Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
New Candidate Quietly Planning Mayoral Run Against Frey?Â
Minneapolis’s next mayoral election isn’t until 2025, but self-professed politics nerd Josh Martin (Southwest Voices, Minneapolis Documenters) has shared news of Jacob Frey's first "major opponent" via Bluesky:
In addition to being lead minister at Plymouth Congregational Church in downtown Minneapolis, Rev. Dr. Dewayne Davis was elected chaplain of the Minnesota Senate in 2023; the first Black, gay person to do so. That fall, he told his alma mater Howard University that fighting oppression—especially white oppression—is central to his work. “It created in our religion and politics a demonizing and oppressing of Black bodies, and by extension, the woman body and the queer body,” he told the school’s alumni magazine. “And so, I have to speak up because I exist in that body.”
A few other fun facts on Davis: He was raised in Mississippi, is the youngest of 15 siblings, and currently lives on the North Side with his husband, Kareem Murphy, who is the director of government relations for Hennepin County.
Will Mississippi Market Employees Vote To Unionize Tomorrow?
If they do, they’ll be joining coops like the Wedge and Seward, plus grocers like Kowalski’s, Lunds & Byerlys, and Cub. But it hasn’t been an easy road getting to this point, and signs point to resistance ahead. On September 19, Mississippi Market workers announced their intention to join the UFCW Local 1189. “Recently there’s been a lot of restructuring in the store and it put a lot of workers in the position that I never want to see happen again,” worker/member-owner Rowan Garrigan told Cirien Saadeh at Minnesota Women’s Press last month.Â
But MM opted not to recognize union efforts, so tomorrow workers will vote on whether or not to unionize. “We are confident that our employees will study the issue and make a decision that is right for them and their families,” says CEO Catherine Downey via a statement. And what is Downey deems "right" apparently, is for there to be no union. When workers started looking into unionizing in 2018, Workday Magazine described a leaked letter sent out to employees as “evidence of an anti-union perspective.” And this go-round, Mississippi Market has lawyered up, hiring Littler Mendelson P.C., a law firm that helped bust union movements at both Starbucks and Apple.Â
McDonald’s Is Beefin’ With Cargill
According to some guy on Twitter, there’s a McDonald’s in Connecticut that charges $17.59 for a Big Mac combo meal, and that really pissed people off. But the rising cost of fast food isn’t due to the chain’s insatiable corporate greed, they claim. It’s actually the fault of the beef mafia, run by the likes of JBS, Tyson Foods, Swift Beef Co., National Beef Packing Co., and Wayzata-based Cargill. In a lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday, McD’s accuses the big four beef providers and their subsidies of working together to control supply and demand so as to set beef prices “artificially higher than beef prices would have been in the absence of their conspiracy.”
While it’s hard to root for any company involved here, it’s not the first time the meat industry has been accused of price gouging. AP points out that in 2022, for example JBS “agreed to a $52.5 million settlement in a similar beef price-fixing lawsuit” and Tyson shelled out $221.5 million in 2021 to kill inflated chicken price accusations.Â
Meanwhile, fast food chain prices continue to skyrocket. NBC found that the average price of all menu items at McDonald’s “has risen 40% over the last five years… That is higher than overall consumer prices, which have increased 21% since December 2019.” This May, a Lending Tree poll found that 80% of Americans consider fast food a luxury these days.
Just In Time for National Pork Month: Locally Made Alcoholic Bacon Cider
Haven’t we moved past the bacon obsession of the 2010s? Apparently not, because we’ve been seeing some weird pig-and-booze related drinks pop up around town. Earlier this fall, Em made her way to Insight Brewing to try the super limited-edition Glizzy McGuire, a hot dog-flavored hard seltzer they deemed not “all that aggressive” once you got “past the smell.” And now, North Loop cidery Number 12 has teamed up with Farmland for a bacon-and-apple collab that was launched in the taproom yesterday. You can get it there “while supplies last.” We just need one more pork-and-alcohol concoction for this thing to become a trend again.
