Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Times Talks Turkey (And Other Midwestern Roadside Treasures)
If you're anything like me, you've long admired The World's Largest Six-Pack, which sits in cylindrical splendor along Hwy. 61 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. So you can imagine my thrill at seeing those triumphant tallboys inside a recent physical edition of the New York Times. But that tangentially regional local connection isn't what piqued our Flyover interest—the article's thrust is about how "other parts of the United States certainly have roadside giants, but the Midwest makes it an art form."
Those art forms include Big Tom, purportedly world's largest turkey, who towers 22 feet over Frazee, Minnesota. Other MN mentions include a giant tiger muskie (Nevis), twine ball (Darwin), sugar beet (Halstad), Paul Bunyan (Akeley), and DQ Dilly Bar (Moorhead), all of which are beautifully photographed by the Times. Oh, and also: giant loon (Vergas), giant otter (Fergus Falls), giant prairie chicken (Rothsay), giant crow (Belgrade), giant pelican (Pelican Rapids, naturally), and two additional giant Bunyans for good measure (Bemidji, Brainerd). (The so-called paper of record omitted any mention of Paul's smokeshow girlfriend from Hackensack.) “They’re all over the place—it’s kind of a Midwestern thing,” says Jay Estenson of Frazee. “We make our own fun. Sometimes you’ve got to. Especially in the middle of the winter.”
These folksy roadside monuments instill a sense of pride and identity in rural communities, so much so that Frazee, population 1,300, throws an annual Turkey Days Festival. Big Tom was originally erected in 1986, but that bird was set aflame via blowtorch and, according to the Fargo Forum, residents are still asking "Who burned the bird?"
“Traveling the U.S., if you wear a Frazee shirt, you’re going to have somebody stop you,” Frazee Mayor Mike Sharp tells the Times, summarizing those exchanges thusly: “Hey, I stopped there, I’ve looked at your turkey.”
Gopher Grad Worker Union Scores 1st Contract
When we last heard from the University of Minnesota's freshly minted graduate student worker union this past October, tension abounded. "We're all incredibly frustrated and feel like we have been stabbed in the back," Sam Boland, a grad student worker in the College of Science & Engineering, told me.
But on Sunday The Minnesota Daily reported more encouraging news: The U of M and its Graduate Labor Union (GLU) reached a tentative contract late last month, and the union's 4,000ish members will vote Monday through Friday on whether to ratify their very first contract. Should they vote it down? Boland tells the Daily's Avery Vrieze the union is prepared to strike. When grad student employees at the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses voted by a large margin to unionize last year, it was the sixth such election since 1974—and first victory.
Elsewhere in the world of organizing grad student workers: Around 1,300 such folks at Macalester College in St. Paul will soon vote on whether to unionize, reports Max Nesterak of the Minnesota Reformer. It'll be interesting to see what role, if any, the ol' campus Sex Bell plays in future negotiations.
The Decline of the Honeycrisp Apple
The University of Minnesota helped pioneer semen-freezing technology, dog leashes, cold-hardy wine grapes, and, in some sense, the '60s folk movement. But we can all agree the greatest U of M export has to be the sweet 'n' tangy Honeycrisp apple. When the apple debuted in 1991, it was a smash hit. But those Honeycrisps from the '90s through the '10s taste and feel like different apples from the Honeycrisps of today, according to Serious Eats editor Genevieve Yam. "What went wrong? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think," she writes, teeing up a fascinating deep-dive into Minnesota's rockstar apple.
Yam talks to U of M seed breeder/research scientist David Bedford, one of the fathers of the Honeycrisp. She talks to New York apple farmer Josh Morgenthau. She talks to Dr. R. Karina Gallardo, an economics professor at Washington State University. We won't spoil the mystery, but let's just say there are a multitude of reasons—some geographic, some economic, some related to apple care that has nothing to do with your computer—why Honeycrisps are cheaper and, arguably, worse these days than ever before. "The Honeycrisp is a victim of its own success," Yam concludes, "and has become exactly what [its creators] despised about the variety’s predecessors: a boring commodity apple."
Gen Z Loves Rainforest Cafe, a Locally Angled Restaurant Chain
Did you know Gen Z is going wild for jungle-themed chain restaurant Rainforest Cafe? That's according to Slate, whose Jessica Gentile writes that, "With animatronic apes and chocolate volcano cakes, the restaurant was built for a social media age that didn’t exist—until now." Why are we telling you about this? Because, and perhaps this isn't news to you, the very first Rainforest Cafe debuted inside Bloomington's Mall of America in 1994.
Emerging from the bygone era of Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania and Hard Rock Cafe, both of which also maintained MOA outposts, Rainforest Cafe has somehow endured, with 16 locations that reportedly persist, at least in part, due to younger generations using it as "a backdrop built for social performativity." (Rainforest Cafe is owned by Landry's, the massive Texas-based hospitality company that also owns Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Joe's Crab Shack, and Houlihan's.) That success is especially remarkable as dine-in chain restaurants struggle to win new customers, though Gentile's reporting is light on hard numbers.
Adds Steven Schussler, the entrepreneur responsible for cooking up the Rain Forest Cafe concept before selling it to Landry's in 2000: “It’s unbelievable. There are a thousand lessons we’re still learning from the Rainforest Cafe.”
