top ten this week’s

All Things Asparagus

Last week, we were talking up a morel mushroom festival. This week, it’s asparagus! (And soon there will be strawberries and blueberries and cherries too!) The Empire Asparagus Festival is ready to honor the green harbinger of warmer days on Saturday, June 3. Start the day with the KickYer Assparagus 5K fun run/walk at 10am to make room for all the veggie eating to follow. There’s a recipe contest, a children’s magic show, and an “Ode to Asparagus” poetry contest that you won’t want to miss. Food and drink vendors—including Art’s Tavern, Shipwreck Cafe, Right Brain Brewery, and St. Ambrose Cellars—will be slinging asparagus-inspired treats from 12-6pm while festival goers enjoy live music from Deep Water Samba Band, 5th Gear Band, and Andre Villoch. Admission is $5; kids under 16 get in free. Get the details and sign up to run or volunteer here: empirechamber.com/ event/2023-empire-asparagus-festival.

Fishy Fun in Kingsley

Celebrate the world of fly fishing in Kingsley on Saturday, June 3, at Brownson Park. Held from noon to 8pm, the Kingsley Adams Fly Festival will feature fly tying, casting demonstrations and instruction, Au Sable river boats, live music, a microbrew tent, and more. Share fishing stories, shop for fly fishing merchandise, and support the Kingsley Friends of the Library. villageofkingsley.com/ adams-fly-festival

Hey, watch It! Jeopardy! Masters 4

If you didn’t have a chance to watch the competition live, we have good news: All 20 games of the nail-biting Jeopardy! Masters are now available. (Before you watch, let us warn you: Ken Jennings’ clues feel a lot harder in this series than what you normally see at 7:30pm on weekday nights. Don’t feel bad if you’re still mulling long after the contestants buzz in.) This first-of-its-kind spin on the show takes six Jeopardy! champions— James Holzhauer, Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Mattea Roach, Andrew He, and Sam Buttrey—and pits them against one another in a series of roundrobin matches. Eventually, the field is narrowed down to only four—we won’t tell you who makes the cut!—and then again to three folks who head into the finals. Suffice to say, there are some wild wagers, big losses, bigger wins, and a whole bunch of new trivia to store away in your gray matter. Catch all the action streaming now on Hulu.

As the old saying goes, we eat first with our eyes. This week, we’re inviting you to the visual feast of Market 22’s sandwich bar. Opened in 2013, this corner deli and eatery has all the charm of an Up North retreat and more freshly-sliced meats than we can count! Our current obsession is the classic Reuben. Featuring your choice of protein (we love the house-brined corned beef, but you do you), each sandwich begins on Detroit-style rye with a generous stack of cold-cuts or veggie-based tempeh. From there, it’s topped with Swiss cheese, crunchy sauerkraut, and a schmear of homemade Thousand Island dressing, before a quick toast seals the deal. Served with a pickle spear and a side of Better Made potato chips, this decadent handheld tastes even better than it looks. Don’t forget an award-winning Reuben pizza for the road! Sink your teeth into a sandwich at Market 22 in Maple City (497 E. Harbor Hwy). (231) 228-6422, market22mi.com.

6 Pride Month Begins This Weekend

Although Up North Pride of Traverse City now puts on their main Pride celebration in late September—shifting out of the busy summer festival season in northern Michigan—there are still plenty of rainbowfriendly June events on the calendar this month. It all begins with the Pride Carnival on June 3 at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. The free, family-friendly event is held from 11am to 2pm with activities from NoMi nonprofits, tasty local food and beverages, and plenty of carnival-style attractions to explore. If your family has a little extra time that morning, be sure to check out Rainbow Story Time at the Dennos Museum Center starting at 10am, where Wild & Wonder, Brilliant Books, and Miriam Pico team up for 90 minutes of music, stories, and art. Those events are just the beginning; find all of Up North Pride’s June programming by visiting upnorthpride.com/events.

Voted the Best…for Stickers?

Stuff We Love: Gardening for the Greater Good

Green thumbed folks know it’s the heyday of gardening season right now, and that’s certainly the case out at Maple Bay Farm. The property, part of the 452-acre Maple Bay Natural Area, is managed by the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy. Most of us know Maple Bay as a beautiful beach spot, but there’s also a volunteer-run garden on-site, where at least 50 percent of the food grown is donated to local food pantries through a partnership with Food Rescue of Northwest Michigan. In 2022 alone, the garden supplied 3,360 pounds of food to the community! The 2023 planting is underway, with 200 broccoli, 100 cauliflower, 25 honeynut squash, 25 acorn squash, and 150 cabbage in the ground. (Next come the green beans and cucumbers.) The garden is set to provide fresh produce throughout the summer and fall, and they’ve also set goals to have a higher yield, less waste, and even tastier fruits of their labor.

