Blog

Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where it operates.

In January I was back in Nicaragua, chatting with Fair Trade coffee producers. It’s a different world. They love Starbucks. It may be that only a small percentage of the coffee bought by the caffeine behemoth is Fair Trade, but that’s still a massive amount of coffee. Starbucks is a godsend to these farmers, who may support the Sandinistas (the leftist party that led the Nicaraguan revolution from 1979 to 1990), but socially have little in common with U.S. liberals. They are typically gay-fearing churchgoers. The women do the cooking and watch over the children; the men carry machetes and work in the fields.

They are also poor. They use outdoor latrines. They cook over a fire. Meat is a rarity; dirt floors are common. Many households have electricity, but others do not. Fair Trade gives these farmers a bit of stability, though; it guarantees a fixed price that meets both the costs of living and production. That price is above those offered by the extremely volatile regular market, but it does not make the farmers wealthy.

Still, it does help them produce the best coffee in the world. The fact is, most coffee is crap. Producing quality coffee is just not cost effective on a large scale. While you can pull a banana off a tree and eat it, a good cup of coffee is the result of a long, labor-intensive process whose many steps must be approached with skill and care. Only small producers have the time.

They grow their coffee in the shade, using arabica plants, which grow more slowly and yield less, but don’t end up tasting like sawdust. During the harvest, farmers pick only the ripe coffee berries, returning to the same plant week after week until the berries are gone. As they dry the coffee, they sort through the beans and throw away anything discolored or damaged by insects.

On huge plantations, owners cut down trees to grow their coffee in the sun. They use the inferior robusta plant, and during the harvest produce thousands of sacks of coffee a day. Workers pick the berries all at once, and there’s no time to pick out bad beans. These beans are cut with small quantities of arabica, because otherwise the coffee would be undrinkable and wind up in cheap instant mixes, or the auto-drips at Ye Olde Truckstop.

Nicaraguan coffee farmers are poor, but they’re not miserable. Life in the countryside is pleasant. People live in shacks, but these shacks are not one foot away from their neighbors, as they would be in the city. There are trees and mountains and lakes in every direction. Families are strong, and though people work hard, they seem to enjoy themselves.

Twenty-year-old Byron Gámez gave me a tour of his family’s lands. Byron’s mother is the president of a women’s cooperative, formed because the men in the mixed cooperative insisted on making all the decisions. Byron is also one of my English students. He calls me “Mister Teacher,” and likes to say things like, “I am Mister Tired.” He is endlessly amused by a question he once asked in class: “How do you say say?” and repeats it every time he sees me.

Byron showed me a neighboring farm that is nothing but a forest of stumps. He explained that disease wiped out their coffee crop. “That’s one of the disadvantages of not being part of a cooperative. You don’t have easy access to credit.” A loan of eighty dollars would have covered the chemical needed to prevent the disease.

Fair Trade organizations must guarantee access to loans. They also generally help out when disaster strikes, such as the recent hurricanes in Guatemala and Mexico. Companies like Peace Coffee want sustainability and long-term relationships; they’re in trouble if their suppliers lose their farms.

Cecocafen is a Nicaraguan Fair Trade organization that serves as middleman between families like Byron’s and companies like Peace Coffee. They have funded community water projects, better farm equipment, and new schools in rural coffee areas. They are also sending Byron to school.

Then there are the cupping labs. In the past, farmers rarely tasted their own product, they just provided raw beans. They had no idea what the quality of their coffee was, much less an incentive to improve it. Cecocafen provides training on how to make good coffee, and processes it locally so the farmers can taste it. Not only can farmers earn a premium for producing better coffee, but they can take real pleasure in their work.—Katherine Glover

If your cardboard and paper-lace valentines box wasn’t exactly overflowing on the big day, don’t despair. There are plenty of potential sweethearts posting regularly to the Minneapolis Craigslist “Missed Connections” page. Functioning as an online “I Saw You,” this forum gives shy-types a chance to yearn in public, or sort of in public, whether mentioning a suggestive cough on the 4A or searching for a lost love from ten years earlier. As workers at the Wedge Community Co-op recently learned, the page can produce plenty of real-life drama.

