The fate of Minneapolis' Midtown Global Market—a public food market designed to serve as a community hub—is one of the biggest open questions in Minnesota right now. Here's the back story: Once upon a time, the Sears catalog was how every small-town resident in America got their consumer goods, and Minneapolis was the place where all those orders were filled, in a gigantic building on Lake Street, which at the time was the center of the city's Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran immigrant community.
By the time cell phones came around, all this had changed: The catalog business folded and most of the area's Scandinavian immigrants had either fled to the suburbs or died. The city was left with a building not too much smaller than the Mall of America. So, the city has invested millions to turn the ground floor into the local equivalent of Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, with dozens of immigrant upstart businesses selling everything any urban eater could ever hope for—everything from Lebanese spicy walnut-stuffed eggplants to West African beef curries and roti.
And prepared food isn't the half of it. At Farm in the Market, you can get chickens which were walking around just yesterday, heirloom pork chops as tender as clouds, buckwheat honey by the gallon, and farm-cured hams so inexpensive it seems like you've slipped through a wormhole to 1970s Minnesota. A local produce distributor sells conventionally raised and organic fruit, and there are a handful of specialty ethnic shops where you can pick up live miso or udon noodles, Mexican chiles and tamale presses, and specialty meats. Sounds like paradise, right?
Unfortunately, it seems that fresh chicken livers and eggs that come with the name of the farmer and his phone number written on the package are not as big a draw for the masses as they are for me: The empty hallways at the Midtown Global Market from late afternoon to closing time testify that the place hasn't become the destination it was meant to be.
When I was at the market yesterday, I talked to one of Farm in the Market's owners, Lori Callister, and she told me that the biggest impediment to the market's success seems to be public misperceptions: one, that the area around the market is dangerous (it isn't, though since it's an urban transit hub, there are a lot of non-white people on the streets), and two, that the place is just a really big food court with parking you have to pay for. The free-parking issue is almost impossible to convey to someone who is not from here, but to a Minnesotan, having to put a dollar in a parking meter is roughly equivalent to being mugged. All in all, the place has been a sort of culture-clash, between the best hopes of visionaries and the everyday reality of Minnesotans.
"Some people are uncomfortable with the diversity," Callister told me, sadly. "Some are intimidated. On top of that, it's going to take a lot to change people's shopping patterns." To accommodate people's real-life shopping, in which deli counters loom large, Farm in the Market is planning to expand soon with ready-made salads, cold cuts, and so on. I know I'll be there buying from day one—I just hope I'm not the only one.
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