Traverse City won another award? Cue the cheers and groans! But this time around, it wasn’t for our lakes or beaches or restaurants or wineries or the million other attractions in this corner of northern Michigan. Instead, the City of Traverse City topped the charts of the national Clearinghouse Awards—put on by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—for their “I Voted” sticker campaign that ran from 2020-2022. (That’s a new one, right?) Traverse City was one of only three communities across the entire county honored with this EAC award. The campaign included designs from local artists for three sticker

Leelanau Bottling Company out of Suttons Bay is bringing Michigan-made cherry drinks to the beverage aisle sans alcohol and sans icky ingredients. We found ourselves looking for something refreshing on a warm spring evening, and their Cherry Unsweet Tea hit the spot and then some. This beauty has only two ingredients, but it’s packed with flavor. Black tea leaves are brewed with tart cherry concentrate…and that’s it. Short and sweet and with no added sugars. (So we finished our first bottle and then had another!) The company also offers other flavors, like Cherry Limeade, Cherry Lemonade, Cherry Half & Half (aka a cherry Arnold Palmer made with lemonade and iced tea), and a cane-sugar sweetened version of the cherry tea. We found ours at the Mountain Market at Crystal Mountain, and you can snag a bottle from a location near you using Leelanau Bottling Company’s handy “Find Us!” tool: drinkleelanau.com/pages/find-us.

REPARATIONS WON’T REPAIR MUCH

spectator

By Stephen Tuttle

Reparations for Black Americans is an idea as old as the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery in 1865. General William Sherman wanted to appropriate 400,000 acres of former slave owners’ land and, with Field Order 15, provide former slave families with 40 acres of “tillable” land.

(There was no mention of a mule in Sherman’s order, but when many former slaves were given an army mule, the order came to be known as “40 acres and a mule.”)

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, new President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15, and former slaves received nothing. Reparations have been discussed ever since.

California is the first state to seriously address the issue and the first to include some version of a price tag. Their Reparations Task Force has made a series of preliminary recommendations, including a one-time payment of slightly more than $1 million to any person who can establish they’ve lived in California for at least six months and can prove they are a direct descendant of slaves or free Black people. They also recommend a new government agency to validate and then process and administer claims, new anti-racist government programs, several policy changes, and a long list of necessary apologies.

The Task Force estimates the total cost will be about $800 billion, which is quite a stretch for a state already wrestling with a $32 billion deficit.

That’s not quite enough for folks in San Francisco discussing their own reparations program. They’re recommending $5 million per local Black resident—plus a guaranteed annual income, plus a house for $1, plus no tax obligations—a plan some estimate would cost the cashstrapped city $100 billion, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Why is California leading the reparations discussions? After all, they were admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850. Unfortunately, they didn’t much act like a free state. They enacted no laws protecting Black citizens and enforced the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to grab any of their “property” that had managed to escape. Their first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, was a white supremacist who had grown up in a slaveowning family in Missouri and brought the same attitude with him to California.

But reparations are a slippery slope for California. According to the 2020 census, only five percent of their population is Black, while 39 percent are Latino, 35 percent are white, and 15 percent are

Asian/Pacific Islanders.

We’ve already paid some reparations to Japanese Americans and their descendants for the outrageous and wholly unconstitutional World War II internment of American citizens of Japanese descent. But California has not addressed their treatment of Chinese laborers. The U.S. gladly employed them in the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the mines and in building railroad lines but then discarded them almost entirely.

Laws prevented them from becoming citizens, from owning land or property, and, in 1858, the California legislature passed laws making it illegal for anyone of Chinese or Mongolian ancestry to immigrate to or live in the state. The practical result was it became illegal to even be a Chinese person. California’s state supreme court struck down those laws in 1862, but it was a little late by then. There are also indigenous tribes whose land was taken and then Spanish-speaking people, mostly from Mexico, who were given large land grants only to have them usurped by English-speaking gold rushers and others. Black Americans aren’t the only group in California intentionally disadvantaged over time.

California’s recommendations are peanuts compared to federal reparations suggested by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo) and others. They’d like the feds to compensate Black Americans not just for slavery but also for Jim Crow laws that led to discrimination in housing, voting rights, unfair policing, and racially-based laws, and sentencing disparities. Bush and her congressional allies figure something around $14 trillion should do the trick.

Reparations, if we could afford them, will financially help some who have been intentionally marginalized since our country was born, but they won’t repair or end racism.

The latest example of how far we have to go comes to us from Florida, where the first African slaves were brought to North America in 1526. Florida still celebrates Confederate History Month, and, according to ABC 7 Southwest Florida, a pro-Confederacy teacher at Manatee Middle School in Collier County created and narrated his own video extolling the “...countless sacrifices by our men and women during that known as the Civil War but may be more correctly titled the War to Prevent Southern Independence...” He also taught about “slavery and property rights,” and bemoaned a “variety of violations of state’s rights and sovereignty...”

The school district said the video violated no policies. And the beat goes on.