The tempest began in late October, with a wistful entry titled, the fishmonger – with personality. “Oh seafood counter fellow…how you make my visit to the co-op so much more than just grocery shopping. Your preparation suggestions improve my dinner, your clever banter makes me smile, and your eyes are rather lovely (nice glasses too!). I think I’d like to make fish with you and exchange further witticisms.” Over the next three weeks, Wedge regulars, ex-patrons, employees, and even members of other co-ops visited the page and dished their opinions and various crushes.

Inside 2105 Lyndale Avenue South, it took only a couple of days for word of the seafood post to spread. Brent and Kyle, both bantering fishmongers with nice glasses, emerged as the most likely objects of desire. Kyle composed a response on behalf of his celebrated department: “Everyone has been drawn to this like sharks to blood,” he wrote. “Of us all that work within the Meat & Seafood Dept. only 3 Do NOT wear glasses. How are we to know of whom you speak???” The confusion finally cleared when Brent read the post, recognized some its more specific references, and wrote a private email to his admirer. (Kyle was singled out several entries later: “Bravo—you’re a real cutey and damn good at your job.”)

Grocery stores have always made good venues for flirtation, for making eyes while hefting an especially juicy grapefruit or squeezing a fresh loaf of bread. And with Brent and Kyle, especially, interactions often get mighty chatty. Brent’s repertoire includes jokes, cooking advice, and questions like, “What’s Keanu Reeves’ worst movie?”; “What famous person died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease?”; and, when standing next to a fellow co-worker, “Who’s cuter?”

Usually, the conversation ends right there. So Brent was both surprised and abashed by the Craigslist post. “I was so flattered!” he said. “My whole life, even as a young teen, I was looking in the ‘I Saw You’ … I’d always thumb through those and be like, ‘Why can’t someone just see me?’”

The post, which turned out to have been penned by a woman named Marie, led to almost forty additional entries over the following weeks, and an entirely new blog (isawyouatthewedge.blogspot.com). Most posts were affectionate. One told a cashier, “You’re feisty and hilarious.” Another marveled, “… every time I go in, I see beautiful people touching my foodstuffs.” Not to miss out on the action, a Seward Co-op Grocery & Deli regular commented that the Wedge is “not the only co-op full of foxy folk. Seward got hotties at the help desk, cashiers, stocking shelves, produce, HBC and deli!”

Since November, the Wedge fishmonger discussion has mostly died down, though the co-op still comes up now and again, as in one recent entry titled, the wedge, tuesdays normally, where someone wrote of a grocery bagger, “i used to think you were flirting with me with your all too familiar greeting. now i see you just are that way and that’s pretty great.” And those curious to read the posts from the original saga likely will come up empty-handed. The Craigslist archives only reach back roughly eight hundred posts, or less than two months.

But don’t despair. The “Missed Connections” page abounds with earnest, heartfelt, aw-shucks declarations of love or lust focused almost exclusively on Twin Cities residents. Skeptics may argue that online romance discussions are bogus—in theory, one person could pop a few multivitamins, log on, and go to town, strictly for entertainment. But there’s no disputing that Brent found a new, very real, pal. Of Marie, he says, “She’s cool. I like hanging out with her a lot.”

—Eden Benbow

Like any budding artisan, Omar Ansari spoke with great pride when he offered a visitor a taste of his creation. “Try that,” he said, pulling a shot of Furious Ale from one of the giant stainless steel tanks. “What do you think?”

I think the Surly Brewing Company, the Twin Cities’ newest producer of craft beer, is on to something. Its name derives from the notion that one becomes surly when offered a mediocre beer. Furious Ale is a beaut: With each sip your tongue is greeted with a sweet malt flavor that is almost immediately chased by an astringent hoppiness, which lingers like a pleasant daydream. When asked if he thinks there’s a market around here for yet another microbrew, Ansari answered without hesitation: “Oh, we can always use more beer!”

Thanks in part to his shoulder-length black hair, Ansari has the soft, friendly look of a surfer who’s finally settled down. He often said things like, “Let’s see, Sam was four months old when I had the idea, and two and a half when I bought this place … ”—one of many instances in which he used the age of his children as a timeline. Ansari’s story is essentially the same as many other specialty brewers: He received a homebrew kit as a gift one Christmas and over the next ten years saw his hobby turn into a roaring obsession, which eventually morphed into a business plan. “You know what they say,” Ansari said, “Give a man a beer, he’ll waste an hour. Teach him to brew, he’ll waste a lifetime.”

