Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love 0262036576, 2016057884, 9780262036573, 9780262534079

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Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice

Food, Health, and the Environment Series Editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College Keith Douglass Warner, Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative Agriculture through Social Networks Christopher M. Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen R. Gliessman, David Goodman, and Jonathan A. Fox, eds., Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America Thomas A. Lyson, G. W. Stevenson, and Rick Welsh, eds., Food and the Mid-Level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle Jennifer Clapp and Doris Fuchs, eds., Corporate Power in Global Agrifood Governance Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice Jill Lindsey Harrison, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, eds., Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability Abby Kinchy, Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi, Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, and Jennifer Sokolove, California Cuisine and Just Food Brian K. Obach, Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States Andrew Fisher, Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and AntiHunger Groups Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel, eds., Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love

Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice From Loncheras to Lobsta Love

Edited by Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Sans Std and ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Agyeman, Julian, editor. | Matthews, Caitlin, 1952- editor. | Sobel, Hannah, editor. Title: Food trucks, cultural identity, and social justice : from loncheras to lobsta love / edited by Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel. Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Series: Food, health, and the environment | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016057884| ISBN 9780262036573 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780262534079 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Food trucks--United States. | Food trucks--Canada. | Street vendors-Law and legislation--United States. | Street vendors--Law and legislation--Canada. | Social justice--United States. | Social justice--Canada. Classification: LCC TX360.U6 F76 2017 | DDC 647.95--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057884 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Foreword  vii Acknowledgments   ix 1 Introduction  1 Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel I

Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices  21

2

Relaxing Regulatory Controls: Vendor Advocacy and Rights in Mobile Food Vending  23 Ginette Wessel

3

Decriminalize Street Vending: Reform and Social Justice  47 Kathleen Dunn

4

To Serve and to Protect: Food Trucks and Food Safety in a Transforming Los Angeles  67 Mark Vallianatos

5

Stuck in Park: New York City’s War on Food Trucks  87 Sean Basinski, Matthew Shapiro, and Alfonso Morales

6

Learning from New Orleans: Will Revising or Relaxing Public Space Ordinances Create a Just Environment for Street Commerce?  109 Renia Ehrenfeucht and Ana Croegaert

7

From Hippie to Hip: City Governance and Two Eras of Street Vending in Vancouver, Canada  129 Amy Hanser

8

Reflexive Food Truck Justice: A Case Study in CLiCK, Inc., a Nonprofit, Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen  149 Phoebe Godfrey

vi Contents

II

Spatial-Cultural Practices  167

9

The Spatial Practices of Food Trucks  169 Robert Lemon

10 Eating in the City: Fidel Gastro, Street Performance, and the Right to the City  189 Edward Whittall 11 Why Local Regulations May Matter Less Than We Think: Street Vending in Chicago and in Durham, North Carolina  207 Nina Martin 12 Breach, Bridgehead, or Trojan Horse? An Exploration of the Role of Food Trucks in Montreal’s Changing Foodscape  225 Alan Nash 13 Scripting the City: Street Food, Urban Policy, and Neoliberal Redevelopment in Vancouver, Canada  243 Lenore Lauri Newman and Katherine Alexandra Newman 14 Atlanta’s Food Truck Fervor: Policy Impediments and Entrepreneurial Efforts to Expand Mobile Cuisine  263 Mackenzie Wood, Jennifer Clark, and Emma French 15 Is It Local ... or Authentic and Exotic? Ethnic Food Carts and Gastropolitan Habitus on Portland’s Eastside  285 Nathan McClintock, Alex Novie, and Matthew Gebhardt Reflections  311 Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel List of Contributors  317 Index  319

Series Foreword

Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love is the thirteenth book in the Food, Health, and the Environment series. The series explores the global and local dimensions of food systems and issues of access; social, environmental, and food justice; and community wellbeing. Books in the series focus on how and where food is grown, manufactured, distributed, sold, and consumed. They also address questions of power and control, social movements and organizing strategies, and the health, environmental, social, and economic factors embedded in foodsystem choices and outcomes. As this book demonstrates, focus is not only on food security and well-being but also on economic, political, and cultural factors and on regional, state, national, and international policy decisions. Food, Health, and the Environment books therefore provide a window into the public debates, alternative and existing discourses, and multidisciplinary perspectives that have made food systems and their connections to health and the environment critically important subjects of study and subjects to consider for social and policy change.   Robert Gottlieb, Occidental College Series Editor ([email protected])

Acknowledgments

Julian would like to thank all the chapter authors for their enthusiasm, insights, and dedication to making this book happen. Your perspectives helped us both to better frame our arguments and to organize the book. I would like to thank all at MIT Press with whom this is my sixth publication, and my coeditors Caitlin and Hannah. In the past, my students have been researchers in my books, visible only in the acknowledgments, but this time they’re outstanding coeditors. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Lissette, her mother, Mami Mili, and our daughter, Nairobi, for expanding my culinary horizons to the delights of sancocho, mondongo, and pasteles. Caitlin would like to give thanks to her coeditors Julian and Hannah for the invitation to be part of this project, for their good communication, and for sharing the load; to the chapter authors for their intellectual contributions to this collection, as well as for their patience, persistence, and responsiveness during the rounds of writing, feedback, and editing; and to the MIT Press editors and anonymous reviewers with whom it has been a pleasure to work and from whom I have learned a great deal about the publication process. Above all, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends for their unwavering support of my many and varied pursuits. Thank you for helping me to find balance while going to graduate school and working on all too many projects. Hannah gives thanks to her coeditors Julian, for his guidance and agreement that food trucks and social justice was a worthy research topic, and to Caitlin, for her enviable work ethic and organization; to the chapter authors, for their remarkable insight and perspectives; and to the MIT Press, for making the publication process feel effortless. I want to thank the City of Boston’s Office of Food Initiatives for hiring me as an intern so many years ago and thus introducing me to the world of food truck policy. Last, I am grateful for my family and friends for their curiosity about and support of my endeavors.

1 Introduction Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel

Food trucks are magical urbanism on four wheels. —Mark Vallianatos, chapter 4

The urban foodscape is changing rapidly. There are fish tacos, vegan cupcakes, gourmet pizzas, and barbeque ribs, all served from the confines of cramped, idling, and often garishly painted trucks. These food trucks,1 part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending or street foods (Tinker 1997), are common in the Global South but also are becoming increasingly common sights in many cities, towns, and universities throughout the United States and Canada—the focus of this book. Within the past few years, urban dwellers—from creative class gourmands to late-night revelers, from savvy and cost-sensitive tourists to office lunch groups, from construction workers to school children—have flocked to these new businesses on wheels to get their fix of food that is inventive, authentic, and often inexpensive. In some US cities, like Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, however, mobile food vending is less of a recent phenomenon. In Los Angeles, the Latino/a immigrant diaspora brought with it the street food traditions of many countries, in the form of food trucks known as loncheras. Meanwhile, the relaxed permitting processes in Portland, Oregon, have allowed for a storied history of street food vending, which has now become a firm fixture of the city’s renowned hipster gastro-tourist experience. Collectively and at street level, these trucks are indeed “magical urbanism on four wheels,” a powerful affirmation of “pop-up urbanism” and of cultural placemaking. These and other postmodern, cultural identity forming qualities that this book will highlight are part of what is unique about food trucks as businesses in the city. A lot of attention is placed on the cultural and physical presence of food trucks in the urban foodscape, but how does their growing presence differ from and change the role of traditional

2 

Chapter 1

catering businesses, which were once solely responsible for hip food at corporate and cultural events, or the role of immigrants renting a brickand-mortar storefront to open a restaurant, a very long-standing trope in most cities? Unlike other food businesses, food trucks are uniquely situated to have their cultural placemaking either associated with or at odds with social justice, immigration, and governance, as the chapters in this book will reveal. Government, Regulation, and Food Trucks As part of the global shift toward more deregulated economies driven by neoliberal ideologies, the key issue of regulatory conflicts between the state and street food vending and food truck entrepreneurs and the wider industry as a whole has risen to the fore (Harvey 2005, 2–3). Studies now abound in areas such as neoliberalization and urban policy and planning (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Purcell 2008; Martin 2014); notions of formality and informality (Devlin 2010; Davis 2014; chapters 7, 9, and 10); immigration status, racial bias, criminalization, and policing (chapters 3, 4, and 6); placemaking and the spatial politics of food (chapters 2, 3, 9, 10, and 11); city branding (chapters 12 and 13) and the cultural politics of food (Hernández-López 2011); immigration, segregation, organizing, and mobility (Bhimji 2010; Hernández-López 2011; Milkman and Terriquez 2012); and the role(s) of local food systems and, by extension, food trucks in “ecological” gentrification and displacement (Deener 2007; Dooling 2008; Zukin et al. 2009; Lloyd 2010; Checker 2011; Cadji and Alkon 2014; Anguelovski 2016). However, these regulatory conflicts are not spatially distributed evenly across or within cities and towns in the United States and Canada. The distribution depends on many factors, including local political affiliations and aspirations. Conflicts can depend on racial, ethnic, and power dynamics, which in the United States especially have come to the fore in the shape of both the Black Lives Matter movement that developed after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin and the hashtag #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner that emerged in 2016 after Marco Gutierrez, founder of Latinos for Trump, claimed on MSNBC that his culture was “dominant” and “imposing” and that failure to act would result in “taco trucks on every corner.” In these and other ways, food trucks are implicated in many of what Omi and Winant (1994) call racial projects, political and economic undertakings through which racial hierarchies are established and racialized subjectivities created.

Introduction 3

The unequal political-economic benefits of “entrepreneurialism” to working-class and immigrant communities on one hand and creative class entrepreneurs on the other can generate conflicts between these two communities. Indeed, there is abundant evidence of differential treatment by local politicians and their enforcement personnel based on whether vendors are perceived as creative-class, hip, entrepreneurial trucksters or as illegitimate, immigrant2 hucksters: The streets of the post-industrial complex are policed as a border for immigrant vendors, and are pioneered as a frontier by native-born food truck owners. Yet criminalization has produced street vendor solidarities, evidenced in a growing street labor movement amongst immigrant vendors in New York. Like most vendor organizations across the Global South, two immigrant street vendor worker centers in New York press the municipal government to uphold vendors’ right to the city. In contrast, the city’s native-born food truck owners have established a business association not to achieve social justice but to increase profitability. Post-industrial urban governance thus deepens inequalities within the informal economy while spurring new movements to claim the enduring resource of urban public space. (Dunn 2013, v)

This bifurcation and discrimination by public authorities with concomitant, differential organizing strategies and solidarities among trucksters and hucksters, together with the ways street food vending and food trucks are challenging the distinction between public and private spaces, means food trucks are garnering increasing attention among academics, activists, urban planners, and policymakers alike. Immigration laws in this way are acting as racial projects in that they and the public authorities define who is a legitimate subject deserving of privilege and who is regarded as an alien other. In addition, much attention has been paid to street food vending and food trucks in discussions of community economic development (CED) (National League of Cities 2013) and cultural identity formation (Douglass 1996; Bell and Valentine 1997; Gabaccia 2000; Anguelovski 2014; Agyeman 2013). The relatively low start-up costs of food trucks compared with brickand-mortar restaurants produce a business model more accessible to people of diverse backgrounds and socioeconomic status. Moreover, because food is an essential element of cultural identity formation, food may be even more important for marginalized groups (e.g., recent immigrants and minorities). Such groups can use food to both navigate and negotiate their cultural marginality (Agyeman 2013) and create “place” through autotopographies—a type of placemaking operating through the growth and celebration of culturally appropriate foods (Mares and Peña 2011), in effect

4 

Chapter 1

a cultural and community inscription on the cityscape. The links between cultural identity formation and social justice are not well researched in this context, and we hope this book stimulates further consideration of the interrelation between the two topics. As the earlier quote from Dunn 2013 shows, there has been a difficult relationship between certain mobile food vending enterprises and municipal governments. There is clearly nothing particularly unreasonable about all vendors, mobile and stationary, being required to meet basic health codes, labor laws, traffic safety, insurance regulations, and wastemanagement plans. Indeed, in this sense, city regulators are doing exactly what they are tasked with, and street food vendors should have to play by the same rules as brick-and-mortar restaurants. However, there is a clear distinction between these kinds of routine regulations and the more clearly obtrusive rules about competition that should be made explicit by states and/or municipalities. It is less clear, however, why reasonable laws for health codes and so forth sometimes are enforced unfairly or in a discriminatory manner. Food Trucks and Social Justice Despite some of the preceding observations, growing consumer demand for street food and food trucks ensures that many cities are now taking steps to (re)assess their foodscapes and embrace the street food trend. Cities that are working to develop progressive food policies would therefore do well to acknowledge the associations between street food and food trucks and cultural identity in all its forms, as well as their relationship with social justice. More inclusive policies, as the chapters ahead will show, can create space for the expression of cultural identity; the visibility and legitimacy of one’s culinary business is, by extension, visibility and legitimacy for oneself. Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice, which represents an early stage of research, assesses the limitations and potentials of mobile food vending to positively affect cultural identity formation and, ultimately, social justice. We asked our contributing authors the following questions: “What are the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion of mobile food vending? How might these motivations connect to the broad goals of social justice?” In practice, we want to know how the adoption of CED and/or an entrepreneurial-empowerment framework for mobile food vending can be a vehicle for increasing social justice. Just as there are many incarnations of mobile food vending, there are many interpretations of the term social justice. We deliberately left it to the

