Blog

I’m 12 years old, scooted up to my dad’s octagonal dining table, the backs of my thighs sticking unpleasantly to the vinyl kitchen chair on a sweltering August day. Stepmom Debbie has prepared her specialty, Swedish sausage, a gray tube of meat-like substance that looks a lot like the photo my health teacher Ms. Nick recently displayed of a large intestine. And then there’s the tall glass of two percent milk resting heavily before me, beads of sweat running down its exterior, thick and disgusting white fluid within. Before leaving the table, I will be forced to swallow the milk, all of it, no matter how much I gag in the process. I will have to swallow it because, insists my dad, it’s good for me. Against this truism I, a scrawny kid with chronic earaches and poor appetite, am defenseless.

If only I’d had access then to today’s impressive and growing body of research that threatens our sacrosanct belief in milk as the epitome of wholesome food. Critics now point past the dangers associated with the sins of factory farming— growth hormones, antibiotics, and infectious secretions from unhealthy animals—to the most shattering question of all: whether clean, pure cow’s milk is fit for humans to drink in the first place.

“Ask yourself this question,” coaxes Robert Cohen, author of Milk, The Deadliest Poison, and founder of Notmilk.com, “Does organic human breast milk sound like a delicious drink for an adult human? Instinctively, most people know that there are substances in breast milk that are not intended for their adult bodies. Same goes for pig’s milk and dog’s milk. Same for cow’s milk.”

Seems logical to me, especially when coupled with the real horror stories behind mass production of dairy products. That’s why I tried so hard back in the late 90s to replace dairy in my own and my children’s diets with alternatives, mostly soy based, such as soy milk for pouring on cereal, Tofutti instead of ice cream, and the unpalatable, unmeltable, and dare I say inedible soy cheese products of that era (if they’ve improved, I wouldn’t know, having given up on them for good). Being dairy-free wasn’t easy. After six months of strict veganism, I broke down and bit into a warm, gooey slice of cheese pizza. I haven’t gotten back on the wagon since.

Little did I know that with my foray into dairy alternatives I was buying right into a decade-long marketing campaign to gain consumer acceptance of tofu, soy milk, soy ice cream, soy cheese, soy sausage, and soy derivatives. It coincided with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration decision, announced on October 25, 1999, to allow a health claim for products “low in saturated fat and cholesterol” that contain 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving. Cereals, baked products, convenience food, and other items could now be marketed as promoting cardiovascular health, as long as they contained one teaspoon of soy protein per 100-gram serving.

It was a weak will, not health concerns, that brought me back to Pizza Hut, but given my demonstrated history of swinging with the dairy-soy pendulum, it was probably no coincidence that my personal roundabout dovetailed exactly with the millennial tide turning against soy consumption. As it turned out, shrieked the critics, I—along with the rest of the unsuspecting health-conscious masses—had been bamboozled by the soy industry. Soy protesters began waving fistfuls of anti-soy studies. There are links between soy and fertility problems in certain animals! Soy contains a natural chemical that mimics estrogen, and it alters sexual development! Two glasses of soy milk a day, over the course of a month, contain enough of this chemical to run my menstrual cycle amok! And if that’s not bad enough, soy also promises to disturb my digestion, give me breast cancer, and shrink my brain. Of course, all of this is disputed heatedly by those who claim soy is a healthy, low-cost, versatile food for a new generation, but the debate in itself is enough to turn some consumers back toward the milking pail.

So maybe humans are the only mammals that drink the milk of another mammal. What we drink is hardly the most significant distinction between humans and our animal brethren. So the newest purists believe that raw milk, in its most natural, unadulterated state, is the dairy product most fit for humans. But to get it, they’ve got to form a relationship with an organic farmer willing to bypass wholesalers and market his or her raw, unpasteurized milk directly to consumers.

For years, when my family lived in the country, I bought raw goat milk from a friend down the road, and my children appeared to me just like Heidi and Klara on the Alm, growing strong and rosy on the herb-rich milk of Schwaanli and Baarli. They got used to the thick, salty flavor of the goat milk, and I appreciated the simplicity of it, the fact that we were drinking it practically straight from the goat. It felt right and good, and we only drifted away from it after moving back to the Twin Cities.

