Category: Food

Summer 2022 Highway News Roundup

Google Maps Silliness Minnesota has about a hundred legally named highways and bridges, written into law in Minnesota Statute § 161.14. Some of the early ones like the Viking Trail and the Sioux Trail were possibly intended to mark motoring touring routes. But overwhelmingly the highways are named in memory of local politicians, veterans or […]

Replacing the Car: Groceries

My mother would do the shopping once a week, filling her cart and car with groceries. We would dutifully unload and put away all the food we may or may not eat over the next week, as this was just how things were done. As an adult, I kept the same practices. Of course I […]

National Links: Curb Management Costing Cities Billions

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes […]

A Poem for August 27th, 2020

Weep and know Death, Land of Sky Blue Waters. There will be no butter blocks carved of your daughters. Eighteen hundred siblings are already dead. All else holds its breath so The Thing won’t spread. The places you ate, the places you drank, The places you danced and flirted, The places you studied, and the […]

Several branches with dozens of red and green cherries

The Orchard in My Backyard: Urban Fruit Plants

I first saw the trees in the depth of winter, when snow covered everything. They looked like normal, small, trees on a normal, small, city lot. I was excited by the nature surrounding the house I was going to live in, and by the potential of what I could harvest from these trees, vines, and […]

Streets Aldi Grocery

Shopping for Food, and Community, at Aldi

A grocery store arose at the corner of Penn and Lowry in the middle of a federally designated food desert some years ago, but it was no mirage. With healthy foods, organic produce and household items, Aldi is my oasis. The costs stay low through small measures: no fancy displays, no free bags, no piped-in […]

Peach tree with wildflowers

Food and Permanence

Since buying a house in 2017, I’ve been planting trees. As of today, I have added 12 trees and about 37 woody shrubs, many of which are fruit- or nut-bearing. In a few years, these should provide a cornucopia of fresh food for both us and the wildlife. Right now, though, they produce almost nothing. […]