The Surly Brewing Company is located in a nondescript little concrete block building in Brooklyn Center. (It is unaffiliated with Surly Bikes, in Bloomington—though they are mutual admirers.) From the outside, the place looks like just another bunker in a beleaguered temp-worker wasteland. The Surly headquarters features a wall of multicolored graffiti, a potholed parking lot, and bland, fading signage for the Ansari family business, Sparky Abrasives, which shares the space with the new brewery. Once inside, however, you’re greeted with what will eventually be the bar and tasting area, where the glow of a neon Surly beer sign shines off the new linoleum tiles in gold and crimson, the brewery’s colors. Back in what used to be a large, long storage room are rows of stainless steel vats, copper piping and big yellow signs warning of the presence of acid. On one wall a shelf of five- and fifteen-gallon kegs rises to the ceiling. Toolboxes and welding equipment are scattered about, along with an old whiskey barrel (for future cask-aged ales) and, languishing in a corner, Ansari’s old homebrewing supplies, a pile of plastic pipes and tubs.

Ansari negotiated this mess like a seasoned pro as we spoke. As one might expect, starting a brewery wasn’t easy. “The biggest, and most surprising, difficulty was trying to find all this equipment,” Ansari explained, gesturing around the room. Apparently, given the prohibitive expense, few microbrewers can afford to buy their equipment new. Small breweries come and go, however, and when they go, upstarts like Surly can acquire pretty much everything they need—from brew kettles to fermenters—secondhand. One of Ansari’s associates eventually discovered a defunct brewery in the Dominican Republic. Apparently, the machinery was originally sold to the second-richest guy on the island, who tried to set up his son in business. This enterprise failed in short order, and Surly bought the works and hauled it all up to Brooklyn Center.

Before he could start brewing, Ansari also had to arrange a change in the city’s laws. Since the 1950s an ordinance had been on the books that prohibited brewery operations within the city limits. That made sense sixty years ago, when a brewery typically produced millions of barrels a year, sucked water by the trainload, and belched enough sewage to fill a small lake. In those days, of course, there was no such thing as a microbrewery. After a pleasant meeting with local commissioners—one of whom was a homebrewer himself—the law was changed to accommodate Surly.

Todd Haug is Ansari’s head brewer. He is a short, taciturn man, with more than a dozen years of brewing experience. When asked where his recipes came from, he shrugged and pointed at his noggin. “Made it up in my head,” he said. Not only is Haug responsible for making sure the beer is of the finest quality, he is also Surly’s mechanical man, and welded and assembled most of the brewery’s machinery. “My hobbies are welding and fabricating,” he mumbled before disappearing behind the pipes and giant silver barrels. Ansari rolled his eyes and said, “I was told that if you ever find a brewer who’s also into welding, never let him go. I’ll never let him go!”

For now, Surly will brew only two beers, and focus entirely on kegs (bottling would take up a tremendous amount of space). Ansari will use his big red truck to distribute the brew himself. A few restaurants and bars are already serving his beers, but he admits that it takes time to get tavern owners to agree to something they haven’t yet tasted. Without much of a staff besides himself and Haug, Ansari will hit the pavement, meeting tavern owners and plugging his product. “This is the best way to be a salesman,” he adds with a grin. “I’m not selling widgets, you know. I’m selling something people really care about, something I care about. It’s not like before. No one cares about abrasives. But people love beer!”—Peter Schilling

March is a month we are especially fond of, for a couple of reasons. It’s our birthday—four years old! No presents, please, we’re laying low this year—and it is also the month that we haul out the twelve-inch, black-and-white television in the office. Why? So we can attend to Minnesota’s secular high holidays, the State High School Hockey tournaments. We’d make the effort to attend the games in person, but we’re usually impeded by two other March traditions—the last snowstorm of the season, and the resulting heyday for the towing concessions in the city. This last tradition really irks us, as do all garden variety parking-related violations. Just the other day, we overstayed our welcome at a parking meter on Washington Avenue. The penalty was thirty-four dollars, and we hereby declare war on whatever city bureaucrat set this rapacious price. The only person who can be pleased with city parking policies and parking meters has to be the person counting all the money looted from the pockets of harried middle-managers and soccer moms just trying to pick up their dry cleaning. And the person who engineered parking meters that only take quarters and dollar coins? There is a special circle in hell reserved for that scoundrel.