Introduction 5

authors to signify what they interpreted social justice to mean. We felt this to be fair, because some saw it as a fulfillment of the American Dream: the right to own a food truck and the ensuing economic success that it might bring. Others interpreted it more as the ability of racially, culturally, and ethnically segregated communities to enact some form of spatial justice: the manipulation and ultimately control of urban spaces. Still others saw it as freedom from criminalization. Whichever interpretations our authors adopted, we wanted to know which policies and/or programming might support or impede this goal. We argue that cultural identity formation and CED are two possible frameworks through which we can identify and ultimately foreground social justice in policy and practice. We therefore first describe these two frameworks before explaining how food trucks—as uniquely postmodern phenomena—are situated to be a potential route to increased social justice in any city that both recognizes and acts upon this potential. Food and Cultural Identity Formation Food is an essential element of both individual and cultural identity formation (Fischler 1988). The links between food and cultural identity are fundamental, diverse, and a growing area of research interest. Beoku-Betts (1995) notes that although food preparation can reveal gender inequality and subordination, in certain circumstances it can also promote resistance and strengthen cultural identity for marginalized groups, the culture of which is threatened by dominant cultures. Similarly, Hernández-López (2011) uses Bourdieu’s argument that taste is defined by those in power to posit that food trucks undermine the power structure by asserting nondominant tastes (“nongourmet”). In a different vein, looking at the conflict between cultural identity formation and the law, Minkoff-Zern et al. (2011) investigated the cultural standard of labor reciprocity among Hmong families in Californian agriculture, which entails that labor and in-kind services are shared among extended family groups. This practice runs counter to California labor laws that require farms to have workers’ compensation insurance. Different still, Bhimji’s (2010) work in Los Angeles shows that street vendors’ shared experiences and struggles create a sense of citizenship and belonging in streets that are otherwise dominated by cars (see also Vallianatos 2014). Food trucks serve traditional foods while people stop and gather around the truck. This pop-up placemaking in the city simultaneously creates a place that is of rights-claiming and belonging, perhaps more so than the

6 

Chapter 1

nation-state is. In this way, we would argue that pop-up placemaking fits into de Certeau’s (1984) notion of being a tactic of everyday life, while rights-claiming can be seen as a part of a wider expression of a Right to the City in the sense of Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), Mitchell (2003), and Harvey (2008; see also our discussion of postmodernism ahead). In these and many more ways, culture, cultural association, and cultural identity formation create a complex web, intersecting and overlapping. Although it is common knowledge that cuisine is culturally related, anthropological studies affirm that food choices are shaped by individual, cultural, historical, social, and economic influences (Koc and Welsh 2001). However, cultural or personal identity is not fixed, because “culture is predicated on difference and on otherness and is a complex, dynamic, and embodied set of realities in which people (re)create identities, meanings, and values” (Agyeman and Erickson 2012, 359). With this understanding, food choices are not insignificant. Because identity is fluid rather than fixed, it influences people’s daily choices in how they construct themselves in relation to otherness (Koc and Welsh 2001). Food is therefore an especially important opportunity for daily choice that marginalized groups can use to navigate and negotiate their otherness and thus develop community and individual cultural identity. As it relates more specifically to food businesses, food can be a means of cultural communication. As Slocum notes, “eating ethnically cannot be completely written off as ‘liberal pretense’ because culinary connections have the potential to show people the stakes involved in eating” (Slocum 2007, 10). Thus, even the “fusion” cuisines of modern food trucks are lessons in cultural navigation and negotiation; they represent the blending and creation of new identities. As will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4, the history of Los Angeles’s loncheras in particular shows how these street food vending enterprises served as tools for building and supporting marginalized communities and for supporting individuals’ entry into these communities. If cities can recognize and effectively support this sort of cultural identity formation through municipal street food/food truck policy and programming, then perhaps they can also contribute to the goals of greater social justice. However, we must be cautious not to relish foods alone while the people preparing and presenting those foods continue to be excluded from the food truck landscape. Certainly, there are cases in which foods from nondominant cultures rise in popularity and become mainstreamed into the food scene—in “pure” or fusion forms—and the communities to whom these foods belong remain invisible, marginalized, and regulated (Tam 2015). If

Introduction 7

and when not only the food but also the people who are the originators of these foods are legitimized, made visible, and ultimately recognized, then food trucks can become a more inclusive space for “recognizing people’s membership of the moral and political community, as well as providing for the capabilities needed for their functioning and flourishing, and ensuring their inclusion in political-decision making” (Agyeman 2013, 39). Food Trucks and Community Economic Development Another way in which street food/food trucks can potentially contribute to the goals of social justice is through strategies of CED, an entrepreneurialempowerment and economic development strategy that aims to improve the quality of life and economic position of community members. CED is primarily concerned with who benefits from economic development efforts. It is commonly associated with social justice through its tendency to focus on disadvantaged communities, with “solutions ... rooted in local knowledge and led by community members” (Barringer 2012). In our research into CED frameworks, we learned of the Neechi Foods Worker Co-op in Manitoba, Canada, the guiding principles of which align particularly well with the wider goals of CED (see table 1.1). Considering that economic development is commonly cited by municipalities in support of food trucks (National League of Cities 2013), we began to wonder if any of the Neechi co-op’s CED guiding principles were aligned with motivating factors behind food truck development. If so, then there Table 1.1 CED guiding principles, Neechi Foods Worker Co-op 1

Use of locally produced goods and services

2

Production of goods and services for local use

3

Local reinvestment of profits

4

Long-term employment of local residents

5

Local skill development

6

Local decision-making

7

Public health

8

Physical environment

9

Neighborhood stability

10

Human dignity

11

Support for other CED initiatives

8 

Chapter 1

are social justice implications (perhaps implicit rather than explicit) of food trucks as CED strategies. To analyze street food/food truck policy and programming parallel with CED criteria necessitates defining more specific questions. First, a discussion of social justice would be incomplete without mentioning issues of race. Slocum (2007) and others (see Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Guthman 2008a, 2008b; Slocum and Cadieux 2015; Cadieux and Slocum 2015) warn that whiteness can potentially interfere with community food projects— that the “presence of people of colour in white food spaces and their interest in alternative food practice does not make community food less white” (Slocum 2007, 2). Does the involvement of white people, either as the operators of “gourmet” food trucks or as municipal bureaucrats, insert too much whiteness into street food and thus reduce its potential as a vehicle for increasing social justice? Aside from race, another important issue for social justice is power. The analysis of informal food economies from Cross (2000) looks at the role of power in defining economic activity. He notes that the “distinction between ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ economic behavior is not a matter of laws or rules, but of definition, motives, and power” (32). Although Cross speaks to the difficulty of defining the informal economy, this argument also attests to the importance of determining who benefits from CED: Who is really in power? Whoever has the power to determine the direction and extent of economic activity is going to have the most control over who benefits from it. Finally, at its most basic, CED is concerned with wealth. Therefore, we must ask if food trucks are a component of the food system that makes a contribution to local wealth in a sustainable way. Borrowing from the Oakland Food Retail Impact Study (Laurison and Young 2009), we ask: Do food trucks represent business practices that contribute to community wellbeing? Do food trucks create good jobs for neighborhood residents and throughout the supply chain? How can food trucks contribute to a healthy, clean environment? Food Truck Policy and Postmodernism To explain why street food/food trucks provide a unique opportunity for achieving greater social justice is to understand food trucks as uniquely postmodern phenomenon. Postmodernism fits into a discussion of social justice because the conditions and challenges of postmodernism mirror those of social justice. Postmodernism is characterized by the blending of

Introduction 9

modes and uses as well as the undermining and decentering of authority and traditional sources of knowledge. Postmodern planning entails the “demise of ... large-scale, comprehensive, and integrated planning models ... for metropolitan regions” (Harvey 1989, 40). In her exploration of Ellin’s (1999) concept of postmodern urbanism and Allmendinger’s (2001) study of “planning in postmodern times” (27), Hirt (2005) notes that in the shift toward postmodernism in urban planning there is “a growing interest in participatory planning (in lieu of the former dominance of rational planning performed by valuefree experts)” and “a search for urbanity, urban identity, and cultural uniqueness (in lieu of the former focus on functionalism, efficiency, and rational organization of urban forms)” (27). Although we agree with Hirt in broad measure, we see a more fluid, messy, and hybrid notion of identity and culture as being the true indicator of postmodernism, as argued previously. Pop-up urbanism, postmodern urbanism at its finest, is but one example of an expression of Lefebvre’s Right to the City, and it simultaneously illustrates Michel de Certeau’s notions of spatial practice and everyday life. The appropriation of sidewalks, streets, and parking lots as places of business or cultural expression similarly challenges modernist modes of governance and urban planning and policymaking that call for orderliness and authoritative zoning. Food trucks are also a postmodern phenomenon from the consumer’s perspective. They are popular due in part to their rebelliousness and informal imagery. This element reflects the fact that “postmodernism ... is concerned first and foremost with the individual’s attempt to regain control over their lives—control that is lost in today’s society of massproduction factories and corporate offices” (Cross 2000, 41). Moreover, the trends associated with food trucks—hybrid and fusion cuisine, interest in food sourcing, the gourmetifying of street food—all reflect postmodernism’s messiness, its mixing of high and low culture and its challenge to traditional and corporate hegemony. Hybridity and mixing are perhaps most famously exemplified by Chef Roy Choi’s Korean BBQ tacos from Kogi Truck that became “LA in a meal” (see chapter 4). This intercultural mixing showed that food truck cuisine could be seen as a microcosm of, and a portal through which to view, the City of Angels. In terms of urban planning, this relates to the postmodern themes of the “collage city” (Harvey 1989, 40) and Anderson’s (2011) “cosmopolitan canopy.” Needless to say, the relationship between mobile food vending and municipal governments has sometimes had a difficult history. Some municipal governments have created incoherent and biased

10 

Chapter 1

policy environments in which they have differentially criminalized forms of vending based on race, immigration status, and geographic categories— but we must also acknowledge, as do our chapter authors, that there are supportive and permissive municipalities too. At their worst, sometimes in ways detrimental to mobile vendors, municipalities work in direct collusion with real estate and developer interests. At their best, municipalities such as Portland, Oregon, have a more supportive, permissive approach. The city’s food carts are praised for “their interesting and often innovative cuisine” as well as “their strong association with the unique culture of the city and the vibrant urban spaces they create” (Newman and Burnett 2013, 237). Los Angeles’s food truck controversies are based on the conflict between the older loncheras and the newer gourmet food trucks, but in other cities, like Chicago, brick-and-mortar restaurants have argued that food trucks have gained an unfair competitive advantage by vending on public space in city streets. There are significant differences in the capitalization and kinds of power that can be mobilized between a Zagat-rated or Michelin-starred restaurant and a small storefront taquería. The former restaurants perhaps have a more serious grievance if they are paying rising urban rents and taxes as well as the costs of permits, health, and labor codes while a food truck parked in front of their establishment is not. Although they differ in the details, each food truck controversy is essentially a turf war. Food trucks exacerbate “normal” food business competition by adding an entirely new element to the equation: the use of public space for private business operation. This conflict over public space usage reflects the antiauthoritarian role of postmodern governance, through which planning embraces both Jane Jacobs’s pluralism (Harvey 1989, 40) and Jacques Derrida’s (1976) différence to create cultural meaning. Overview We have now outlined several tensions and opportunities in terms of food trucks, government and regulation, social justice, cultural identity formation, community economic development, and finally postmodernism. Now, we will move into an overview of the chapters submitted by our authors. In Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice, we offer a variety of perspectives from across the United States and Canada on our guiding questions: “What are the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion of mobile food vending? How might these motivations connect to the broad goals of social justice?” The cities represented in the chapters range from Montreal to New Orleans, from Durham to Los Angeles; they are written