Of course I knew raw milk could cause illness, even if I didn’t know that an estimated 100 Americans each year get sick from unpasteurized dairy products, and that some critics claim that figure is far too low since food-borne illness is often misdiagnosed as “flu” or viral illness. Indeed, outbreaks of raw-milk related illnesses occur every year in Minnesota, and in one 1992 incident 50 people got sick after ingesting raw milk at a church picnic. Raw milk can apparently harbor a variety of dangerous micro–organisms including campy-lobacter, salmonella, staphylococci, E. coli, and even rabies. Symptoms can range from mild stomach cramps to coma and death.

It’s a hard world. Risk lurks everywhere. From terrorism to traffic, our lives are at stake with every polluted breath we take. I’m all for eating well, supporting organics, keeping hope alive. But I’ve given up the notion that every sip I allow to pass through my children’s lips is going to make the difference between health and disease. The hysteria, if anything, is bound to make us sick. That harmless looking soybean, that creamy glass of goatmilk that got Klara up on her own two feet, that once-revered carton of two percent in the cooler at the corner store—they’ve got their problems. But are they going to kill you? Probably not (immediately).

Jeannie Ouellette is Associate Editor of The Rake.

It took eight years to catch the man who killed Linda Jensen in her Big Lake home—even though two other men had already confessed to the crime.

Sherburne County 15 crosses the Elk River just north of highway 10, then takes the first of several gentle curves west toward Big Lake. It’s the kind of rural two-lane you might see in an SUV commercial—mom at the wheel undaunted by the icy road, back seat full of kids gazing out at the snow-softened landscape. The homes are set back in wooded lots every quarter mile or so, close enough to be neighborly, but distant enough to be secluded. The distinctive stained-wood exterior of the house that Charlie Jensen built still looks the same as it did one winter evening in 1992 when it was plastered all over Twin Cities’ television screens, but Charlie hasn’t seen it in a long time. “I can’t bring myself to look at it,” he says.

The Jensen’s nine-year-old son Joe had gotten off the school bus at the end of the long driveway about 3 o’clock that afternoon. He dragged his bum leg through the snow toward his house, and pushed the unlocked door open. He cast a quick glance at his baby sister Lisa who was sitting in her playpen with poopy diapers and teary eyes, then made a beeline for his room and booted up a video game. The aliens materialized, and started to advance. Lisa began crying. Otherwise it was too quiet in the house. Joe wondered where his mom was. He and Linda Jensen were close, and he had a feeling that something was wrong.

While Joe had called three men dad in his life—two abusive drunks and Charlie Jensen— his mom was a constant. She’d mothered him with a special passion because of a stroke he’d suffered at birth that left him with a limp and a weakened arm. She’d protected him when the men in her life got nasty, and comforted him when he brooded about his handicaps. Linda Jensen’s presence was something Joe had always been aware of. Now he sensed her absence. He walked over to the open door of his parents’ bedroom and looked in. The bedclothes had been pulled off. They were piled on top of something on the floor at the foot of the bed. He ran back to the living room and lost himself in the video game. About an hour later Charlie Jensen arrived home. As he drove up the driveway the symbols of the day’s frustrations were in plain view. The pickup truck he had for sale sat unsold behind the house, and nearby his wife’s van was up to the hubcaps in freshly fallen snow. Obviously it hadn’t moved, yet he’d been trying to reach her off and on all day. Why didn’t she answer the phone, he wondered, vaguely irritated.

Charlie stomped the snow off his shoes in the walkout. Joe was sitting in the living room in front of the video screen, a few feet from the playpen where Lisa sat sniffling. “Lisa’s here alone—mom’s not around,” Joe blurted out, before Charlie could ask. Charlie picked up his daughter. He glanced into the bedroom, saw the stripped bed, and hurried down to the laundry room. Linda wasn’t there. He went back to the bedroom with Joe following him, noticed the bedclothes on the floor, and saw his wife’s head poking out from underneath. The bedspread, he realized, was pinned to her chest with a knife. Shocked, he put the baby down and pulled back the bedclothes. Linda Jensen had been disemboweled. She’d been murdered so brutally that Charlie’s first thought was of some grisly ritual.

“I couldn’t stand to look at it,” he told investigator Gary Polusny of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s office. “I said, ‘Joe, mom’s dead you know,’ and Joe went hysterical. Then I called 911.” That evening Charlie told investigators that he suspected Joe’s biological father was the killer. “He’s got a hell of a temper, and he hated Linda for not staying with him,” he said. “He’d call her up and just scream at her.” Charlie’s speculation on the evening of his wife’s murder was the first promising lead in a gruesome murder case that took eight years to solve.