Not that we’d ever wish to play God. God already has too many impersonators, and they generally make a mess of things. The continuing violence in the wake of the Mohammed comics in Europe and the East is deplorable on so many levels that we hardly know where to start. Closer to home, we can understand the anger of Christian conservatives who want to take this opportunity to condemn American newspapers for not having the spine to offend members of the world’s largest (and growing) faith. Free speech, they say, applies only to secular humanist tree-hugging supporters of the homosexual agenda. They can barely hide their disappointment at losing this opportunity to offer up a groin kick in the Clash of Civilizations.

Actually, there’s a much simpler explanation that should resonate in our bold new “ownership society”: Like the man always said, freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses. In explaining why U.S. newspapers weren’t, for the most part, republishing the comics in question, we admired the Strib’s Anders Gyllenhaal (isn’t that, um, a Danish name?) for his own sound logic. He said something along the Goldbloomian lines of “Just because we can print offensive and sacrilegious cartoons, doesn’t mean we should.” Hear, hear. We think the story has a Solomonic moral: He who would exercise free speech, and he who would eliminate it, can both learn the divine practice of restraint. If God knows how to do anything, it is to restrain Himself from intervening in human affairs.

But there is a larger and more troubling question here. If Islam forbids the reproduction of any human likeness, how does anyone know what Mohammed looked like? Anyway, between the press and the public, we naturally side with the press. One can make the reasonable argument that the role of comics and other sorts of op-ed material is to provoke public dialogue and controversy. It’s a good teaching moment, and Muslims are not off the hook. Listen up, Medieval Islamic World: It’s time you got used to the idea of free speech and civil dissent. Iran, go ahead and hold Holocaust comics contests and see what happens. How many Westerners, with or without religious ardor, are going to react by storming the Saudi Arabian embassy and fire bombing it? (None.) How many Jews will issue formal protests? (Most of them.) That’s modern civilization. Get used to it!

Fairness is a more noble, humane, and achievable goal than Absolute Truth, and if that confession puts our mortal souls in danger, we’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Which is why we felt bad about the Olympics this year, before the Olympics even started. Three American athletes were disqualified from participating in the games due to evidence that they’d indulged in artificial performance enhancers. We’ve not been among the shrillest, most self-righteous protestors when it comes to condemning doping in sports. It does, though, violate our basic sense of fair play, but more than that, it has ruined our natural, sunny optimism. Ultimately, the presence of steroids and similar results-by-injection most hurts the underdog, who can never make a surprising triumph without raising suspicions that he or she somehow cheated. When a middle-of-the-pack no-name suddenly crosses the line ahead of all the others, our first thought is a most uncharitable one.

Yes, guilty until proven innocent has become a troubling American standard, one we used to identify with our worst enemies. At some point within the last five years, we suddenly forgot a cornerstone of basic fairness and justice, and traded it for an uneasy trust in our Strong Father-Figure Government. President Bush and his cohorts have been arguing for years now that we need only to trust in their commitment to our safety and our best interests. It is astonishing to hear an American president not just admitting to and defending a practice of illegal warrantless eavesdropping, but also brazenly suggesting that it must continue indefinitely. (And to have a lap-dog congress that, rather than holding the lawbreaker accountable, would merely change the law. We’d like to try that strategy in court, as regards this parking ticket.)

It is the same approach, justified by the nebulous carte blanche of “war practices,” that allows our federal government to hold prisoners without charge, bail, lawyer, or any recourse whatsoever if they are suspected of terrorism. Is that fair? Well, would we be holding them if they weren’t obviously guilty? Essentially, our president wishes to do whatever he deems necessary in the execution of his office, without accountability from anyone anywhere. We are to trust a man who never really did settle on a good reason for starting a war in the center of the Middle East, who never did find weapons of mass destruction there, who allowed the illegal leak of the name of an undercover CIA agent, who couldn’t be bothered with the obliteration of an entire city on American soil, and who has not yet fired a wayward employee. He has had many opportunities to establish the trust he needs to realize his dream of absolute power without check. And how has he managed each of these opportunities? You be the judge. You’re fair minded, right?

