In 2012, the trendiest business in the world — the food biz — has gone into overdrive. Suddenly, food trucks are legal, they’re hot, and they’re everywhere.
We’ve all seen the whack of kitchens-on-wheels and pop-up eateries around town this summer, with vendors tweeting locations and crowds of happy eaters calling for more.
Their advent brought an end to that sad, deprived time when an outdated bylaw prevented street-food being sold in Edmonton.
Not that mobile eateries are a new concept. According to FAO (United Nations) figures, 2.5 billion people eat most of their meals from some variation of the movable kitchen, every day of the year.
In North America, the original food truck was probably the chuckwagon, invented by Charles (Chuck?) Goodnight, who owned a sprawling Texas ranch, circa 1830. Chuck, apparently an inventive type, bought himself an army-issued covered wagon in which he installed shelves, a water barrel and a coffee grinder. He stocked it with salt pork and dried beans, flour and molasses, coffee and tea. The menu wasn’t big on variety: pork, beans, biscuits. To announce the where and when of dinner, the cook would bang vigorously on an iron triangle. (To triangle; forerunner of the newer verb, to tweet. Really.)
So here we are, more than a century later, and naturally, reality television has leapt aboard. Eat St. is the current favourite, spawned by The Great Food Truck Race, which aired in 2010. How about those trucky names? Nom Nom Truck, Green Meanie, Bacon Jam, Gorilla Cheese, not to forget El Gastronomo Vagabundo.
Food trucks have had a bad rap, some of it justified. They’ve been called everything from ptomaine trolleys to roach coaches, for reasons too painfully obvious to think about.
Given their popularity in less careful public health jurisdictions than ours, it’s a miracle there aren’t more after-dinner stomach aches. I once spent a solitary winter in China, living on instant noodles and street food. I passed up the fried scorpions, but learned to love the skewers of bright red crabapples deep-fried in faintly rancid oil (it was a beggars/choosers thing).
Day after day, I ate from food trucks, food carts or ingenious coal-fired woks-on-wheels, and I regretted it only once. As my grandma used to say, “First I was afraid I’d die; then I was afraid I wouldn’t.”
I blamed it on mystery meat in pastry, cooked over an old gas barrel in a back alley. After the first nibble I should have known. The lesson: if it tastes that bad, it probably is.
Food trucks are not universally loved. Some people just plain despise the concept, and all they want to see of these culinary conveyances are their tail-lights, fading into the distance.
But the rest of us? We love them. They’re fast, they’re fun, they have a place in our food community. I want one! My fearless prediction? When the definitive history of the kitchen is finally written, food trucks will be out in front.
Judy is looking for a second-hand truck; check her blog, judyink.ca