Introduction 11

by contributors who are practitioners and/or academics from diverse fields. The book is divided into two parts, grouping the chapters into emerging themes in food truck scholarship. Part I: Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices Part I, “Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices,” presents analyses of the politics and the policies behind street food vending and food truck operations. The political processes surrounding food trucks defy the usual top-down versus bottom-up policymaking framework. Instead, we see that it is more often the case that cities respond reactively to democratic, bottom-up actions with either a welcoming or confrontational approach, depending on numerous factors ranging from the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic background of food truck operators to a city’s ambition to renovate its image. Often but not always related, regulation is also not applied or enforced uniformly, creating many instances of discriminatory municipal practices. This section opens with Wessel’s overview of food truck policy (chapter 2). Her analysis outlines the competing interests that have characterized the evolution of food truck policy in the United States. Employing de Certeau’s concepts of strategies and tactics, Wessel shows how power is an important factor for determining how competing interests are able to shape food trucks. She presents three cases to illustrate formal policy applications and their contestations: spatial proximity bans around schools in California, restaurant protectionism in Los Angeles, and public health and safety codes in Charlotte, North Carolina. Wessel contends that when food truck vendors define their rights through bottom-up advocacy, the conflicts that emerge from rigid “one size fits all” policy approaches can eventually create more just and practical policy resolutions. In the following chapters, both Dunn (chapter 3) and Vallianatos (chapter 4) begin with important insights on the stratified nature of the food truck industry by commenting on the ways that the industry is criminalized. Dunn’s analysis is of New York City’s complicated and undemocratic policy system in its entirety, whereas Vallianatos narrows in on the food health and safety regulations in Los Angeles. Dunn describes how police presence in New York City is a significant factor in discriminatory policy implementation. Although both low-income, immigrant huckster vendors and modern “gourmet” food trucksters face enforcement through fines, the latter group experiences enforcement as a deterrent, while the former experiences it as criminalization. Dunn argues that both the complexity of New York’s regulations and the use of

12 

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police to enforce them are significant barriers to the broad goal of social justice. Vallianatos details how food health and safety regulation in Los Angeles is the formal mechanism used to police and criminalize food trucks—which, like the situation in New York, affects immigrant-run loncheras and gourmet food trucks differently. The depictions of the industry’s dichotomy between low-income/immigrant and gourmet food truck operators in both chapters importantly illustrate how policy implementation is in turn bifurcated and discriminatory. The consequences of these double standards can be dire. Basinski, Shapiro, and Morales’s (chapter 5) tale of one immigrant food truck vendor’s legal battles in New York City becomes more than a story about right to entrepreneurship; it is also a matter of rights to active citizenship, livelihood, and community well-being. The Street Vendor Project (SVP), an advocacy organization mentioned in chapter 3, plays a prominent supporting role in this case study. Although SVP’s efforts are extensive, the lesson taken from New York City is that social justice for food trucks requires a greater overhaul of formal regulation mechanisms and enforcement. While municipal food truck policies struggle to fuse democratic, bottomup initiative with legitimate regulatory needs, often unwittingly at the expense of the industry they want to support, other regulatory mechanisms are at best merely ineffective and out of touch. Ehrenfeucht and Croegaert (chapter 6) make a comparison between New Orleans’s newer regulations, designed to facilitate food trucks, and regulations designed to limit the street vending that occurs in second line parades. After providing an overview discussion of how food truck policy is often created haphazardly, rendering many regulations too restrictive for vending to occur, Ehrenfeucht and Croegaert then turn their attention to the second line parades. Regulations for the parades are similarly highly restrictive and complaintdriven, resulting in the parades’ street vendors operating outside the law. Second line vending therefore serves as a cautionary tale for overly restrictive and ineffective regulations that are no match for social traditions and entrepreneurial spirit. Next, Hanser (chapter 7) chronicles and criticizes how changing regulations in Vancouver, British Columbia, have responded to political and public opinion about if and how street vending should occur. “Hippie” street vendors thrived in the 1970s because of relaxed regulations, but their presence drew political and public concerns over disorderly streetscapes and ultimately precipitated stricter regulations. In contrast, political and public enthusiasm for food trucks in the early 2000s created formalized policies to encourage their operation. Street vending regulations for food trucks meant

Introduction 13

that the aura of creativity and marginality created by the hippie vendors endured, albeit in a different and formalized environment. Hanser contends that social and political contexts shaped Vancouver’s attitude toward street vending, ultimately creating what is today a highly regulated and formalized vending environment. Godfrey’s (chapter 8) account of a food truck incubator organization, CLiCK (Commercially Licensed Cooperative Kitchen), in the small, diverse town of Willimantic, Connecticut, concludes part I. Godfrey, CLicK’s cofounder, offers an insider’s view into the intentions behind a food truck advocacy and services organization. In founding CLiCK, Godfrey was conscious of racial, social, economic, and legal barriers, as well as how these injustices fit into the larger discourse of local food. Godfrey applies a “reflexively local” approach to assess the successes and challenges of her organization. This reflexive approach allows Godfrey to highlight processes and contradictions without necessarily problematizing them. CLiCK’s case study can be used as a model for other food truck incubator organizations working toward “situated” social justice. In addition, this case study underscores the need and opportunity for nonprofit organizations to help emerging food truck businesses navigate regulatory terrains. Part II: Spatial-Cultural Practices In part II, “Spatial-Cultural Practices,” the authors utilize semiotic frameworks for discussing the spatial and cultural effects of how, where, and what food is served. Themes of personal and cultural identity intersect with patterns of eating and spatial mobility. As in part I, in which regulations were shown to be variously and differently enforced along a continuum of vendor identity and citizenship, part II shows that a similar continuum of food truck operators’ languages, identities, and citizenship(s) predicts movements in public spaces and how operators interact with and serve the public. Part II begins with an analysis of one food truck in Columbus, Ohio. While deconstructing the truck’s Mexican menu offerings and the cultural identities of the mixed-ethnicity couple who own and operate the truck (African American and Mexican), Lemon (chapter 9) describes how the truck straddles two socio- and spatial-cultural positions and practices. The operators’ Mexican-American citizenship also provides a lens on citizenship in Columbus itself: The truck’s operations reflect the city’s two parallel yet separate demographics, food and cultural preferences, and geographies. The truck’s successes and challenges reflect cultural power dynamics in unexpected ways.

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Whereas Lemon’s discussion is primarily of cultural geography, the next chapter in part II takes the notion of culture and urban spaces into the realm of performance studies. With a critical analysis of a popular Toronto food truck entrepreneur weaved throughout the chapter, Whittall (chapter 10) explains how performativity helps frame identity in cities and is dependent on social, economic, and political factors. This chapter contends that food trucks offer the opportunity for spatial interventions; food truck vendors and customers redefine their identities and the spaces around them. These interventions are political as well, because they challenge the tightened amount and control of public space. Bridging Lemon’s and Whittall’s discussions of cultural and political geographies and echoing Ehrenfeucht and Croegaert’s, Hanser’s, and Godfrey’s takes on the practical limitations of food truck policies, Martin (chapter 11) illustrates how the food truck industry’s bifurcated structure occurs due to—and in spite of—regulatory environments. Martin compares the food truck landscapes in Chicago and Durham, North Carolina, and avers that they are similar despite having opposing approaches to regulation. Whereas Chicago’s legal regulations create divisions among food trucks, Durham’s industry bifurcation is the result of social and geographic divisions. Comparing the similar outcomes of these two cities implies that food trucks in these cities are therefore a product of similar social and spatial situations rather than of political regulation. Martin calls into question how much politics matter in the face of spatial and cultural geography. The first chapters in part II reflect the role that food trucks play as organic manifestations of political-cultural geographies, and the next chapters then illuminate the ways in which cities use those manifestations strategically, often at the expense of or at odds with good intentions. Nash’s (chapter 12) analysis of Montreal’s pilot food truck program confirms how policies to promote food trucks are direct derivations of food’s proxy as cultural currency. Rather than being businesses with few barriers to entry, Montreal’s modern food trucks are hampered by a mandate to enhance what Nash calls the “gastronomic landscape” and by long and difficult permitting processes. However, although Montreal’s food trucks may not necessarily “feed the masses,” they have the potential to make a wider variety of cuisines accessible given the relative ease of patronizing a food truck versus dining in a restaurant. Montreal’s and Vancouver’s food truck policies are similarly motivated by the city’s branding efforts. Newman and Newman (chapter 13) discuss the history of food trucks in Vancouver and how they are now being appropriated by its Greenest City strategy. In tightening policy controls over

Introduction 15

food trucks while simultaneously allowing them to flourish, food trucks have become Vancouver’s semiotic tools for branding itself as sustainable and healthy. Noting their similarity in planning to heavily scripted power- and wealth-controlled mega events (such as the Olympics), this chapter warns of Vancouver’s food trucks’ potential for gentrification and displacement. Echoing Vancouver’s and Montreal’s food truck cultural cache, authors Wood, Clark, and French (chapter 14) analyze Atlanta’s policy history in relation to the role that Atlanta’s food trucks play as cultural amenities rather than social justice practices. With civic leaders and industry advocates helping to navigate the city’s system of regulations, Atlanta’s food truck locations sprang up from demands of major events, suburban catering, and office workers’ lunch hours. Evidence of the social justice implications of Atlanta’s food trucks is mixed. Although there are many trucks that bring attention to minority immigrant cultures by serving the food of such cultures, the CED element is missing. Because opening a food truck is still more accessible to the socioeconomically privileged and the food served is predominantly “gourmet,” Atlanta’s food truck operators are more like brick-and-mortar restaurant owners (i.e., white, male) than not. In the closing chapter of part II, we circle back to the beginning. As in Columbus, Ohio, food trucks in Portland, Oregon, straddle culture and geographic imaginaries. Immigrant- or minority-owned carts selling ethnic food navigate the demands for their “authenticity” as well as demands for sustainability, local and organic sourcing. However, unlike in Columbus and other smaller cities, Portland’s rich food truck history means that there are a number of carts operating under this duality of conflicting demands, thereby creating patterns that reflect the varied topography of the urban food system. While analyzing the cultural tropes that perpetuate authenticity and local/organic ideals, McClintock, Novie, and Gebhardt’s (chapter 15) discussion dives into Portland’s food truck geography. Although Portland has used its food trucks strategically to brand itself as a “Mighty Gastropolis,” its political history of disinvestment and displacement means that food trucks do not uniformly adhere to dominant ideals of urban sustainability. Therefore, how food trucks straddle conflicting culinary ideals is ultimately dependent on their socioeconomic and geographic positions. In all, the chapters in both parts of Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice tell their stories of the huckster and the truckster, of city welcomes and city confrontations, of ground-up and of top-down approaches, of the right to entrepreneurship and of rights to active citizenship, of personal

16 

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and cultural identities and patterns of eating and spatial mobilities, of cultural and political geographies, of gastro-tourist entities and city-branding tools, of the clash of ideals of ethnic authenticity and sustainability through local/organic sourcing. Notes 1.  Here in the introduction, for purposes of simplicity, we use the term food trucks as a catchall for the wide array of mobile street vending sources, from gourmet and taco trucks to food carts. Individual chapter authors may spell out more precisely the focus of their particular research. 2.  We are aware of our chapter authors’ sometimes inconsistent and unproblematized use of the word immigrant, as if it were a somehow fixed or static signifier. However, rather than impose a “systematic” solution on our authors, we ask the reader to be aware of this and also to see immigrant as an active part of American cultural identity, not passive—as one always on the outside and juxtaposed to our normalized “white as mainstream” culture.

References Agyeman, J. 2013. Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice. London: Zed Books. Agyeman, J., and J. Sien Erickson. 2012. “Culture, Recognition, and the Negotiation of Difference: Some Thoughts on Cultural Competency in Planning Education.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 32 (3): 358–366. Alkon, A., and J. Agyeman. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Allmendinger, P. 2001. Planning in Postmodern Times. London: Routledge. Anderson, E. 2011. The Cosmopolitan Canopy. Race and Civility in Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton. Anguelovski, I. 2014. Neighborhood as Refuge: Community Reconstruction, PlaceRemaking, and Environmental Justice in the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Anguelovski, I. 2016. “Healthy Food Stores, Greenlining and Food Gentrification: Contesting New Forms of Privilege, Displacement and Locally Unwanted Land Uses in Racially Mixed Neighborhoods.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12299. Barringer, P. 2012. “Community Economic Development.” Email communication. Edited by H. Sobel.

