavors from the mountains rather than the steppes.

    For our main course, we shared a platter of Choyala with chicken ($11.95), a platter of grilled-to-nearly-blackened meat with peppers, onions, and herbs, and an extra-spicy order of Aaloo Cauli ($9.95): stir-fried potatoes with cauliflower and peas in a rich red sauce. Both were served steaming — which improves a spicy meal ten-fold for me — with white rice. It was a cold, rainy night and this meal was filling and satisfying and hot.

    Ours, however, was the only table in the place. And this is tragic.

    While Himalayan won’t win any David Shea design awards, it’s exactly what we need in this town to diversify our ethnic food offerings. It’s inexpensive and family-owned, serving the simple, traditional food of a region that gets short shrift. But it’s also in a location (2401 E. Franklin Avenue) that has some sort of curse over it: restaurant after restaurant has failed to make a go in that spot. Don’t let this one be another casualty on the list.

    Just go. Now. Shake off that Chipotle habit. Whatever you’re doing, stop, put on your shoes, pick up your wallet, and drive over to Seward with a mind to eat something more interesting and support a local businessman who wants nothing more than to make you a great meal.

    Or, you can call: 612-332-0880. Himalayan also does takeout.

  • Fill Your Tank With Pinot Gris

    Back in late 2007, I wrote a blog post called The Seventh Sign: $30 Chianti about a predicted rise in the price of European wines. According to the New York Times, the hike was supposed to hit in three to five months. Right about. . . .now.

    The exchange rate, oil prices, global economic turmoil: all the factors are there. But so far as I can see, wine inflation just isn’t happening. At least not yet.

    As of April 2008, I’m buying the same French, Spanish, and Italian wines I was buying a year ago, for roughly the same amount of money. Low end to high end, everything wine-wise seems stable. Which is, frankly, puzzling to me. . . .because everything else is going up. Gasoline is averaging $3.60 per gallon nationwide. And food prices are going up in a corresponding fashion: milk is up to $4 a gallon and the cost of eggs has risen a staggering 40 percent.

    Perhaps it’s time to stop buying such frippery. Omelets! Who needs ’em? Especially when you can get a decent bottle of Borja Borsao shipped to you all the way from the sun-kissed Spain for $5.95.

    You see, in addition to the weird and inexplicable stability of the imported wine market, Haskell’s is running its legendary nickel sale until Saturday, May 3. This used to mean that they offered customers one bottle at full price and the second for a nickel. Today, it’s more complicated. But basically, it boils down to this: Everything in their 10 Twin Cities stores that has a yellow sign is 30 to 50 percent off. And I spent enough time in the Minnetonka location today to attest, these deals run both long and deep.

    I picked up four bottles for under $7 apiece (including, by the way, a very nice chianti). But there were deals on the higher-priced items as well: Really nice 2005 Bordeaux in the $40 range, a Pouilly-Fuisse for $25. And the really quality wines, those typically in the $250 bracket, are going for about $175.

    It’s a strange world we live in, where it’s cheaper to drink fine French wine than to take a Sunday evening drive or heat the water for a long shower or feed an infant. But this is the reality, folks. So we might as well make the best of it. If wine is the only inexpensive luxury that remains — and the only thing merchants are willing to sell at a fair market price — I say go for it. Buy the really good stuff and enjoy.

    In fact, if you stop by Haskell’s before this weekend, you may pay less per ounce for your wine than you do for the fuel you use to get there. Ironic, isn’t it?

  • A Midsummer Night's Wine

    So it seems the kids from Fame (who, by the way, are now eligible for AARP) have gotten together with Cyndi Lauper and a couple writers from the early days of Saturday Night Live to adapt Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Guthrie.

    That, and I suppose Joe Dowling had a hand in it, too.

    This is a wild, colorful, aggressively sexual production. And by that, I don’t mean sexy. "Sexy," to me, is nuanced and flirtatious, suggestive, tempting, a little bit hidden. Sexual is in your face. It’s full frontal, bumping and grinding. It’s Ground Zero. It’s Rich Goldsmith‘s headlines. It’s Namir Smallwood‘s Puck in a glittering coral codpiece.

