True wealth lies in a healthy spirit and body. This truism seems to suggest that wealth is within everyone’s reach. In the United States, however, living a healthy lifestyle can seem like a luxury of the upper and upper-middle classes. Not only do the poor lack monetary wealth, they often do not have the same opportunities to eat as healthily and exercise as regularly as those with higher incomes. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the prevalence of obesity is significantly higher in poor communities than in affluent communities, and higher among African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans than Caucasians.

Chicago’s Englewood community could be described as a “food desert” due to its lack of grocery stores, particularly those that carry fresh produce. This term is usually applied to poor communities where junk food-stocking corner stores are the only source of groceries for miles. But a self-described “urban goddess, a hip hop head, an activist, and a Christian” have come up with a creative approach to a healthy food store hoping not only to eradicate the food desert, but to transform healthy living into an integral part of urban minority culture. Their project, the Graffiti and Grub market, opened on June 19 at 59th and Wentworth. Read the rest of this entry »

In general, Chinese restaurants put little stock in looking good, whatever the quality of the food they serve. Speaking with the sole (and vague) qualification of being Chinese myself, I suspect this is a simple reflection of the utilitarian preferences of Chinese diners, who seem to have an almost calculated disregard for such incidentals as décor, and judge a restaurant ultimately by what its kitchen produces. They are quite at peace feasting on the choicest morsels in the shabbiest surroundings. So it was that upon first entering Lao Shanghai one year ago, observing its white linen tablecloths on dark wooden tables, the generally subdued tones of its rather coherent furnishing scheme, even with muzak on the speakers, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Read the rest of this entry »

Envision this: a creative haven for artists both local and global to come together and encourage the economic growth of a community. A neighborhood place where artists, intellectuals, community activists, students, and visitors can work collaboratively towards creative expression and community building. Marguerite Horberg, drawing on over 20 years of experience with the acclaimed performing arts center HotHouse, hopes to make this lofty vision a reality with Porto Luz, an arts and culture center scheduled to open on Chicago’s South Side within the next year. Through this venture, Horberg plans to show the world a model for responsible economic stimulation of a creative community. Read the rest of this entry »

“To paraphrase Sir Richard Livingstone, ‘The sign of a good university is the number of subjects that it declines to investigate,’” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote in 1953, 24 years after his tenure as the fifth president of the University of Chicago began. What Hutchins meant was that a proper university should be oriented around a few select subjects that have proven essential to social integrity and personal development throughout history. It should do so while ignoring intellectual fads and contrived fields made up to entertain dilettantes or credential lesser talents. Hutchins’s ambitions are signaled elsewhere in his writings: “The university should renounce any ambition to increase the ability of its graduates to acquire external goods…Instead, it should see to it that in the college or in the university itself students might first learn how to deal with ideas. This means an education in disciplines designed to teach the student how to discover, analyze, and utilize ideas. At the same time he should become acquainted with the principal ideas which have directed the activities of mankind. These are to be found in books.” Certain of these books would be “Great,” and they would form the basis for a Common Core Curriculum at Hutchins’s university, a model from which the University of Chicago has regrettably strayed. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s not hard to make this stuff look good,” says filmmaker Mitra Sticklen, pausing in between shots of the bright green kale and collards on display on a stand at the 61st Street Farmers Market. “It’s beautiful stuff—beautiful footage.” The stand belongs to Windy City Harvest, an urban agriculture job training program of the Chicago Botanic Garden and West Side Technical Institute, whose participants Sticklen has been filming since last fall. With the working title “Growing Change,” the film was originally meant to be a ten-minute short documenting one season of the program. During the course of filming, however, Sticklen “realized that there were several stories going on that were inspiring and interesting”—the farmer’s market itself, for instance, as well as a number of other urban agriculture initiatives that have recently sprung up across the city. Now Windy City Harvest is the focus of a demo reel, whose June 5 screening at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center Sticklen hopes will help win her funding for a longer film or television documentary. Read the rest of this entry »

Mundial Cocina Mestiza’s name suggests an Old to New World mezcla, bringing forth images of a mixed family uniting two styles in the kitchen. It serves Mediterranean-Latin fusion fare at its location next to the Pink Line in Pilsen. Decorated in browns and greens, the restaurant’s style is simple and earthy, evoking a sense of home and comfort. However, as the genial staff will inform you, the restaurant’s changing menu strives for a unique combination of ingredients, accenting meals with elements that may pique your interest: for example, one recent evening, almost all options on the dessert menu had some form of chili incorporated into the dish. And yet, each meal brought to the table is more than a standard Spanish dish with an odd fruit mixed in, as all elements are paired together with exciting complementary flavors. With sizable portions and entrees ranging from $15 to $23, this restaurant is a good place to bring close friends or family. Read the rest of this entry »

“It does surprise me,” says Mark Solotroff, “how within genres of music that are underground, confrontational, and aggressive, people can still be closed-minded to other underground, aggressive, dark music.” The Chicago musician and scene veteran hits upon an all-too-common contradiction in musical subcultures, which preach nonconformity while erecting their own rigid aesthetic expectations. Matchitehew Assembly, a two-day festival featuring a range of acoustically vicious performers that “encompass the spectrum of dark sound,” breaks down boundaries by uniting diverse patrons of extreme music under the Co-Prosperity Sphere’s roof. Read the rest of this entry »

Early last winter, Paul Baker realized a long-time dream of bringing a community theater company to Hyde Park. Inspired by his teenage daughter’s passion for theater and the neighborhood’s need for quality theater produced in a spirit of collaboration, Baker hit the streets of Hyde Park, posting yellow flyers emblazoned with an emphatic call-to-arts: “Hyde Park Needs a Community Theater. Do You Agree?” The first meeting for the Hyde Park Community Players drew a dozen Hyde Parkers in spite of what Baker calls the “stupid” choice of timing: January 20, 2009, was Inauguration Day, after all, and a moment of historic importance for many members of the community. Still, the group has retained enough members to put up its first show this week. “An Evening of One Acts,” featuring Irish playwright John M. Synge’s tragedy “Riders to the Sea” and Chekhov’s “The Bear” (a more farcical, if not equally tragic work), goes up at the Experimental Station this Friday. Read the rest of this entry »