Introduction 17

Bell, D., and G. Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge. Beoku-Betts, J. 1995. “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah.” Gender & Society 9 (5): 535–555. Bhimji, F. 2010. “Struggles, Urban Citizenship, and Belonging: The Experience of Undocumented Street Vendors and Food Truck Owners in Los Angeles.” Urban Anthropology 39 (4): 455–492. Brenner, N., and N. Theodore. 2002. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism.’” Antipode 34 (3): 349–379. Cadieux, K., and R. Slocum. 2015. “What Does It Mean to Do Food Justice?” Journal of Political Ecology 22:1–26. Cadji, J., and A. H. Alkon. 2014. “‘One Day, the White People Are Going to Want These Houses Again:’ Understanding Gentrification through the North Oakland Farmers Market.” In Incomplete Streets, edited by Steven Zavetowski and Julian Agyeman, 154–175. New York: Routledge. Checker, M. 2011. “Wiped Out by the Greenwave: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability.” City & Society 23 (2): 210–229. Cross, J. C. 2000. “Street Vendors, Modernity and Postmodernity: Conflict and Compromise in the Global Economy.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (1–2): 29–51. Davis, D. 2014. “Urban Informality: Remnant of the Past or Wave of the Future.” Harvard Design Magazine 37:86–92. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deener, A. 2007. “Commerce as the Structure and Symbol of Neighborhood Life: Reshaping the Meaning of Community in Venice, California.” City & Community 6:291–314. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6040.2007.00229.x. Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. Chakravorty Spivak. 1st American ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Devlin, R. 2010. “Informal Urbanism: Legal Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and the Management of Street Vending in New York City.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Dooling, S. 2008. “Ecological Gentrification: Re-negotiating Justice in the City.” Critical Planning 15:40–57. Douglass, M. 1996. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo. New York: Taylor.

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Dunn, K. 2013. “Hucksters and Trucksters: Criminalization and Gentrification in New York City’s Street Vending Industry.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Ellin, N. 1999. Postmodern Urbanism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Fischler, C. 1988. “Food, Self, and Identity.” Social Sciences Information: Information Sur les Sciences Sociales 27:275–292. Gabaccia, D. 2000. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guthman, J. 2008a. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15 (4): 431–447. Guthman, J. 2008b. “‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions.” Professional Geographer 60 (3): 387–397. Harvey, D. 1989. “Postmodernism.” In The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, 39–65. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53:23–40. https:// newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city. Hernández-López, E. 2011. “LA’s Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests.” Inter-American Law Review 43 (1): 233–268. Hirt, S. 2005. “Toward Postmodern Urbanism? Evolution of Planning in Cleveland, Ohio.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25:27–42. Koc, M., and J. Welsh. 2001. Food, Foodways and Immigrant Experience. Unpublished manuscript. Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Laurison, H., and N. Young. 2009. “Oakland food retail impact study.” Development report no. 20. Oakland: Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy. Lefebvre, H. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lloyd, R. 2010. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. New York: Routledge. Mares, T., and D. Peña. 2011. “Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow, and Deep Food Systems.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, edited by A. H. Alkon and J. Agyeman, 197–220. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martin, N. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks, and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883.

Introduction 19

Milkman, R., and V. Terriquez. 2012. “‘We Are the Ones Who Are Out in Front’: Women’s Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement.” Feminist Studies 8 (3): 723–752. Minkoff-Zern, L., N. Peluso, C. Getz, and J. Sourwine. 2011. “Race and Regulation: Asian Immigrants in California Agriculture.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, ed. A. Alkon and J. Agyeman, 65–85. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, D. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford. National League of Cities. 2013. Food on Wheels: Mobile Vending Goes Mainstream. Washington, DC: NLC. Newman, L. L., and K. Burnett. 2013. “Street Food and Vibrant Urban Spaces: Lessons from Portland, Oregon.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 18 (2): 233–248. Omi, M., and H. Winant. 1994. “Racial Formation.” In Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 53–76. New York: Routledge. Purcell, M. 2008. Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures. New York: Taylor and Francis. Slocum, R. 2007. “Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice.” Geoforum 38 (3): 520–533. Slocum, R., and K. Cadieux. 2015. “Notes on the Practice of Food Justice in the U.S.: Understanding and Confronting Trauma and Inequity.” Journal of Political Ecology 22:27–52. Tam, R. 2015. “How It Feels When White People Shame Your Culture’s Food—Then Make It Trendy.” The Washington Post, August 31, 17–18. Tinker, I. 1997. Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries. Oxford: OUP. Vallianatos, M. 2014. “Compl(eat)ing the Streets: Legalizing Sidewalk Food Vending in Los Angeles.” In Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices and Possibilities, ed. S. Zavestoski and J. Agyeman, 205–224. London: Routledge. Zukin, S., V. Trujillo, P. Frase, D. Jackson, T. Recuber, and A. Walker. 2009. “New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City.” City & Community 8 (1): 47–64.

I  Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices

2  Relaxing Regulatory Controls: Vendor Advocacy and Rights in Mobile Food Vending Ginette Wessel

In 2008, with little warning, urban policymakers across the United States found themselves increasingly involved in regulatory debates and policy revisions surrounding mobile food vending. Gourmet-style food vendors began invigorating unfamiliar urban spaces and providing new food options in neighborhoods, but unfair competition complaints from brickand-mortar restaurants and concerns over public health and safety from city officials quickly dominated regulatory decisions. In most instances, regulators imposed frameworks that restricted vendors’ entrepreneurial freedoms and spatial opportunities. The implementation of immediate solutions, such as spatial proximity bans, designated vending zones, GPS monitoring, and time limitations, limited when and where vendors could operate. In response to these regulatory strategies, food truck vendors argued for less drastic regulations through local activism and legal action. Such a response demonstrates the vending community’s ability to define its rights by challenging top-down planning methods and special interests. The topic of social equity in vending is largely understudied, but current struggles over mobile food vending regulations can provide new insights into advancing equitable vending policy and just urban environments. As the popularity of gourmet food trucks surged in 2009 and 2010, a variety of issues drove the need for discussion on vending policy. First, compared to seasoned vendors such as loncheras (Latino food vendors), pushcart vendors, and ice cream vendors, who operate in neighborhoods or industrial districts familiar to the vendor, gourmet food trucks move among commercial corridors, office parks, organized food vending lots, and tourist hubs. Many gourmet trucks also engage customers through online announcements and schedules, allowing the trucks to attract large crowds on a moment’s notice. Thanks in part to a price point like that of takeout restaurants, a variety of social classes welcome gourmet food vendors’ culturally diverse and innovative cuisine. The instant popularity of a new style

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of mobile vending and a lack of current policy to manage their operations at new locations renewed municipalities’ attention to vending policy. Second, the increasing number of complaints from established brickand-mortar restaurant owners regarding the location of food trucks near their businesses started to overwhelm officials. With little understanding of the daily practices and social and economic benefits of gourmet food trucks and facing an established and economically powerful restaurant industry, city officials found themselves trying to balance competing interests, often at the expense of food vendor freedoms. Third, vendors seeking to start food truck businesses began voicing their concerns regarding the slow, inefficient, and costly process of obtaining proper street and health permits. Many vendors also wanted to operate in multiple municipalities, further increasing their frustrations. Finally, concerns over public health and safety prompted new food vending unit standards at the county and state levels, including regulations for interior kitchen design, fire separation, equipment operations, restroom accessibility, and trash disposal. New conversations about food truck regulations also reveal inadequacies in current planning and policymaking. In many cases, regulatory frameworks neglect or avoid the actual issues at hand by imposing one-sizefits-all controls. For instance, prohibiting vending past 9:00 p.m. often does not correlate with reduced crime, and such a regulation reduces vendors’ opportunities citywide. Further, municipal ordinances such as vending zones, time limitations, and proximity bans provide a set of standards based on past models that sought to constrain vending activity. Planners’ reliance on these prior methods ignores opportunities to explore and experiment with alternative regulations that could benefit existing establishments and underused open spaces (i.e., foot traffic and patron spillover). Moreover, the abrupt and fast pace growth of the industry in 2009 conflicted with planning officials’ visions of economic and social planned urban order. Research has revealed that municipalities react by excluding and prohibiting activities perceived as uncontrollable. Rather than evaluating less imposing ways to manage growth, positions that outright reject activities based on a perceived threat or potential loss of economic value motivate the implementation of restrictions. This chapter aims to deconstruct the process of regulatory decisionmaking surrounding mobile food vending. In particular, I map competing interests in three recent regulatory struggles among vendors, vending advocates, policymakers, and brick-and-mortar business owners in the states of California and North Carolina. I frame these examples of top-down and

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25

bottom-up contestation in social theory by using Michel de Certeau’s (1984) concepts of strategies and tactics. In the context of social and civic life, de Certeau argues that tactics are “determined by the absence of power, just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power” (38). Strategies are the formal tools of the powerful (government) and are created through knowledge, autonomy, and control. Tactics are “acts of the weak” that may refer “to the precise instant that an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of movements that change the organization of space” (38). De Certeau argues, “Tactics [pin their hopes] on the clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces to the foundations of power” (38, 39). In these opposing realms, strategies are associated with organized power (de Certeau 1984, 38), whereas tactics are generated by the everyday participants who live, walk, adapt, alter, and appropriate the city to make it their own. This dialectic serves as a useful explanation for regulatory contestation surrounding mobile food vending, whereby strategies describe strong actors’ ability to shape vending activity using restrictive policies, and tactics are informal and spontaneous approaches vendors pursue to serve their needs. I am also interested in the ways mobile food vendors define their rights through bottom-up participation and succeed against powerful interests. Considering that city governments have vested interests in the success of stakeholders with financial investments in the city, marginal populations such as newcomers, the homeless, and those who do not own property are often at a disadvantage when organizing their rights in a community. In this chapter, I argue that despite rigid regulatory policies and the variety of economic, social, and political factors that influence local governments’ responses to mobile food vending, active municipal investment in the public realm combined with vendors’ grassroots efforts can support equitable vending policies. I begin with a historical overview of strategic vending regulations to establish the context for current debates and to unpack the underlying regulations that manage vendors’ operations and opportunities. I will then discuss three moments of contestation involving regulatory decision-making to illustrate the ways vendors navigate, challenge, and alter special interests and top-down planning approaches. Similarly, I will explore the factors that motivate the state’s decisions in regard to mobile food vending. Moreover, this research adopts an ethnographic approach that utilizes on-site documentation, policy review, content analysis of local newspapers and popular media outlets, and in-depth interviews with vendors, food truck advocates, nonprofits, and city officials. As an

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urbanist concerned with the development of just cities, the goal of this discussion is to expand scholarly and professional discourse surrounding the formation of equitable policy. Framing Mobile Food Vending Regulations in the United States In general, US state, county, and city governments develop rules about where, when, and how vendors operate their businesses. Broadly, government’s goals surrounding food vending are to protect public health, assure vehicular and pedestrian safety and circulation, and generate economic revenue. State governments establish vehicle and traffic codes and determine what activities can occur in public rights-of-way (including streets and sidewalks). They also provide vendors with driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. County governments, on the other hand, inspect and permit vendors to ensure compliance with public health standards, including vending equipment requirements, disability accommodations, sanitation standards, and proper food handling. Municipalities develop the most comprehensive and often restrictive set of policies for vending on public and private property, such as time durations and proximity bans from residential neighborhoods and commercial areas. County health inspectors, clerks, and local police officers enforce food vending regulations. The multifaceted framework of actors managing vendors prohibits a fluid exchange of ideas and issues between policymakers, vending enforcers, and vendors. A lack of communication also creates legal ambiguity and weakens regulatory objectives and intended outcomes. In order to consider more progressive approaches, it is imperative to look more closely at the history of vending regulations in the United States. A Brief Regulatory History The lengthy history of regulations that limit and control food vending reveals that most government authorities have sought to either formalize vendors or do away with them entirely. Historical literature suggests that reformers have perceived food vendors as a nuisance or part of a “problematized other” that has diminished the value of land, fostered crime, cluttered streets, and served unhealthy foods (Bluestone 1991; Burnstein 1996; Bromley 2000; Morales 2000; Wasserman 2009). This narrative applies to a diverse food vending population that includes pushcart, produce, paletero (ice-cream), taco truck (loncheras), and tamale vendors, who each have differentiated goals and identities.