Dear Column,
This is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write to a column I write. We need to talk.

Lately, it’s seemed like we still love each other, but just aren’t “in love” anymore. First and foremost, let me make it clear that there isn’t another column involved. I couldn’t do that to you. Besides, you know too many of my secrets, which I’ve fed you over the years. You’ve provided the perfect sounding board for a malcontented spaz like myself. Manic depression, cats, death, rock bands, unemployment, hypochondria: There was nothing I couldn’t talk to you about.

Maybe I took you for granted, sometimes not actually picking up a copy for several days to see how you “turned out.” For that I am sorry. I’ll never forget the sometimes several minutes we spent together each month, usually an hour before deadline. Was our time together brief? Yes. But know that you were on my mind every day. I’ll only speak sweetly of you, and if we get lonely and want to trip down memory lane, we’ll always have online archiving.

“If you love someone, set them free.”

You, of all columns, know how hard that was for me to write. As you are well aware, I hate Sting.

Mary sez: Good bye.

Email Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

The proof that Minnesota has soul lies in Jackie Williams’ sweet potato pie. Or perhaps it’s in her rib tips, smothered pork chops, or fried green tomatoes, which warm your belly and your disposition. Williams has been a chef-around-town for years, and she’s occasionally even catered for stopover celebrities before opening Abundant Bistro, her own soul food restaurant. On Sunday afternoons, she treats her diners to gospel music while they work on a big plate of fried catfish and a hunk of cornbread the size of your heart. 609 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 651-209-1707

There really is only one thing that can melt through our puritanical will to stay home and hunker down through the cold months: barbeque. Now that we have a Baker’s Ribs in Eden Prairie, we’ll brave any weather to bask in the inner heat that only good sausage can kindle. The smoky barbecue links at Baker’s are made with a spiced beef-and-pork mixture that nearly bursts through the skin of each plump package. This Texas-based chain offers a variety of meats, slow cooked over oak and accompanied by a bracing sauce that burns past the competition’s. 8019 Glen Lane, Eden Prairie; 952-942-5337

Fiery, doomed love isn’t just for gay cowboys; prairie girls can get it real bad, too. In this play by local writer Melanie Marnich, a young, small-town wife succumbs to a crush on a handsome neighbor, and becomes entangled in a dangerous constellation of personalities and tempers. Based loosely on the 1622 play The Changeling, this brutal romance covers the heady intoxication of new love and the bloody and terrifying repercussions of infidelity in a deceptively wholesome Midwestern setting. 820 18th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-605-8497; www.emigranttheater.org

It’s heartening to note that this annual event has added themes in recent years–perhaps it means that so many women are now making films that the focus has been narrowed. In its thirteenth year, the Women with Vision festival showcases filmmakers from Chile, Iran, Kenya, Cameroon–as well as Europe and the U.S.–who have faced political obstacles in creating their work. Classic 1950s noir by artists blacklisted as communists; glimpses into the lives of young women in Iran; and an exploration of spousal abuse in Cameroon are highlights in a wide-ranging program of several dozen films. But Deepa Mehta’s India trilogy deserves its own mention. For the last film in the series, about a child bride trying to make her way in the world after her husband dies, Mehta encountered enough violent protest from her fellow citizens that she was forced to finish the film in Sri Lanka. 612-375-7622, www.walkerart.org

Jeune Lune has gotten so good at opera that almost everything it does in the genre deserves mention. The company’s strategy involves stripping away layers of orchestration from the score, because it can neither afford a full orchestra nor fit one into its space. The result has been opera productions that are short, punchy, and intimate, with a cast of singers who also happen to have great acting skills. This time, artistic director Dominique Serrand and singers Bradley Greenwald, Christina Baldwin, and Jennifer Baldwin Peden heat up Mefistofele, a little-known Italian opera that’s based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s telling of Faust. 105 N. First St., Minneapolis; 612-333-6200; www.jeunelune.org