    This is not to say I didn’t like the play. There were wonderful dance numbers, great (skimpy) costumes, and a fabulous sparkly egg in which Titania and Bottom the ass get it on. I enjoyed the Guthrie’s production for what it was: grand spectacle.

    But I did miss the air of sweetness and optimism that typically wafts through Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is a play I associate with whimsy and tentative romance and the suspension of disbelief. It is, in my experience (which involves seeing it perhaps five other times on stages including the former Guthrie’s and studying it in Stratford-upon-Avon) a story about the mischievous yet goodnatured spirit world that helps guide the loves and lives of mortals. It contains a play within a play — which was executed beautifully in the Guthrie’s current production as wry slapstick — and a layering of comical missed chances, magic, and a sense that everyone will be rightfully paired in the end.

    Contrast that with Dowling’s modern vision: An alien landscape in which sci-fi fairies drop from the sky and prod underwear-clad couples to lurch from love to lust and back to love again.

    If you go for this sort of thing, I urge you to see it and stop by Cue on your way up for a glass of Flor de Pingus 2005. This Spanish red from the Ribera del Duero region is fruity and floral on the nose. But it tastes completely different than it smells: earthy, plummy, and HOT. I mean, this wine scorches on the way down your throat; it’s dry on the tongue, and the finish is pure whisky.

    Flor de Pingus is like a well-built Spanish guy in tight leather. . . .You know, someone old enough to know what he’s doing but young enough to do it well. At 14.8% alcohol and a little more than $100 a bottle, it costs about the same as two tickets to the show.

    But this wine is really sexy, not just sexual. It has shades and nuances, and an impish, spiritual gleam. Which is, if you ask me, well worth the price of admission.

  • More Fesenjoon. No Sex.

    Back in January, I submitted a blog called Sex and the Fat Man that was about my forthcoming novel in which a large hero has a lot of quality sex and fesenjoon — the dish over which he and the lady with whom he has all that great sex fall in love.

    For the past four months, Sex and the Fat Man has remained in the top 10 most popular daily blogs. NOT, I’m sorry to say, because the world is so breathlessly awaiting my new novel that people are crawling the Web to find information. Nor because the eating public is rife with fesenjoon fanatics who were swooning over my description of the version served at Shiraz Fireroasted Cuisine.

    No, the only reason my blog rates hundreds of hits a day is because it begins with the word "sex." So I want to be totally up front here: there is no sex in my story today. No allusions to sex. No hints of sex. Just fesenjoon.

    I was lunching at Atlas Grill & Clubroom yesterday when Gholam-Abbas Shahbazi, the head chef whom everyone calls simply "Abbas," wandered through. I asked if Abbas would be willing to make me fesenjoon some time. And he said, "It’s on the menu! Only I call it pomegranate-walnut chicken; otherwise, no one would know what it was." It was Americanized, he admitted. But I know Abbas and whatever he makes tends to be good, so I decided to give it a try.

    The meal that arrived was deconstructed fesenjoon. Typically, this dish is like stew made of chopped chicken, pomegranate juice, carmelized onions, crushed walnuts, and citron, served over rice. Here, however, the chicken was two boneless breasts topped with a thick gravy of pomegranate and walnuts. The rice (basmati, perfectly cooked) was mounded to the side and topped with citron. There were vegetables garnishing the plate.

    And it was fabulous.

    Meaty, sweet, plummy with pomegranate sauce and that brickle-ish hint from the salty nuts. Lighter than the standard typically served in the Middle East, the Atlas take on fesenjoon is ideal for lunch. And this was fortunate, because after my dining companion and I had finished, Abbas suddenly appeared with a dish of homemade ice cream.

    I’m not an ice cream eater. First of all, it’s too cold (makes my teeth hurt) and sweet. For me, it’s all about salt, wine, and coffee. But in order to be polite, I took a spoonful and my mouth filled with a difficult but wonderful taste. This was rosewater, saffron, and pistachio — a triangle of red, yellow, and green. And it took full moments to wait out each flavor: the rose so strong it was like a fairytale (then the princess began to sing and rose petals streamed from her lips), the saffron delicate — vanilla with spice — and the pistachios whole and satisfyingly crunchy at the end.