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At the turn of the century, the “filth problem” in many congested pushcart areas in New York City led reformers to strategize ways to deter pushcarts from sitting stationary on street corners. In 1904, the Street Cleaning Commission established an ordinance that limited vendors to remaining in a single spot for thirty minutes or less. Despite the fact that this approach alleviated concentrations of vendors, it grew notoriously difficult to enforce (Burnstein 1996, 75). In 1906, the New York City Push-Cart Commission took a different approach and supported bringing quality, affordable food to areas lacking food sources. The commission recommended establishing official permanent places for the pushcarts in open-air markets and allowing four vendors to a city block in certain restricted districts (Bluestone 1991, 83; Wasserman 2009, 158). Regrettably, city council members rejected the proposal, and peddlers continued to concentrate in areas that were not carefully policed. During the economic depression of the 1930s, vendors proliferated as the unemployed struggled to support their starving families. Reformers continued to develop strategies to eliminate or formalize pushcart vendors. Supported by merchants, New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia took up the issue and developed three indoor markets, with the largest holding a capacity of roughly five hundred vendors. Vendors were charged four dollars a week, and they had to follow rules that prohibited the sale of secondhand merchandise, ordered vendors to remain behind their counters, and banned shouting or hawking (Wasserman 2009, 164). The supervision of vendors in such markets crippled their entrepreneurial independence and forced many to go out of business or risk vending on the streets. Fifteen thousand peddlers lined the streets of the city when LaGuardia came to power in 1934, and by 1945, only 1,200 remained (Wasserman 2009, 167). Proximity bans are the most common strategy to eliminate vendors from areas. Of the groups that have historically opposed pushcarts, store merchants have represented the most oppositional faction of society demanding separation from their establishments. Store merchants have centered their concerns on pushcart congestion on sidewalks by arguing that vending is a visually unpleasant activity that blocks their storefronts. Department stores and delivery services also argued that they needed clear street frontage for deliveries and shopper parking to allow for high-volume, high-turnover business activity (Bluestone 1991, 76). Earl French, a vending advocate and author who wrote on New York City pushcart markets, dispelled merchants’ arguments in his 1925 study that found pushcarts

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generally lined side streets or large thoroughfares and did not interfere with traffic (Bluestone 1991, 77). In the 1930s, the City of Los Angeles took proximity bans one step further and outlawed sidewalk vending altogether (including merchandise vendors).1 Since then, sidewalk vendors have operated despite this contentious piece of legislation, using lookouts, such as friends and family members, to detect approaching police and health code enforcers. Today, most vendors seek legalization to avoid expensive citations and gain legitimacy as business owners. The current difficulty associated with overturning the provision is driven by the inability to enforce food safety measures across Los Angeles, the continued resistance from restaurant owners, and the general disregard for vending as a priority issue in an economic landscape in which stronger food industry sectors dominate. Vallianatos highlights that “although attitudes are changing, sidewalk vending has been viewed as a foreign and chaotic activity, a Third World occupation, rather than as an opportunity to encourage business formation and provision of food in low-income areas” (2014, 212). Despite failed attempts to overturn this ordinance over the last century, vendors continue to gain strong support by forming their own associations.2 Decades after Los Angeles council members banned sidewalk vending, New York City leaders implemented a vending cap. Reacting to the growth of street vending after immigration reform in the 1970s, Mayor Koch limited the number of year-round permits issued to three thousand and allowed for an additional one thousand temporary permits to be made available during the summer months.3 This single regulation forever changed the vending landscape in New York City, creating a hopeless, ten- to twenty-year waitlist and a black market in which two-year permits are rented from retired permit holders for upward of $25,000 (Schmidt 2016). The vending cap has made legal entry into the industry nearly impossible, and it continues to stifle the city’s street vending scene. Aiming to curb the black market while boosting enforcement of regulations, in October 2016 a city council member introduced legislation that would double the number of food vendor permits issued over the course of seven years, making it possible for six hundred more street vendors to begin selling food each year (Schmidt 2016). Although the legislation does not address all the estimated 10,000 to 12,000 vendors in New York City and increasing enforcement can stifle vendor opportunities, more available permits will reduce financial risk for many vendors. As this book goes to press, the debate over this legislation continues. Over time, strategies to control vending have achieved little success. Sidewalk bans and permit caps have failed to meet their objectives to formalize or reduce vendor activity, yet these methods are still used today.

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Strategic Vending Regulations Today more than ever, policymakers must balance their efforts to support small business development, maintain economic vitality in commercial areas, and protect the health and safety of the public. Often, a community’s brick-and-mortar business owners show the greatest opposition to gourmet food vendors by arguing that higher overhead costs—such as property taxes, utilities, high rents, and building maintenance—place them at a disadvantage. Since 2009, policymakers have responded to this mounting challenge with a variety of strategies to solve complaints. Accordingly, policymakers often develop strategic vending regulations based on rigid and broad regulatory frameworks that lack vendor input, limit vendor opportunity, and contradict the agile ways vendors operate. Table 2.1 organizes tested regulatory approaches for managing vendors into three categories: regulations that spatially exclude vendors, regulations that control and monitor the behaviors of vendors and their patrons, and regulations that protect the public’s health and safety. Regulations that spatially exclude vendors from particular areas of the city are regularly used to settle complaints about business competition. Local and state policymakers view spatial distancing as a simple way to Table 2.1 Mobile food vending regulations categorized by regulatory strategy Regulatory strategy

Means of control

Spatial exclusion

• Containing vending to specific districts • Proximity bans (e.g., restaurants, schools, neighborhoods, parks) • Public and private property bans • Requiring compatibility with parking stalls

Regulating and monitoring behavior

• • • • • •

Requiring GPS devices inside vending units Duration restrictions Stop-and-wait restrictions Spatial distancing between vendors Requiring activity permits (e.g., special event permits) Regulating activities (e.g., alcohol consumption, recycling waste products)

Public health and safety

• • • • • •

Requiring letter grades Requiring commissary use Impromptu health inspections Requiring public bathroom Vending unit design standards Requiring separation from public rights-of-way (particularly sidewalk and street intersections or paths of egress)

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separate and reduce conflict between vendors and food establishments, schools, neighborhoods, or parks. The fear of vendors creating business competition, serving unhealthy food, or fostering crime drive the desire to limit vendors’ spatial mobility. These regulations include designating vending districts, proximity bans, bans from public and private property, and maximum size requirements for parking spaces. Regulations that rely on spatial exclusion also reinforce the political power of opposing businesses, residents, and restaurants, making them authoritative actors with decisionmaking power at a similar level to city officials. Regulating and monitoring vendor behaviors by imposing duration restrictions, requiring GPS tracking, creating separation between vendors, and eliminating the consumption of alcohol are less restrictive methods than spatial regulations, yet local governments seek to control vending activity by monitoring and deterring certain behaviors. These narrower forms of control at the municipal level attempt to tame the activities of vendors and their patrons. For instance, in 2008 the City of Charlotte (North Carolina) implemented a regulation that required vendors to remain four hundred feet away from other vendors and from residential-zoned districts to mitigate vendor concentrations that were perceived to create noise, trash, and crime. Embracing technology, city officials in Cranston, Rhode Island; Chicago; and Boston require vendors to purchase and install GPS devices in their vending units to verify a vendor’s location if a complaint is filed, a vendor counterargues a citation, or health inspectors conduct an impromptu inspection. GPS devices are required to be turned on while a vendor is in business, a reminder that their activities are being recorded and potentially monitored by officials. In this example, vendors’ decisions to locate in unapproved areas are preconditioned by surveillance. Finally, the last examples of regulations set in place by policymakers to protect the public’s health and safety include requirements for proper sanitation and food handling, a restroom facility in proximity, commissary use by vendors, and the assignment of letter grades to vending units. In addition, vending unit design, both interior and exterior, must comply with local and state fire and mechanical codes. Standards for sanitation and the proper handling of food are enforced by county officials who follow state and federal health and safety codes, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Code, which oversees multiple food industry sectors (e.g., full-service restaurants, grocery stores, and commissaries). In 2011, Los Angeles County implemented a policy requiring vendors to display restaurant letter grades on their trucks to notify patrons of their sanitation level. Most vendors who maintain a well-kept vending unit welcome

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letter grades and find that they legitimize their practices in the food industry. On the other hand, vendors who are downgraded for mistakes or a misinterpretation of the code find that the lengthy wait time for a reinspection can effectively put them out of business. Public health regulations regarding food sanitation also apply to brick-and-mortar restaurants, which can undergo similar setbacks. Regulations viewed in terms of spatial exclusion, behavior control, and public health and safety illustrate the impact of regulatory strategies that create an imbalance of power and control, with vendor businesses at the mercy of regulatory authority and strong stakeholders. Counteractive to vendors’ tactics, strategic vending regulations or strategies are part of a total vision of urban order and predictability. As the following vignettes show, equitable policy alternatives must consider vendors’ marginal position in the food industry sector. Public Health and Declining Schools: Reactions from the California Assembly On February 14, 2012, California State Assemblyman William Monning introduced Assembly Bill 1678. This bill proposed banning food trucks from operating within 1,500 feet (approximately three city blocks) of California’s elementary, middle, and high schools on public and privately owned land between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on school days (figure 2.1). He sought to exclude food trucks from schools to slow the epidemic of childhood obesity, stating: “We’ve made great advances in providing healthful nutrition in the schools, and the mobile vendors are the single most undermining element of those advances” (Gordon 2012). The state bill was designed to support the school districts’ efforts to institute healthy lunch programs, which many educators feared were being undermined by the presence of food trucks. The California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA) organization also supported the bill and felt the state had worked hard to promote healthy food and restrict access to unhealthy options. A spokesman stated, “A lot of these trucks are just driving right up to the curb and reintroducing this food back into school” (Sankin 2012). A mother of two school students, who advocated for student nutrition for the past decade, wanted to see the 1,500-foot protective zone in place. She claimed that students will not walk beyond three blocks to get lunch and that letting the trucks park near schools would have broader social equity implications. For example, food and beverages bought from food trucks cost more than what low-income children, who qualify for free

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Figure 2.1 High school students eating from a food truck during lunch hours in Berkeley, CA. Source: Author photograph, March 7, 2012.

or reduced-cost meals in the school cafeterias, can afford. Allowing food trucks to park close to schools “exacerbates the two-tiered system where poor kids are identified and spotlighted eating their meal of shame,” she said (Gordon 2012). She also argued income would be drained from the school food programs, which serves the most economically vulnerable student population. Food truck advocates across the state highlighted several issues that the bill failed to resolve. First, in geographically dense cities such as San Francisco the proximity ban would further reduce vendors’ parking options (figure 2.2). Second, the bill could be insufficiently enforced given that the already short-staffed county health departments would oversee enforcement of the regulation as part of the state’s health code. “There are only 11 health inspectors [for the 2,500 licensed vendors] in Los Angeles monitoring food trucks,” said the Southern California Mobile Food Vending Association (SCMFVA) president, “so the bill would actually decrease the level of enforcement” (Sankin 2012). Third, the owner of San Francisco’s Off the Grid suggested the bill was “targeting one class of small businesses at the expense of others. For example, it doesn’t regulate liquor store or fast

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Figure 2.2 Map of proposed 1,500-foot proximity ban surrounding elementary, middle, and high schools on public and privately owned land in San Francisco. Source: Ginette Wessel, 2016. Originally mapped by Scott Weiner, 2012.

food restaurant proximity” (Sankin 2012). Finally, these vending advocates were quick to point out that the proposed bill did not differentiate between healthy and unhealthy foods, but only noted the delivery mechanism used by a restaurateur to serve the public. Also in opposition to the bill, San Francisco Board Supervisor Scott Wiener called Monning’s proposal an “extreme piece of legislation that takes us exactly in the wrong direction. It removes local control in terms of deciding where we as a locality can or cannot put food trucks. It’s a onesize-fits-all for all of California. The consequence in densely populated cities such as San Francisco would keep the mobile food vendors out of many parts of the city” (Gordon 2012).4 The bill would have effectively eliminated vending almost entirely from the Haight, Marina, Castro, Downtown, Mission, Bayview, Sunset, and Excelsior districts (figure 2.2). Media outlets began blasting news of the proposed bill, and on March 28, 2012, food truck advocates, representing both gourmet food trucks and loncheras from Los Angeles and San Francisco, traveled to the state capital to discuss the matter with Monning in person. Despite the assumption that

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Monning could not be persuaded, given his role as the chair of the California State Assembly Committee on Health, Monning withdrew his own bill after the meeting, stating: “The challenge before us is working with a diverse group of stakeholders to establish a shared understanding about the adverse impacts of these practices and the necessity of a statewide legislative solution” (Monning 2012). Following the decision, the CFPA stated that “no one should profit at the expense of students’ health. AB 1678 may be curbed, but CFPA’s efforts are not derailed. Student-targeted mobile food vending is an ongoing problem and we will continue advocating for statewide solutions” (CFPA 2012). This debate reveals that although state-level policymakers and public school officials can form strong alliances, local vending advocates can persuade high-level actors and impact legislation by collectively organizing their rights. Fundamentally, the case illustrates the failure of universal approaches that neglect dense urban environments and local conditions. Had the legislation passed, food vending may have dissolved in much of Los Angeles and the Bay Area, California’s most active food vending landscapes. Furthermore, the new proximity ban would have expanded institutional agency over areas of the city that could have implications for future development, such as opening new food establishments. Furthermore, the debate between local food vending advocates and state-level policymakers reveals the importance of local decision-making. The vending advocates that traveled to the state capital to voice their opinions illustrated the immense need for transparency of local issues and circumstances. Without local advocacy, the state would have little understanding of the potential negative outcomes of their legislation. Restaurant Protectionism: Stretching the Limits of Public Safety in Los Angeles The growth of gourmet food trucks in pedestrian-dense locations once devoid of street vending led to a dispute on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile in the summer of 2010. Restaurant owners within the Museum Square office building and the Los Angeles County Art Museum argued uncontrollable vendors were encroaching on their businesses, at a time when sales were declining following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated: “The economy has been so bad that I had to cut employees, and then these trucks show up and I had to cut more. We all average $15,000 to $18,000 in rent, and have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses” (Behrens 2010c).