A cold river rushes by, and cottonwood trees have toppled in along the bank. On a sandstone bluff, 20 feet up, there’s a dancing Shiva carved deeply into the rock. The Hindu God of Destruction has been defaced by kids, farmers, fundamentalists. When Jim Langford carved it 15 years ago, a few Faribault evangelicals mobilized. They xeroxed flyers and put them in farmer’s mailboxes throughout the area. They claimed the “paganistic idol” would sicken cattle and kill crops. Theirs was a decidedly Old Testament view of things.

Each summer, Langford still makes the trip south to visit his handiwork at Scott’s Mill, a piece of Isaac Walton League land halfway between Northfield and Faribault, on the Cannon River. “Shiva was dancing on the head of ignorance,” he said recently, still relishing the truth of it. “But not anymore. Some farmers came with a shotgun and took target practice.” Years later, Langford saw the head of ignorance again—at a friend’s house. The friend had found the fragment in woods near the bluff, and brought it home to the safety of his garden.

Langford is a tall and energetic man, a happy father with fraternal twins in first grade. He travels five days a week, giving financial seminars in Atlanta, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1986, he was a senior at St. Olaf College. Through the arcane knowledge of upperclassmen, Langford learned about Scott’s Mill— a remote but favored location for the usual college bacchanals. And in a long-since extinct program that was on the leftiest fringe of a liberal arts education, he fashioned a senior project that encompassed American studies (think Huck Finn), Asian religion, and three-dimensional art. It all came together in the eight-foot-in-diameter carving.

The outrage of the locals was palpable. The Faribault Daily News was moved to remark on the public outcry. “Not since the city council considered cat-leashing has a story created such a stir here,” one reporter exclaimed. Religiously-inclined folks bridled the most, while the secular objected on the grounds that Langford had vandalized park property. Then again, Langford’s handiwork was simply the latest and most accomplished in a long tradition of local vandalism. Sandstone, which yields to pointed sticks and strong fingers, practically cries out for the initials of teenagers.

Langford spent six months working on Shiva, through the spring of 1986. He built his own scaffolding, waded through meltwater, and spent about six hours a day on the project. As final exams and graduation approached, he even hired an assistant. But the aide couldn’t handle the work, and suffered an episode of neurosis that involved staring at the sun for long periods of the workday. Believers might have called it a demonic possession. “He had issues,” explained Langford with the benefit of hindsight.

Despite a decade and a half of abuse, Shiva still dances on the sandstone bluff. “Oh yeah, he’s really in there for good,” said the artist, who received his baccalaureate degree as his reward.

In Minnesota, the number on your driver’s license is a function of your name and date of birth. A woman with the maiden name Linda Louise Eastman who marries James Paul McCartney and takes the name Linda Eastman McCartney sees her Minnesota driver’s license number change from E-235-522-549-898 to M-263-522-162-898 because her last and middle names change. Exactly how the name and number correspond is a closely guarded secret of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. However, Minnesota and Michigan code their numbers using the identical method—and Michigan doesn’t keep the method secret. The first character of a person’s Minnesota driver’s license number is the initial of the surname (E for Eastman). The next three characters of the license number are obtained by applying a complicated system called the Soundex code.

Here’s how Soundex works: Delete all Hs and Ws, and assign numbers 0 through 6 to the remaining letters as follows: A, E, I, O, U, Y=0; B, F, P, V=1; C, G, J, K, Q, S, X, Z=2; D, T=3; L=4; M, N=5; R=6. Convert the letters to numbers. If two or more adjacent digits are the same, omit all but the first. Next, unless the first letter was an H or W, delete the first digit. Then, delete all 0s. Retain only the first three digits among the remaining digits. If you have fewer than three digits left, add zeros. For example, for the surname McCartney we have the following numbers at successive stages of the process: 522063500; 5206350; 206350; 2635; 263.

The next two blocks of digits are determined from tables by using parts of the first and middle names. In most cases the code is determined by the first two characters such as Aa (028) for Aaron or Ji (414) for Jill. Exceptionally common names such as Joseph or Robert have their own special numbers (441 and 745). Finally, the last three digits are determined from tables using the day and month of birth. The numbers usually alternate in increments of 2 and 3. For example, the codes for March 1, 2 and 3 are 159, 162 and 164, respectively.

