Visitors to Minneapolis might find St Anthony falls a tad uninspiring, and St Anthony himself must be rather upset that his eminent name doesn’t grace something more stately, but this underwhelming kink in the Mississippi river once birthed the largest flour milling operation in the world. Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its waterfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of mills. One of them, the Washburn A Mill, is now a museum. Despite only burning down as recently as 1991, its walls and foundations are put to display as if they were the remains of some Roman ruins. Inside, slick wood and glass paneling meets meet industrial air-vents and scary warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions; this is industrial chic distilled to its essence. Here, you not only learn the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail, you also get to sample freshly made biscuits in the Baking Lab operated by a bona-fide embodiment of Betty Crocker. This is no Isabella Steward Gardner Museum or Lotusland; this is not the whimsy of a wealthy socialite. This is better. This is flour — you know, the stuff croissants are made of.
NOTE: A shortened version of this review was published in The Drift magazine.