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Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the food trucks were monopolizing public parking spaces (figure 2.3). LaBonge stated: “These trucks park for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high demand areas” (Behrens 2010a). LaBonge proposed two alternatives to the city council: either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create specially designated zones for trucks. Food truck vendors felt LaBonge’s proposals were short-sighted and did not uphold the 1985 California Vehicle Code (CVC 22455), which states that local agencies may only “adopt additional requirements [to the current code] for public safety [reasons] regulating the time and place of vending from vehicles upon any street.” To vendors’ benefit, this same code was upheld in the 2009 court case People v. Margarita Garcia. LaBonge later expanded his argument claiming the trucks blocked the visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate with a law degree turned to Twitter to spread news of the debate on a late Friday afternoon in 2010, asking the food truck community to contact LaBonge with any

Figure 2.3 Mobile food vendor parked near the entrance of the Los Angeles County Art Museum. Source: Author photograph, May 19, 2014.

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concerns about the proposal. A Facebook page titled “Los Angelinos against LaBonge,” which described him as a “friend of celebrity, foe of the small businessman,” collected many “likes” (Behrens 2010b). By Monday morning, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded. This backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they could locate an empty parking space. In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council members voted and approved two restrictions for the area: first, food trucks larger than twentytwo feet long and seven feet high were prohibited from parking spaces with oversized vehicle restrictions along fifteen blocks of Wilshire Boulevard from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.; second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from the bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions reduced the number of potential parking spaces for vendors, from forty to twenty. Food truck advocates claim a lack of visibility has not been proven and find the new regulations to be a way to balance competing interests without having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the consumers, who now have more limited lunchtime options. The restaurants’ argument focuses on the premise that food trucks sell food in the vicinity of existing restaurants, thereby unfairly luring customers from brick-and-mortar establishments that incur higher overhead costs. In certain instances this may be partially true, but a variety of court cases suggest there is no evidence to support this position.5 One case, for example, dates back to 1978, when the City of Los Angeles passed an ordinance banning the sale of “victuals” on public streets within one hundred feet of an entrance to a brick-and-mortar establishment. In trial court, it was ruled that the regulation “discriminated economically against catering truck operations” and amounted to nothing more than an unconstitutional “naked restraint of trade” (Eagly 2012). Some restaurant owners have been more embracing of food truck activity and have founds ways to reinvent and boost their business. For instance, the owners of Lemon Rue restaurant on the Hulu/HBO campus in Santa Monica realized they could not remove the food trucks parking along the perimeter of the campus. Instead, they decided to lower their prices and change their menu, with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to their customer demand for more to-go style foods. From the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate-controlled environment. Despite their differences, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to avoid areas with

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an established restaurant scene. In the end, consumers drive the market, and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy. “The person who is going to go to the food truck isn’t choosing it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go,” noted one industry expert (Richmond 2011). New Vending Landscapes and Local Activism in Charlotte In November 2008, the City of Charlotte revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from food vendors along South Boulevard. Among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited the number of days a vendor could serve at a single location to ninety per year; limited the hours of operation, from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.; required four hundred feet of separation from another vendor and from residential districts; and prohibited vending entirely from streets within the central business district. At the time, loncheras (the Latino vendors that formed the dominant vending population) felt that the new regulations directly attacked their established fifty-vendor community. Following the policy change, loncheras began voicing their concerns over social injustices in a regulatory system that governs a city in which the three largest populations consist of white (50 percent), African American (35 percent), and Hispanic or Latino (13 percent) residents.6 In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned to amend the ordinance. One Latino vendor, who was convinced the vending ordinances were culturally biased, stated: “They are making it hard for us. This is our job. It’s not fair” (Rose 2012). Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the loncheras advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, and today the number of loncheras has significantly decreased, while the number of gourmet food trucks has risen. In 2011, gourmet food trucks began to emerge due to their carefully made business plans and aggressive tactics for arranging private property agreements. Rather than locating on the main thoroughfares, food trucks located near college campuses, private parking lots downtown, and within office park complexes. The now-popular Food Truck Friday event, which originated on a vacant lot in the historic South End District with a few vendors, hosts over five hundred attendees. Charlotte Center City Partners

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has been an advocate of the gourmet food trucks, working with the City of Charlotte to increase its presence in the central business district. Today, Charlotte has at least seventy gourmet food truck vendors, a number that is still growing, along with new commissary locations. After observing this vending transformation, a local news reporter analyzed vending citations from 2012 and found that all sixteen violations have been cited to loncheras. A local code enforcer explained: “We would inspect any location that comes to our attention or is brought to our attention. There is no delineation with regard to what type of truck” (Rose 2012). If regulations are indeed driven by complaints, it appears residents dislike the presence of loncheras and would prefer to see them removed. In April 2014, five years after the last revised set of food vending regulations, the Charlotte Planning Department proposed another lengthy set of regulations. Responding to the gourmet food truck scene, these new rules restricted vendors from accepting partnership opportunities from businesses that were not in officially zoned office parks (e.g., breweries), established a one-hundred-foot no parking buffer from restaurants, and prohibited vendors from gathering more than once a week in a specific location. In response to this legislation, vendors launched charlottefoodtrucks. org and formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association to petition the proposed regulations. These advocacy efforts materialized in the City of Charlotte’s Citizen Advisory Group, through which vendors helped to establish a new set of ordinances that reduced the four-hundred-foot proximity ban from residential areas to one hundred feet and fifty feet from brickand-mortar food establishments, allowed vendors to serve past 9:00 p.m., and eliminated the four-hundred-foot separation between trucks to allow for multiple trucks on a single-acre lot. Although these new regulations were not ideal and still required expensive special event permits, the collaboration between city officials and vendors resulted in less severe restrictions. Similar to policy debates occurring across the country, Charlotte’s regulatory tensions in 2008 and 2014 began as a reaction to complaints about noise, trash, crime, and business competition. City officials quickly sought control over the urban landscape with little consideration for the vendors’ daily practices or cultural context, which led to immediate resistance from vendors. Two insights can be drawn from Charlotte’s contentious vending past. First, although residential communities resisted loncheras based on their lack of upkeep, Latino vendors felt targeted, particularly when their petition was denied. For some Americans, Latinos’ long history of immigration into the United States has specific associations with illegality, and

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this perception has prompted many debates over their presence in local economies and communities. Basinski, Shapiro, and Morales (chapter 5) highlight the ongoing challenges immigrant vendors face to gain rights to entrepreneurship, citizenship, and their livelihoods. In Charlotte, the debate over inclusion and exclusion of citizenship manifests spatially for these vendors, who are subject to socioeconomic prejudices. Second, though loncheras were unable to change policy, gourmet food truck vendors were able to achieve a middle-of-the-road agreement. Cultural differences may explain this disparity, but the larger message suggests that organized grassroots efforts can be effective at mitigating drastic regulatory strongholds. In Charlotte, vendor participation in the regulatory decision-making process built stronger relationships with city officials, establishing vendors as legitimate stakeholders. Vendor Advocacy and Entrepreneurial Freedoms In response to changing regulations, food truck vending organizations, including vendors, advocates, and legal experts, have multiplied across the United States. The first gourmet food truck organizations emerged in Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C. For vendors, a collective identity in an emerging industry helped them to develop a voice, gain legitimacy, and challenge exclusionary policies (Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2013). These food truck organizations emerged from the bottom-up, sharing local knowledge to advance their entrepreneurial aspirations and challenge regulatory constraints. Before gourmet food truck organizations, loncheras and pushcart vendors sought similar ways to protect their businesses from enforcement. For example, New York City’s Street Vendor Project, founded in 2001, provides vendors with legal support against unfair enforcement, translates regulations into multiple languages, and helps vendors plan for financial stability. Currently, the organization advocates for eliminating New York City’s vendor permit cap (see also chapters 3 and 5). In Los Angeles, the Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California (Loncheros Association), established in 2009, now has three hundred members. The organization provides business education and services for vendors and addresses community conflicts with the goal of reaching mutually beneficial agreements. These advocacy groups, like others across the United States, seek justice for vendors who are underrepresented in the legal system. In 2010, the SCMFVA became the first advocacy organization in the United States for gourmet food trucks. While supporting the Los Angeles

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metropolitan area of eighty-eight municipalities with widely varying vending policies, the SCMFVA quickly grew to approximately 120 members in two years. Today, the member-based organization follows an established code of proper food truck behavior, provides consultancy services for vendor operations, and challenges outdated city policies. Supported by legal experts, the organization has filed lawsuits against thirteen municipalities since 2010. In Monrovia, California, for example, the SCMFVA argued that city officials limited the vending community’s ability to serve in the Old Town area to protect brick-and-mortar restaurants. Councilman Adams argued: “If you can drive during peak hours and take advantage of brisk business and then leave, you have an advantage over someone who stays there in good times and in bad” (Adams as quoted in Knoll 2012). The mayor decided to settle the case to avoid an expensive trial, particularly since prior case law supported SCMFVA’s stance. In the end, the city paid nearly $140,000 in legal fees and agreed to repeal the ordinance (McIntire 2012). Vending organizations have shown success in negotiating the complicated terrain of regulations. Together, vendors’ collective identity legitimizes their demands for just vending policies that would otherwise go unnoticed by policymakers. In 2013, the president of the SCMFVA founded the National Food Truck Association (NFTA) to create a food truck identity and network of resources across the United States. The organization currently represents fifteen associations that seek a platform to share best practices and policies across multiple municipalities and regions (figure 2.4). Many of NFTA’s leaders convene with industry experts (from legal, automotive, and technology

Figure 2.4 Association logos of the fifteen National Food Truck Association members. Source: http://www.nationalfoodtrucks.org, retrieved May 27, 2015.

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sectors) at the ROAM Mobile Food Vending Conference on an annual basis to share best practices. This growing network of food vending associations seeks to change the marginalized position of food vendors and illustrates the widespread demand to challenge government regulations. Conclusion Over the last century, policymakers have implemented regulations to manage vendors’ business operations and tame vending activity. Today, vendors’ rights are still relatively unknown. Municipalities continue to use regulatory strategies to curb vendor behavior and control the growth of vending. Vending regulations are also politically charged, as city leaders and brick-and-mortar business owners align perspectives over long-term economic development. In these cases, regulations favor powerful actors at the expense of marginalized vendors who have little to no decision-making power. Likewise, policymakers have shown a lack of knowledge about vendors’ daily activities, which reinforces polarities and leads to resistance. Outcomes show that broad policy approaches fail and overburden vendors with irrelevant restrictions, as well as put a strain on municipalities that use their resources to routinely enforce the restrictions citywide. To this end, new dialogue regarding the agile and opportunistic nature of vendors’ operations will contribute to minimizing conflict between policy measures and vendor realities. The three vignettes in this chapter regarding vending near schools, restaurant protectionism, and local activism illustrate the ways vendors are effectively claiming rights, mitigating overly burdensome regulations, and shaping the food vending landscape. The stories and struggles highlight the inadequacies of regulatory approaches that have hindered vendor opportunity. This analysis suggests that although political interests often shape regulations and control vendor practices in unjust ways, bottom-up actors are capable of mitigating and eliminating oppressive regulations in ways that build from cooperative efforts and local advocacy. Findings show that the state of California failed to understand the drastic potential outcomes of geographically vast property bans in cities. Local vending advocates and leaders across California overcame state-level authority and succeeded in preserving vendors’ rights. In Los Angeles, vendor resistance weakened complaints from the restaurant sector. The result was a settlement that ultimately reduced vendors’ spatial opportunities rather than banning them from the entire area. Finally, gourmet food truck vendors in Charlotte negotiated new regulations, legitimizing the arguments put forth by vendors

