Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
"Let's Find Common Ground With the Guy Who Wants to Bring Back Polio!"
This is more or less the thrust of newish Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Karen Tolkkinen's latest, which the Strib shared on Twitter with the teaser, "Tolkkinen: Raw milk upset my stomach. I would drink it again."
Oh boy. Since Tolkkinen took the role of greater Minnesota columnist last May, we've mostly chosen to quietly shrug at her apparently print-worthy revelation that, "It's easier to live in rural Minnesota when you're white and straight" (some people genuinely might not know!), or her decision to highlight the folks who say they think the old state flag is a "beautiful depiction" of Native culture and local farmers. Two separate columns about the runaway sheep? Sure, why not. We've all had our slow news days.
But to try and find common ground with RFK Jr., a guy who thinks COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, who continues to erroneously link vaccines and autism, who wants to remove fluoride from our drinking water, and who has said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that “100 percent of the people who died—the first thousand who had AIDS—were people who were addicted to poppers," among other outrageous medical theories? Sorry, that guy, who happens to also be a big-time raw milk guy, can go fuck himself. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him.
And "rich and creamy... delectable" raw milk, which Tolkkinen goes to great lengths and uses dubious statistics to defend here, is in fact far less safe than its pasteurized counterpart. “Raw milk can contain a variety of disease-causing pathogens, as demonstrated by numerous scientific studies," per the FDA. "Consuming raw milk can lead to serious health risks, especially for certain vulnerable populations," adds the CDC.
Anyway, for future slow news days, here are some column suggestions from your friends at Racket:
- Tolkkinen: These berries are poisonous... but they taste so good!
- Tolkkinen: What I learned after bashing myself in the head with a hammer.
- Tolkkinen: Why I'm no longer looking both ways before crossing the street.
The Bots Are Hiking Rent
Algorithms: They're not just determining whether you do or don't get into college, determining whether you do or don't get a job, determining whether you receive health care, and sucking the joy out of the music discovery process. They're also costing Twin Cities renters when it comes to rent payments, according to a White House analysis scooped by Axios.
A software company called RealPage has been accused of "pushing landlords to raise rents higher than they would've on their own," according to an August story from Axios's Emily Peck, which is why the Department of Justice has lodged an antitrust suit against the company.
Locally, roughly one in seven rental units in our area relies on rental pricing software from RealPage, according to the White House's latest analysis, costing Twin Cities renters an extra $26 per month on average. Nationally, Axios reports that renters spent an extra $3.8 billion in 2024 thanks to these kinds of pricing algorithms, an average of about $70 per month.
Uh Oh: We're Doing NYT-Meets-MN Food Discourse Again
Well, local chef Ann Kim (Hello Pizza, Pizzeria Lola, Young Joni) was quoted in the New York Times earlier this week, in a story about where you can find great New York slices around the country these days. And she makes some Minnesota-interesting claims about the origins of by-the-slice pizza in the Twin Cities that have folks getting riled up online.
Here's the offending passage from that NYT story:
In 2010, she and her husband, Conrad Leifur, wanted to open a wood-oven, whole-pie restaurant, Pizzeria Lola, and later a slice joint, Hello Pizza. ... At first, many Minnesotans didn’t know what to make of Ms. Kim’s pizza by the slice. “It was a foreign concept,” she said. “People were dumbfounded by the fact that I was putting a slice back in the oven to crisp it up. Customers would ask: ‘Why would you do that? Why are you giving me an old slice?’”
If the quotes and replies on this Wedge LIVE! post are any indication, Minnesotans don't love that version of local pizza history.
"So she’s gonna straight up ignore Mesa in Dinkytown, Slice of New York off Nicollet, Luce, AND Sal’s on Fifth, all of which were doing pizza by the slice well before Hello Pizza came along? That’s quite the revisionist history," says Racket contributor Ali Elabbady, adding that Broder's, which opened in the 1980s, is just a few minutes away.
"I recall getting a credible NY-style slice at Andrea Pizza in…. 2006? A while ago, anyway," says James Norton of the local food website Heavy Table.
"Anthony Sbarro punching his way out of his grave to wreak vengeance on this liar," adds Tom Basgen, of the Italian fast-food chain that has maintained Mall of America and Southdale outposts since the '90s. Others namedrop Duffy's in Dinkytown (RIP), Green Mill, and Cossetta's among those who were slingin' slices well before Kim debuted Hello Pizza 12 years ago.
Now, that New York Times story does say many Minnesotans—not all—and as others have noted, that's probably true of the hoity-toity clientele who frequent Hello Pizza. But what the hell, let's remember some old restaurants! Racket's Jay Boller put the question to the Twin Cities Pie Chasers Facebook group—"What are some other old-school slice shops that predate Hello Pizza?"—and got more than 130 responses, from Nino's Pizzeria to Fat Lorenzo's to Taste of Manhattan.
Sean Sherman to Open New Indigenous BBQ Restaurant and Kitchen
That's enough griping for today, eh? How about some good news! Local chef Sean Sherman of Owamni has announced the purchase of 2601 Franklin Ave. in Minneapolis's Seward neighborhood. The former Seward Co-Op Creamery building will soon house NATIFS Wóyute Thipi, with an Indigenous restaurant called ŠHOTÁ Indigenous BBQ by Owamni and a commissary kitchen.
“We are thrilled to expand in this new direction as we continue to uplift Indigenous food systems and support our community,” Sherman, who's the executive director of NATIFS, says in a Wednesday press release. “This will be the first space we own, and it will truly be the heart of everything we do.”
NATIFS will transfer operations out of its current space at Midtown Global Market, where the Indigenous Food Lab will continue to operate, and into Wóyute Thipi (which means "food building" in Dakota). The building, which is located near the the growing American Indian Cultural Corridor, will also have a flexible coworking space that welcomes Indigenous and other BIPOC entrepreneurs. Look for it to open mid-2025.