What is the advantage of this system? It’s an error-correcting scheme. It’s designed so that likely misspellings of a name nevertheless result in the correct coding of the name. For example, frequent misspellings of Erickson such as Ericksen or Ericsen yield the correct code for Erickson (E-625). Likewise, the code for Kristen and Kristin is the same (478) and the code for Emilie and Emily is the same (229). So, if a police officer wanted to know the license number for Kristin Emilie Erickson but entered Kristen Emily Ericsen in the computer, the correct number would come up. The Soundex code was developed by the U.S. Census Bureau back when they still conducted much of their business in verbal interviews, and didn’t apparently have the time to check their spelling.

On a recent Sunday at Knollwood Mall in Hopkins, a dozen or so baseball card dealers and traders huddled grimly behind folding tables as the occasional stray shopper passed by. A mere two or three years ago the weekend card shows were several times the size of this one, and prices were astronomical. Not anymore. How to cope with the newly diminished state of affairs? One seller at the Hopkins gathering, a surly balding man named Rick with a ridiculous haircut, actively trumped the customers disinterest with his own. In those rare moments when anyone asked to see the wares stacked in his locked display case, he only glared at them and demanded to know which card they were looking for. No listee, no lookee.

Thirty years ago, before the “serious” card collector’s market existed, only one company—Topps—was still making baseball cards. And because they were for kids and modestly priced, most of them wound up in the trash eventually. If you bought cards and saved them, you might possess something genuinely scarce. The modern collector’s market was born in the late 70s and early 80s as nostalgia-starved baby boomers started paying hefty prices for these talismans of their youth. By 1989, when a company called Upper Deck rolled out its first series, there was suddenly an unprecedented number of new or resurrected baseball card lines.

It was Upper Deck that almost single-handedly transformed the business, first with its glossy production values and later with its proliferation of specialized high-end card lines and marketing innovations such as autograph cards and memorabilia cards, the latter featuring embedded snippets of “game-used” this or that—jerseys, bats, caps, balls, bases, stadium seats; even, in one case, game-used dirt.

The advent of autograph and memorabilia cards changed the industry in a couple ways. It gave manufacturers a direct piece of the top-end collectors’ business, which previously had been an after-market that took years to ripen as cards aged and grew scarce. And it turned baseball card collecting into a species of gambling. These cards were seeded into packs at exceedingly low rates; Upper Deck’s first memorabilia cards typically appeared at rates of one in 2,500 or more packs.

As they exploded in popularity (and purported value—anywhere from $20 to over $1,000 apiece according to the monthly Beckett price guides), these specialty cards came to drive the industry. Predictably, the card companies rushed to give buyers more of what they wanted. By now it’s become common for the higher-end products to contain autographs and memorabilia at rates of one, two, three per box, even one per pack in premium lines. The trouble, of course, is that this glut has destroyed the cards’ book value. Meanwhile the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices have only kept climbing. As a result, it’s not at all unusual to pay $150-$200 per box for the chance to glean a card you would be lucky to get $30 or $40 for at a show. It’s a sucker’s bazaar. Lottery scratch games offer better odds.

And the suckers are catching on. Tim Smith has toiled in these vineyards of human abasement for seven years as the proprietor of the Sports Card Exchange in Robbinsdale. Nowadays, though, his retail shop accounts for barely a third of his income. The rest comes from card shows and Internet auctions. Smith pines for the days when card-collecting was not the near-exclusive province of aging, obsessive white men with too much money. “Ever since Pokémon,” he laments, “kids have abandoned sports cards and not looked back. And they really couldn’t afford most of the products if they did want them.”

It is a strange and dispiriting business, he admits. “It’s the only retail industry I know that’s dictated by price guides. They’re the ones who tell us every month what our product is worth.” He shakes his head. “And nobody believes them anyway.”

Monica Hammersten woke up at 3 a.m. one night recently. She smelled beef cooking. “And I think, ‘Oh, now what is that?’ So I come running downstairs. I had a bunch of hamburgers pattied out for the next day, and Jack had them all in a frying pan. He was standing there in his P.J.s just flipping them, as happy as can be.”

As his mother told this tale on him at home in St. Louis Park, lanky 10-year-old Jack paced the floor with a puckish smile and a sound-muffling headset over his ears. He’s autistic, and doesn’t like the disorganized sounds of his little brothers Elijah and Benjamin at play. But he likes Alice Cooper, and he loves to cook. While many autistic people are overstimulated by tactile sensation as well as sound, Jack delights in the pebbly texture and sound of couscous in a pot.