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and situating them as key actors in the writing of regulatory policy. In contrast, Latino vendors were unable to achieve such success, raising questions about ethnic prejudices for an underrepresented demographic of the city. In each scenario, vendors and lead advocates shaped policy development and redefined vendors’ rights. Contestation surrounding food vendors’ rights illustrates the ways policymakers, enforcement personnel, and vendors operate and communicate in separate realms. In order to reduce regulatory debates among these actors, city officials will need to devote time to understanding vendors’ daily operations and create more opportunities to include vendors in planning and decision-making. Voices from strong and weak stakeholders support progressive planning practices and allow all parties to develop and negotiate more equitable solutions. A city planning process that devotes time to incorporating multiple perspectives can lead to informed and educated outcomes. Ideally, negotiations between stakeholders can settle disputes before policy intervention is needed. Finally, policymakers must find ways to view policy from the bottomup. Planning efforts that focus on individual vending situations and their particular solutions will mitigate the need for citywide policies that hinder the industry’s development with unnecessary rules. Policymakers who consider the conditions of specific urban spaces at the local level will develop trusting relationships with vendors that will bring long-term mutual support. This research aims to advance discourse surrounding vending regulations to inform alternative vending policy that is inclusive, collaborative, and ultimately equitable. Without progressive planning approaches that address the nuances of vendors’ activities, cities will be unable to build trust, and vendors will continue to voice their marginalized position and define their rights through contestation. Notes 1. To this day, Los Angeles Municipal Code 42.00(b) states: “No person ... shall on any sidewalk ... offer for sale ... any goods, wares or merchandise which the public may purchase at any time.” Section 11.00(m) of the Los Angeles Municipal Code reinforces the ban, “making vending wares on the sidewalks a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to one thousand dollars and/or by imprisonment in the county jail for up to six months.” 2.  The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign, which advocates for the legalization of sidewalk vending, includes forty partners. Leading organizations such as the East LA

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Community Corporation and the Leadership for Urban Renewal Network (LURN) support the effort through community workshops and media outlets. 3.  Permits for nondisabled veterans are unlimited under New York state law. 4.  Prior to this debate, San Francisco enforced its own three-block buffer between food trucks and middle schools and high schools in 2007; however, the city’s version of the regulation has exceptions for trucks located on park land, private property, and near elementary schools, provisions that would be eliminated if Monning’s bill was enacted. 5.  The Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm that launched the National Street Vending Initiative to shield entrepreneurs from protectionist positions in 2010, filed a highly publicized lawsuit against the City of El Paso, Texas. IJ argued it was unconstitutional to limit vendors from operating within one thousand feet of any restaurant, convenience store, or grocery and to prohibit vendors from stopping and waiting for customers. Just three months after IJ filed the lawsuit, the city eliminated the policy (Miller 2011). 6.  2010 US Census Bureau QuickFacts, http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/.

References Behrens, Zach. 2010a. “Food Fight: City Councilmember Wants to Look into Limiting Food Truck Parking.” LAist, June 11. http://laist.com/2010/06/11/food _fight_city_councilmember_wants.php. Behrens, Zach. 2010b. “Food Fight: Tom LaBonge Backlash Begin after Introducing Food Truck Motions.” LAist, June 14. http://laist.com/2010/06/11/food_fight_city _councilmember_wants.php. Behrens, Zach. 2010c. “Is Museum Square Trying to Block Food Trucks from Parking on 5700 Wilshire? ‘No Comment,’ Says Management.” LAist, July 8. http:// laist.com/2010/07/08/5700_wilshire_food_truck_war.php#photo-6. Bluestone, Daniel. 1991. “The Pushcart Evil: Peddlers, Merchants, and New York City’s Streets, 1890–1940.” Journal of Urban History 18 (1): 68–92. Bromley, Ray. 2000. “Street Vending and Public Policy: A Global Review.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (1–2): 1–28. Burnstein, Daniel. 1996. “The Vegetable Man Cometh: Political and Moral Choices in Pushcart Policy in Progressive Era New York City.” New York History 77 (1): 47–84. California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA). 2012. “AB 1678: Curbed Bill Does Not Derail Efforts.” http://cfpa.net/ChildNutrition/ChildNutrition_Legislation/AB1678 -CFPA-PressRelease-2012.pdf.

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de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eagly, Ingrid V. 2012. “Criminal Clinics in the Pursuit of Immigrant Rights: Lessons from Loncheros.” UC Irvine Law Review 2 (91): 91–124. Esparza, Nicole, Edward T. Walker, and Gabriel Rossman. 2013. “Trade Associations and the Legitimation of Entrepreneurial Movements: Collective Action in the Emerging Gourmet Food Truck Industry.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 43 (2): 143–162. Gordon, Rachel. 2012. “Food Truck Bill Seeks to Combat Childhood Obesity.” San Francisco Gate, February 29. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Food-truck-bill -seeks-to-combat-childhood-obesity-3369050.php. Knoll, Corina. 2012. “Monrovia Will Let Food Trucks Roll Back into Old Town.” Los Angeles Times, September 6. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/09/local/la-me -monrovia-food-trucks-20120910. Miller, Matt. 2011. “Victory for El Paso Street Vendors.” Institute for Justice 20 (3). http://ij.org/ll/june-2011-volume-20-number-3/victory-for-el-paso-street-vendors/. McIntire, Nathan. 2012. “Monrovia Food Truck Lawsuit Costs City $215,000.” Monrovia Patch, September 7. http://patch.com/california/monrovia/monrovia-to -pay-75-000-in-attorney-s-fees-to-food-truae2ead912d. Monning, William W. 2012. “Assemblymember Monning Issues a Statement on Mobile Food Vending Bill.” California Food Policy Advocates, March 28. http://cfpa.net/ ChildNutrition/ChildNutrition_Legislation/AB1678-AssemblymemberMonning -Statement-2012.pdf. Morales, Alfonso. 2000. “Peddling Policy: Street Vending in Historical and Contemporary Context.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (3–4): 76–98. Richmond, Antonia. 2011. “Have We Reached Gridlock? Matt Cohen on Food Trucks in 2011.” 7X7SF, January 31. http://www.7x7.com/. Rose, Julie. 2012. “Food Truck Boom or Bust? Depends on What You Serve.” WFAE 90.7, August 24. http://wfae.org/post/food-truck-boom-or-bust-depends-what-you -serve. Sankin, Aaron. 2012. “California Food Truck Ban Cooks Up Growing Opposition.” Huffington Post, February 28. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/california -food-truck-ban-growing-opposition_n_1307510.html. Schmidt, Samantha. 2016. “New York City May Double Number of Food Vendor Permits.” New York Times, October 10. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/ nyregion/new-york-city-may-double-number-of-food-vendors-permits.html.

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Vallianatos, Mark. 2014. “A More Delicious City: How to Legalize Street Food.” In The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor, edited by Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 209–226. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wasserman, Suzanne. 2009. “Hawkers and Gawkers: Peddling and Markets in New York City.” In Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, 153–173. New York: Columbia University Press.

3  Decriminalize Street Vending: Reform and Social Justice Kathleen Dunn

Enthusiatic media coverage of food trucks in the United States—their quirky “foodie” offerings, their festivals and competitions, and even their reality shows on cable television—might lead observers to think a new urban food trend has emerged overnight, revitalizing public space in the process. The backstory, and the ongoing struggles over street vending and public space, are more complex. The sale of food in the streets has a long, contentious history in the United States and abroad. Street vendors regularly inflame “quality of life” concerns among brick-and-mortar business owners large and small, as well as among concerned residents, who press municipal officials to remove vendors from “their” corner or block, a NIMBYism that invariably requires police intervention to be achieved. In some larger cities, street vending regulations severely restrict or outlaw the practice altogether; in others, a lack of regulations empowers police to “regulate” vendors as they see fit. Any discussion of food trucks and social justice must begin from the empirical reality that street food vending is a deeply stratified industry, one that is profoundly shaped by the class and race politics of public space. Shiny trucks selling artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches and sixteen-dollar lobster rolls do not seem to provoke “quality of life” panics or forceful police interventions. Indeed, the owners of upscale food trucks don’t often identify as street vendors but entrepreneurs; state and media actors have in turn legitimized this distinction, embracing these more affluent street vendors as “models for small business innovation,” as Senator Nancy Pelosi called them (Schwartz and Sankin 2012). What is it about the “new” street food purveyors that distinguishes them from both past and present cohorts of urban street vendors—the neighborhood ice cream trucks, the lunch trucks catering to construction workers and other manual laborers, the fruit and vegetable vendors by the subway exits, or the tamale and taco vendors waiting outside the stadium when the game or the concert lets out?

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Perhaps the most crucial difference is social class and its persistently racialized structure. The warm welcome extended to “gourmet” food trucks, those using comparatively expensive ingredients and selling foodstuffs at higher price points than other food vendors, is an abrupt about-face in the annals of street vending policy in American cities, which until quite recently have uniformly been set to limit or deter street peddling. Not coincidentally, the overwhelming majority of street food vendors are poor and working class immigrants and people of color. Too often, the same city officials whose reports dismiss street vendors as “obstacles to pedestrian circulation” (NYCDOT 2008) are also granting sidewalk café permits to brickand-mortar restaurants or special use permits for “pop-up” gourmet food truck courts sans vitriol. These municipal authorizations in turn have been pivotal to the rapid expansion of a “food truck industry,” which IBISWorld (2015) market research now estimates to be a $1 billion sector. Yet this food truck revolution, as some boosters refer to it, has not reduced the primary and near-universal occupational hazard for the majority of street vendors in the United States and beyond: criminalization. Indeed, there are ways in which the criminalization of lower-income immigrant street vendors benefits the gourmet food truck economy, evidenced by a variety of social distancing practices, least of which is a fetishization of the truck itself as signifier of class difference. To chart the contours of food vending injustice requires consideration of the conditions that sustain and strongly pattern the criminalization of street vendors, as well as the conditions under which the sale of food on the street is not criminalized. Street vendor criminalization derives from a broad repertoire of urban governance tactics to disappear the urban poor, especially poor people of color, from the city’s public spaces, including its commercial spaces. The street vendor labors against this project, presenting an alternative, both symbolically and materially, to the corporate-led organization of production and consumption in the modern city. Street vendors are therefore policed aggressively as working people of color who do not know their place in this sociospatial hierarchy. In contrast, upscale food truck owners can more easily claim belonging to the “small business community,” presenting themselves as knowledgeable cultural producers (Martin 2014), rightful members of the owning and governing classes. The gourmet food truck presents another sort of alternative: a more affluent, often white and/ or native-born, antidote to the persistent street vendor “problem.” This advantaged status protects against much of the state violence that their lower-income counterparts, usually immigrants and racial minorities,

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continue to experience for carrying out the exact same social practice. The rapid expansion of gourmet food trucking is in many respects a turn of gentrification by innovation, a class and race transformation of marginalized economic and spatial practice. This chapter draws on participant observation and over seventy interviews carried out between 2009 and 2012 in New York City’s street vending industry.1 I worked with two immigrant street vendor organizations, the Street Vendor Project (SVP) and VAMOS Unidos, on everything from office to campaign work. I interviewed roughly fifty vendors from these two organizations, along with the organizations’ directors and staff members. I also interviewed fifteen gourmet food truck owners, some of whom were members of the New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), as well as the NYCFTA’s director. A few other interviews were carried out with longtime advocates for vendors who are artists and military veterans. My research in New York City reveals a sharp division in both quantity and quality of vendor criminalization along the axes of race, class, and nativity. SVP and VAMOS vendors, who are most commonly first-generation immigrants and people of color, experience the brunt of police enforcement, fines, and arrest. Comparatively affluent gourmet food truck owners, who are commonly native-born or highly educated second-generation immigrants, do not get arrested and do not experience policing as a major constraint to their livelihoods; instead, they tend to find fault with the overall system of vending regulation in New York City as needlessly inefficient. The fines they do accrue are less of an economic setback for them, and as a group through the NYCFTA they aim to build bridges with the city as class insiders. Most do not identify as street vendors but as entrepreneurs and innovators building a new, smarter, cleaner industry. As the demographic composition of street vending shifts, vending policies have not developed to lift all boats equally. In the case of New York, the state’s de facto embrace of gourmet food trucks has facilitated gentrification of the food vending sector, causing food permit prices to double inside a handful of years. At the same time, most vendors remain persecuted by police—as is the case in Chicago and Los Angeles, both cities with sizeable immigrant vendor populations who remain criminalized while more “gourmet” food truck economies have flourished thanks to state support. In this way municipal governments actively facilitate the appropriation of street food vending as both culture and industry through policies that concentrate the profits from this appropriation into fewer and comparatively more affluent hands.