    It wasn’t as good as sex. I’ll give you that. But it was close.

  • A Dry Spell and Then a Premier Cru

    It is true that I drink wine nearly every day. But recently, I went three days without. . . .very purposefully. It was less a personal decision than a public parenting demonstration. Alcohol is not a necessity. I only hope it worked.

    I was in Madison, Wisconsin, with my middle child, Max — 18 years old this week — who has been accepted to the university for fall. This was my birthday gift to him: a weekend in a hotel in the town where he will soon be living, a tour of the local restaurants, a shopping spree for Badger gear.

    We shared a hotel room to minimize costs. And he was courtly and careful, changing in the bathroom and muting the volume on the televised basketball game he was watching when I wanted to go to sleep. I, in turn, tried to tone down my female-isms and Mom impulses. I dealt with being sweaty after the two-hour campus tour and wore no makeup and ate tabbouleh for breakfast when that’s what he craved.

    And I decided not to buy wine at night.

    When I travel with my husband, it’s a sacred ritual: that bottle from a local wine shop that we open with our travel corkscrew and drink out of Lucite "glasses" in our room. But traveling alone with my underage son — in a town that I’m growing to love, but where I saw people drinking beer, A LOT OF PEOPLE DRINKING BEER, for breakfast — it just didn’t seem right.

    One of my greatest concerns about Max’s leaving for a Big 10 school is the alcohol element. I know, as a college professor, that drinking begins on Thursday night and continues, pretty much unabated, through every weekend. Home games are an excuse for alumni to come into town and "tailgate," which means sitting in a parking lot and cracking open a Budweiser at 8 a.m.

    So it just didn’t feel right to me to comb the streets of Madison for a liquor store and buy cheap wine and schlep it back to the hotel room. Mom with the monkey on her back. Instead, I got us a six-pack of mineral water to keep in our mini-fridge and share.

    It was a wonderful weekend. Max got comfortable in the place that will be his home for the next four years. He caught a wave of school spirit (the Badger scrubs clinched the deal, I think). And he seemed even to be excited about school itself: the massive biology building, the lakeside Union, the main library where he logged in with his student ID and discovered he already has an account.

    It was only after we arrived home that the reality hit me. This kid is leaving.

    Technically, Max is my younger son. But because his older brother has autism and his father left when he was nine, Max has aways straddled a strange role. He’s been protector and consultant and cook. At 10, he made a Thanksgiving turkey. At 17, he stood by his catatonic brother’s hospital bed at Mayo and debated the risks and benefits of electroshock. He has been my mainstay, my rock, my comic relief. And now, I have to let him leave.

    It’s a little like tearing off a foot-long strip of my own skin. Which is why I insisted he go to an out-of-state school– because I wanted too badly for him to stay close to home.

    Sunday night, around the time I was realizing all this, my husband opened a bottle of Domaine Bouchard Pere & Fils Beaune de Chateau Premier Cru 2005 that we’d been saving for a time of need. Pure pinot noir from Burgundy, this wine is silky and deceptive. It feels light in the mouth, nearly sweet and purely fruity at first. But then there is a streak of oaky dryness that runs straight down the tongue and lasts for a long, long time. This makes it incredibly easy to drink but satisfying. Perfect alone. Even better with food.

    Me? I wasn’t in the mood to eat. Only to drink my wine and mull the four months I have left with this large, serious, clever boy. The dry spell was over. But it was worth every abstinent minute. And more.

  • Whole Foods Has One Word for You: Paper

    Starting this Earth Day — April 20 — you will no longer have the choice of paper or plastic at Whole Foods. It’ll be paper, unless you’re one of those too-good-to-be-true types who can remember to bring your own reusable string bag. Yes, the world’s largest natural foods retailer, which operates nearly 300 stores in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, is doing away with plastic entirely.

