No Nukes

Oregon & California, 
1976-1978

The anti-nuclear movement has been revived by the recent catastrophe in Japan, “putting governments on the defensive and undermining the nuclear power industry’s recent renaissance,” according to the Washington Post.1 Menus from dinners held backstage at two anti-nuclear benefit concerts on the West Coast during the 1970s recall an early phase of the movement. Although the efforts opposing the use of nuclear technologies have been ongoing, one of the ideas about food reflected on these menus has already entered the mainstream of American society.

Dry Monopole by Half a Length

New York City, 1886

Dry Monopole, a small, athletic horse named after a renowned brand of Champagne, is remembered for winning the first stakes race run on turf in the United States. The historic event, fittingly called the Green Grass Stakes, was the sixth and final race at the Sheepshead Bay Race Track on June 10, 1886. Having rained the day before, the new turf track looked like “a great band of soft green velvet.”1 Going off at 6-1 odds, the three-year-old thoroughbred went wire to wire in the field of ten, winning the one-and-an-eighth-mile race in 1:57. In the parlance of future generations of racing fans, Dry Monopole was the “class of the grass.”