As a class, cooks are eccentrics, as documented by Anthony Bourdain. And even by autistic standards, Jack is no exception. Neighbors who have left their doors unlocked have found Jack undertaking his craft in their kitchens, his frontside dusted with flour. And his many night-time wanderings have taken him to McDonald’s, where his parents once found him standing next to the drive-through speaker repeating a favorite selection from his limited verbal output: “Burger, burger, burger, burger.” It’s an incident that keeps Tom and Monica Hammersten amused when they imagine it from the cashier’s point of view.

While it’s hard to guess at Jack’s point of view, it has dawned on Tom and Monica that his need for lifetime care will continue past their ability to provide it. Some autistic people learn to function in relative independence, but Jack’s tendency to wander and his experimental use of knives and toasters are likely to make him a danger to himself 24/7 for the foreseeable future. The Hammerstens estimate Jack has generated at least four calls to 911 since they moved to Minnesota eight years ago.

Parents who can handle that kind of stress naturally end up in the restaurant business. Behold, the birth of À La Mode at the Mall of America. Should the fickle gods of food service smile on Monica and her business partner, Marilee McGraw, their dessert shop may someday fund a group home custom–built for Jack and other autistic people. “I dream,” said Monica, “of fall afternoons in a warm kitchen with Jack and others like him cooking up their favorites for our big family dinners. This is the home I will build for Jack so that I can feel secure that when Tom and I are gone, Jack is going to have a great place to live.”

For now, this dream is tucked into a 790 square–foot wedge on South Avenue near the Mall of America’s food court, a spot once occupied by a hemp shop. À La Mode offers over-the-counter American desserts. It’s a modest mission: Monica and Mariliee want to offer a small menu of traditional items made well.

Very well. The apple crisp sampled by The Rake achieved the rare ideal of tender apples and crisp oatmeal. Under two scoops of cinnamon ice cream from the Edina Creamery, it was nearly impossible to unhand for a stab at the fudge-drizzled cheesecake. A chocolate chip cookie the size of a dinner plate met with unqualified approval from our five-year-old guest. Adults who insisted on sharing detected the signature of real butter. “I just found out from our Sysco rep that we use more butter than any other restaurant in the mall,” said Monica. A white-chocolate raspberry scone went into storage against leaner times.

First the rumbles raged in England between the Rockers and the Mods. Slick leather-clad Elvis wannabes dropped a few shillings in the jukebox, hopped on their BSA Goldstars, ran some scooters off the road, and popped back for a pint before the rockabilly faded. Rockers mocked the Mods’ more stylish—but less powerful—scooters calling them “Italian hairdryers.” The Mods sought their revenge on the beaches of Brighton—as immortalized in The Who’s Quadrophenia—and casually brushed the blood off their sharkskin suits.

Inevitably, the Mods couldn’t stay united. A schism developed, dividing them into two sects: the aficionados of the slightly less expensive, but more famous Vespa versus fans of the longer, more stable and stylish Lambretta. Some decked out their scooters with every mirror and light imaginable, while others souped up the engines and stripped off every unnecessary body part. By 1972 the Vespa won the popularity contest, and Lambretta’s factory in Milan was quietly decommissioned.

Now, the balkanization continues. Loyal Vespisti have drawn the battle lines once again, this time between the old and the new. The Vespa first came to this country in the 1950s. It arrived in force, too, via Sears department stores, where they were sold alongside the lawn mowers and washing machines. When Sears gave up the enterprise, a little scooter shop on University Avenue called Vesparado kept the spirit alive locally until about 1984, when the Vespa couldn’t meet tougher U.S. emission standards. The remaining scooters were nursed along by devoted mechanics and hobbyists working to keep these Italian marvels alive.

Vespas are now back in the U.S. with a sleek new design. The basic shape remains the same. (As original Vespa designer Corradino d’Ascanio said back in the 1950s, “The Vespa will always look like it does. Even when it is atomic-powered and riding on the moon.”) Already a phenomenon, the new Vespa has appeared in numerous TV ads, and was even featured on Good Morning America—although Diane Sawyer didn’t do much for scooterists’ inferiority complex when she hopped on a Vespa exclaiming, “We’re not Hell’s Angels, we’re Hell’s Dorks!” Even so, big stars such as Jay Leno, Sandra Bullock, and Robert DeNiro all have popped for a new Vespa.

The new scooters are sleek, modern versions of the classic without all the vibrations and front-brake dipping which made the original Vespa infamous. They tote an ultra-modern price tag, too—$2980 for a 50cc version and $3980 for the 150cc which is capable of pushing the needle past 60 mph.

“If you don’t care about quality or image, buy a plastic Yahama scooter. If you want to buy into the Vespa lifestyle, we’re the place,” said Jim D’Aquila, the co-owner of the new Vespa Boutique in downtown Minneapolis.