    “Central
    to Whole Foods Market’s core values is caring for our communities and the
    environment, and this includes adopting wise environmental practices,”
    said A.C. Gallo, co-president and chief operating officer for Whole Foods
    Market. “    More and more cities
    and countries are beginning to place serious restrictions on single-use plastic
    shopping bags since they don’t break down in our landfills, can harm
    nature by clogging waterways and endangering wildlife, and litter our
    roadsides.     Together with our
    shoppers, our gift to the planet this Earth Day will be reducing our
    environmental impact as we estimate we will keep 100 million new plastic
    grocery bags out of our environment between Earth Day and the end of this year
    alone.”

     

    Now, just between the two of us, I’m ambivalent. I love the earth, don’t get me wrong. And I think chucking plastic is a bold, leadership-y sort of move. But I have a few concerns.

    One: Did you see the movie An Inconvenient Truth? (I swear, I’m going somewhere with this.) Here was Al Gore, talking about the devastation of our natural resources, droning on and on about it, getting up on rickety ladders with pointers at his own peril. . . .And WHERE was he every single time he was not standing in front of an audience in this film? He was on a gas-guzzling airplane, that’s where. The man was flying all over the world to tell people about the problems of global warming, burning probably 11 times his share of fossil fuels, when he could have sent out an e-presentation and been done with it. But that wouldn’t have made such as splash with film producers, I guess. So let’s look at the practices of the people at Whole Foods. They, like all other monstrous grocers, assume that all people everywhere should have access to all foods. So we here in Minnesota should be eating cheese from Italy and chocolate from Venezuela and kumquats from Florida. And how is all this food getting to us? Well, it’s coming by truck and airplane mostly (hardly ever by ship, especially from Florida), polluting madly as it rides the roads and skies. So I guess what I’m saying is, where’s the consistency here?

    Two: Every time we make some big sea change in our habits, it seems, we find that instead of helping the environment, we’re actually further degrading it. You never know what the sly, lurking problem will be. Use cloth diapers because you think the plastic ones are evil? Shame on you. What a waste of water, one of our most precious earthly gifts! Gas up with ethanol much? Turns out you’re both decimating the earth by promoting the over-growth of corn and demolishing sweet little family farms. So what’s going to come next, I wonder? Some report that links reusable cloth bags to a dangerous rise in cotton spores that form an impenetrable cover over our planet and seal greenhouse gases in. . . .I don’t know about you, but I’m just waiting to find out what havoc is wreaked by Whole Foods’ decision to bag the plastic.

    Three: OK, you’ve been waiting for the selfish reason, right? — what am I going to use to carry my sweaty workout clothes home from the gym? At my house, every Whole Foods, Target, and other plastic bag gets recycled in some way. Only once, I grant you, but there are viable uses for these things. Throwing away juicy pineapple cores (I know, I should be composting, give me a break); picking up dog poop. The ways in which we use plastic bags are endless!

    I’m actually serious here. We consumers will have to figure out other methods for doing, carrying, and disposing of the things we’ve always wrapped in plastic bags. And I’m not sure this is a bad development but it may turn out to be, well. . . .inconvenient. At least for a while.

    By the way, in addition to a ritual bag-shedding, Whole Foods at Calhoun’s other Earth Day-related events include:

    Just for Kids: Spring In to Gardening – FREE

    Noon-1
    p.m.

    Kids
    can get ready for spring by planting their own plant. They will get your own
    dirt, seeds, and a recycled container to plant them. Kids can take their plant
    home, add some sun and a bit of water and watch it grow!

    Greening Your Home with Kel Heyl

    2-3
    p.m. lecture

    This
    lecture will walk people through the steps for greening their home. Greening is
    more energy-efficient, healthier for you and
    healthier for the planet. A basic kitchen will be used as a case study
    and a stairways approach will be used to examine costs. There will also be time
    to have questions answered and you will leave with an excellent list of
    resources for greener design, consulting and building services and some local
    vendors of green products. Kel Heyl is a certified building designer and Minnesota licensed
    building contractor. His company, Studio Rebus Incorporated, has had a strong green
    offering for more than three years. For more information, visit studiorebus.com

     

    Composting 101

    3:15-4
    p.m.

    Are
    you aware that the U.S.
    waste stream is comprised of more than 25 percent food and yard scraps? Home
    composting is a great solution! This class on the basics will help people
    get started by teaching the acceptable materials and the benefits of this great
    natural process!