What’s that? Who said “boutique?” The unfortunate moniker does little to dispel the “Italian hairdryer” myth, but it does fit the new digs. Where else can you find Vespa watches, Vespa silver cufflinks, Vespa perfume, Vespa bath foams, Vespa herbal cream, Vespa bath oil, Vespa bath salts (in strawberry, mint, musk, and rose scents)?

Enrico Piaggio, the original head of the company that builds Vespas, told Time magazine in 1952, “The best way to fight Communism in this country is to give each worker a scooter, so he will have his own transportation, have something valuable of his own, and has a stake in the principle of private property.” Piaggio—clever capitalist! — wasn’t kidding. To open a new Vespa store, entrepreneurs reportedly need to plunk down a hefty chunk of change: $350,000.

Hardcore scooter enthusiasts, on the other hand, are still willing to get a little grease under their fingernails. Jeremy Liebig persists in repairing and refurbishing vintage Vespas at his Scooter Lab garage, and refused an offer to work for the new store. Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly’s scooter columnist Jeremy Wilker impugned the new Vespa campaign when he referred to it as “the Gap approach.” Fifty-one of these boutiques are to be opened around the country. Meanwhile, Minneapolis will get a second scooter shop in June. “Scooterville” will occupy an old warehouse near Dinkytown and it will specialize in Indian-made Vespas, called “Bajaj.” These scooters sport the older, classic style for the relatively retro price of $2000.

It may well be the summer of scooters in the Twin Cities. The Vespa Boutique owners are confident the new scooters will be a hit, but when I asked co-owner Garry Kieves for some details about the new Vespas, he demurred. “I can answer any questions you have on Ducatis and other Italian motorcycles,” he offered. How’s that? Have the Rockers won after all?

A recent statistic indicates that total beer consumption in the United States is around 33 gallons per person per year for everyone 18 years and older. But wait a minute: If the legal drinking age in every state is 21, why are kids as young as 18 included in the statistic? Apparently someone in a position of power has learned that people under the legal age are getting their hands on adult beverages. Here in the real world, that’s hardly news. But it does beg the converse question: Why do people under 21 have so much trouble buying non-alcoholic beer?

It is perfectly legal for anyone to consume, purchase, and possess a “near beer” (also called “non-alcoholic” beers by their manufacturers, “near beer” is the government’s preferred term). Near beers are not classified as alcoholic drinks, and therefore do not require the same restrictions.

In order for a beverage to qualify as “non-alcoholic,” it must contain less than one half of one percent alcohol by volume. Regular beer typically contains five percent. So do most cough syrups. A bottle of NyQuil contains 33 times the amount of alcohol in a serving of O’Doul’s. Cool Mint Listerine contains 72 times the alcohol. Nobody thinks to card teenagers attempting to buy mouthwash.

So why is it so hard for my friend Becky, a college freshman, to get her hands on some non-alcoholic beer? On a recent (attempted) bender, Cub Foods wouldn’t sell to her. Neither would Applebee’s. And she didn’t have much more luck with a host of other restaurants.

Part of the problem is local ordinances. Many cities set their own rules limiting the purchase of these “near beers” to people old enough to drink the real stuff. Even more commonly, many restaurants deny the drinks through their own policies and paranoia. When Becky and I raised questions about the rule, servers and owners tended to favor the reliable (but feeble) excuse that “it’s just company policy.” And that was the end of it. You can’t get blood or non-alcoholic beer from a stone.

According to Brian Kringen, who works for the Minnesota Department of Alcohol and Gambling Enforcement, restaurants don’t have any reason to worry. There are no punishments for “serving these drinks to anyone under 21, because they are legal to consume,” he said.

But minors can still get into trouble. If your daughter is under 21, and she gets pulled over after legally enjoying an O’Doul’s or two, she could theoretically lose her license until her 21st birthday. Thanks to Minnesota’s “Not a Drop” law, it’s illegal to have even a trace of alcohol in her system.

Though he knows of no cases like this, Kringen said, “It is possible that with probable cause an officer could run field sobriety tests and request urinalysis.” Peeing in a cup—that’s what it would take. Everyone knows it’s nearly impossible to get drunk off non-alcoholic beers—and your bladder will certainly stay busy. Since the miniscule amounts of alcohol in a “near beer” probably won’t register on a breathalyzer test, it would take blood or urine tests to show violation. A quart of mouthwash, on the other hand…