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In these larger cities, food trucks can increase social injustice for less affluent food vendors and benefit from their criminalization, demonstrating their own “good citizenship” to city hall. Achieving social justice for street vendors, then, can in no way be achieved without addressing the centrality of criminalization and policing in vendors’ working lives. Street vending reform that protects and promotes food truck owners, for example, does not address industry stratification in working conditions, including the condition of criminalization, and may in fact worsen existing inequalities. Workers and the Urban Process Although the idea that capital builds cities is now taken for granted, it remains perplexing for some to contemplate that working classes build cities too. Labor, in its old and new forms, has disappeared from much contemporary analysis of the urban process, following a long century of restructuring urban space against the interests of both workers and the urban poor (Harvey 1989, 2005; Wilson 1997). Yet as Herod (1997, 2003) has shown, labor nonetheless plays a formative role in economic geography. The search for work has fueled the mass urbanization of late capitalism and profoundly shapes everyday urbanisms, as most struggles over street vending reveal. Efforts to modernize and globalize cities throughout the twentieth century generated a variety of mechanisms to manage dramatic and tandem increases in labor migration and the informal economy, in which street vending constitutes one of the leading occupations (ILC/ILO 2002; ILO 2008; ILO/ES 2002). Municipal policies and governing practices around public space thus include measures of racialized labor discipline over so-called surplus populations, such as early twentieth century modernization efforts to “de-ethnicize” public space (Wasserman 1998) by relocating immigrant street vendors into enclosed public markets. Maintaining a bourgeois structure and culture of urban public space has been a central preoccupation in urban governance since Engels ([1845] 2009) documented the spatiality of class divisions in Manchester. Yet in recent decades, the maintenance of urban public space’s hegemonic order has become inextricable from the politics of race and policing. As the racialization of poverty in the United States has intensified, public space has become an increasingly hostile territory for city dwellers of color (Davis 1992; Low and Smith 2005; Low 2000; McCann 1999; Mitchell 2003). These conflicts include struggles over the right to work in city streets and parks. From informal day laborers and street vendors to more illicit trades,

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disciplining lower-income workers of color is now a central component of the state’s sociolegal control of urban public space (Theodore, Valenzuela, and Meléndez 2006; Vitale 2009). In New York, the reform of street vending regulations from the late 1970s and into the 1990s provides a window into this racialized labor discipline. Mayor Edward Koch enacted most of today’s street vending regulations in New York, with important modifications later made by Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg. In the later years of his tenure as mayor, Koch admitted that he ceded near total control to corporations in the reforms, rooted in a system of caps on legal authorizations for vending and the eviction of street vendors from central business corridors in Manhattan (Devlin 2010). These restrictions were enacted in the wake of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, as more immigrants of color from across the Global South entered the United States, and New York worked to recover from the 1975 fiscal crisis by “re-branding” itself as a global city (Greenberg 2008). Throughout the years of these contentious reforms, street vendors responded by staging strikes, marches, and demonstrations, filing lawsuits, and enacting at least one hunger strike in protest of the proposed restrictions. Street closures and attacks on vendors increased again during Mayor Giuliani’s tenure through an appointed Street Vendor Review Panel, along with a highly militarized removal of African and African American street vendors from 125th Street, a central retail corridor in Harlem. In the past forty years Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the only leader who increased the number of food vending permits available, through the creation of a GreenCarts program to bring fresh produce to food deserts. Yet Bloomberg also dramatically increased the cost of administrative street vending violations, which are easy to accrue and highly detrimental to income security. Working conditions for New York City street vendors have thus been greatly degraded as a result of these reforms. The number of permits for food vending vehicles and licenses for both food handlers and merchandise vendors have been capped for nearly forty years. Food vending permits for vehicles (carts or trucks) were capped at roughly three thousand, and merchandise licenses were capped at under one thousand. Food handling licenses to work on a food cart or truck remain uncapped, and there are roughly nineteen thousand vendors who hold such a license.2 Many who possessed food vending permits as these reforms came into effect held onto them and now function as a shadow rentier class in possession of an increasingly profitable commodity. In a less corporate version of the New York City taxi cab medallion system dominated by middlemen brokers, food permit holders rent out the use of their permits to vendors who

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actually work on the mobile vending unit. First Amendment vendors, those who sell artwork and/or printed materials, were exempted from the permit and license system pursuant to artist-led litigation; military veterans have an exceptional status and their own system of licenses apart from the general one as well. Beyond these authorizations, there are a variety of spatial rules, including over five hundred streets closed to vending altogether, and strict rules governing the size and placement of vending units, be they carts, trucks, or stands. In addition, seven different municipal agencies have some kind of jurisdiction over street vendors in New York. The majority of violation summonses that are issued come from the police. The New York Police Department (NYPD) spends over $4.5 million annually on a special unit that focuses solely on policing vendors in Manhattan’s Midtown and Financial Districts (IBO 2010). However, any police officer can essentially stop and ticket a vendor; this helps to explain how, in fiscal years 2008 and 2009, $15.8 million in fines was assessed, the majority of which went uncollected (IBO 2010). These regulations are so complex and at times contradictory that they increase informality and precarity for street vendors, of which there are estimated to be at least twenty thousand.3 Vendors are all but assured to be in violation of one or another of these codes and laws. As one of the only gourmet food truck owners who belongs to the largely immigrant SVP attests: “The whole industry is basically criminalized.” Vendors are subject to such overwrought oversight for spatial reasons—that is, because they work in public spaces, not shielded by private property. The laws that govern their every move are even more convoluted on the street than they are on paper. As former SVP staff lawyer Matthew Shapiro explains: “A lot of times the regulations don’t fit with the facts on the ground. Because vendors are out there, and there are hundreds of restricted streets, and so if you find a street that is legal, you’ve got to be 20 feet from a door, 10 feet from a crosswalk. There are planters and phone booths on the sidewalk. There ends up being so much more restricted space than what’s actually restricted under the restricted streets list. We tell the vendors, oh look, you can vend on any street that’s not restricted. It’s not true.” Particularly restrictive for food vendors, the cap on food permits (held by individuals, but attached to vehicles) ensures that an overwhelming majority of licensed food vendors are workers and not owners of their own operation. This cap also pushes many to work independently, some with the food handling license but without the unattainable food vending permit, and others without any authorizations. Some food vendors have been

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able to access one of the one thousand newly created GreenCarts permits. Tellingly, however, GreenCart permit jurisdictions are organized by police precinct, not by food desert boundaries or even city council districts. Such legal confusions amount to what an SVP organizer named Darya concisely termed conditions of impossibility. After returning from a meeting for StreetNet International, an international alliance of over three hundred vendor organizations from over fifty countries, Darya pointed out that in poorer cities, “there are just [police] raids at all once, people are running and like, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’ But [in New York], there’s this more systematic, slow exercise of power. It’s the exact same purpose of a raid, but it’s done over time and it’s a much more subtle way of creating the conditions of impossibility for street vending.” Racial Profiling in the Workplace: Policing Immigrant Vendors of Color A growing body of literature on street vendor criminalization reveals that some confluence of racialization and criminalization is a perfunctory state response to vendors’ presence in public space across an astounding range of cities (Bhowmik 2010; Crossa 2009; Cross and Morales 2007; Donovan 2008; Duneier 1999; Dunn 2014, 2015; Graaf and Ha 2015; Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2011; Martínez-Novo 2003; Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juárez 2013; Rosales 2013; Stoller 2002; Swanson 2007; Swider 2014). Street vendors tend to be (im)migrants, disproportionately comprised of women, and largely of poor to working-class backgrounds (ILC/ILO 2002; ILO 2008; ILO/ES 2002; Roever 2014; WIEGO 2014). Unlike the regulatory vortex in New York, for vendors in many cities it is a lack of vending regulation that serves as the principle mechanism of criminalization; police can run roughshod over vendors quite easily when no formal state mechanisms recognize or legitimate their right to work in public spaces. The formation of street vendor unions is a common result (Celik 2010; Gallin 2001; Dunn 2014, 2015), allowing vendors to work together to claim and defend a right to work without police harassment, corruption, arrest, and violence. New York is home to two different street vendor worker centers: membership-based, nonprofit unions that help vendors with grievances, negotiate with police precincts, and campaign for vending reforms. The larger of the two, the SVP, is a multiethnic organization based in Manhattan and largely comprised of male4 vendors who work in Manhattan. Of the SVP’s over 1,300 members, only a small percentage are women, mostly Latinas; most men are first-generation immigrants coming from well over

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twenty countries; and there is a small but important group of African American military veterans who sell merchandise and is quite active among the member leadership. The other worker center, VAMOS Unidos, is based in the Bronx with informal satellite offices in Brooklyn and Queens. This group is Latina/o, mostly comprised of women who live and work in the outer boroughs; its membership numbers around five hundred. Each group has a lean handful of staff and annual operating budgets in the range of $300,000. Overall, the street vendors who are members of these organizations are some of the most precariously employed. They tend to be food vendors; many who belong to SVP rent their food permits or work on mobile vending units for someone else renting a permit, whereas those who belong to VAMOS tend to sell food without a permit, save for a small but growing number who have been able to access a GreenCarts permit with help from the VAMOS staff. Yet there are also members who are doing quite well for themselves, from merchandise vendors with twenty years of experience to the owner of a well-known “gourmet” food truck to family-run vending businesses that pull in a solid middle-class income. This latter group is noteworthy but very much in the minority. My participant observation in these organizations’ offices included going through thousands of vending violation summonses from the police and the Department of Health, along with criminal violations that are less expensive than administrative ones—and policing was also far and away the leading topic of conversation in my interviews with SVP and VAMOS vendors. All of them had been ticketed countless times, and well over half had been arrested at some point—usually for vending without a food permit or merchandise license. Other grounds for arrest include being suspected of selling counterfeit goods; not having one’s license displayed properly (i.e., wearing the license on one’s person as required, but having the front side hidden from view accidentally or momentarily); leaving one’s station momentarily unattended to use the bathroom; refusing to move or comply with police directions; minor-aged children of vendors standing near their parents’ vending unit being arrested as unlicensed workers; and finally but quite commonly, being arrested on grounds that the vendor did not understand at the time of arrest. Most vendors recount their experiences with arrest as a form of racism and/or nativism, often stressing, as Austin (1994) found, that their work is honest and not criminal. One Latino couple who are fruit vendors in the Bronx pointed out that though they regularly see drug deals happening around their block, the police stop vendors with more frequency. Arrested

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for selling handbags deemed counterfeit before he had even set up his table, Moustafa, a Senegalese merchandise vendor, said it took four different appearances at court before his case was dismissed. He explained: “The funny thing is, every two or three weeks, the [police] officer comes back to me and asks ‘How’s the case going?’ I say, listen, don’t ask me about the case no more, the judge don’t understand, nobody understand that you say it’s counterfeit ... Most tickets would be dismissed because there is no right for that ticket, whether they just use that to keep busy like they’re doing something.” According to a 2010 Independent Budget Office report (IBO 2010), Moustafa’s interpretation is likely correct to some degree. Although the city issues nearly $16 million in tickets most years, they collect less than $1 million in revenue on those tickets. Since it began maintaining records on ticket violations in 2005, SVP has handled over 5,500 tickets for its members, with about 70 percent of these ultimately being dismissed. My work putting together VAMOS’s ticket database from 2011 to 2012 covered over three hundred tickets brought in by the members since the group formed in 2007; working with a pro bono law firm, VAMOS was able to get about half of those tickets dismissed and thus enable forty-five vendors to renew their licenses (which cannot happen if a vendor has outstanding fines from violations). With experiences such as these being as pervasive as they are degrading, it is not difficult to grasp the need for two vendor worker centers. As Matt at SVP explains: “If somebody can’t renew their license because they have too many tickets, then how are they going to continue to work? ... My job is to make sure these people are able to work. And if they’re able to work, they’re able to become part of this organization, and they can join us to help achieve these broader goals.” Such goals include negotiating with police precincts, running campaigns at the municipal level against antivending bills or, more recently and successfully, winning a campaign for the city council to lower the maximum fine for administrative vending violations from $1,000 to $500 (rolling back an increase instituted by Mayor Bloomberg). Police precinct work usually aims to resolve specific place-based conflicts. In 2011, SVP worked with a group of produce vendors that constitute an open-air market along Forsyth Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood to deescalate a marked increase in ticketing and vehicle towing that was hurting the vendors’ businesses. In 2010 in Brooklyn, VAMOS organized its members to protest against the Department of Parks when one of its officers had an altercation with a pregnant vendor. To date, the organization has worked with at least seven different police

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precincts in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx to reduce vendor criminalization, including work to reduce the arrest of vendors’ children, most of whom were minors at the time of arrest watching over the cart when their parent went to use a restroom. Members confirm that these negotiations almost always result in a decrease in police interventions. Whereas VAMOS tends to pursue more grassroots, on-the-ground work with its members, SVP generally pursues more symbolic politics, publicizing blatantly unjust vendor criminalization. One such case was the arrest of two popular taco truck vendors and the confiscation of their truck. Although the vendors were not violating any laws, the arrest was made on the grounds that they were vending from metered parking spaces, which the law defines as illegal for vending “goods” but not food. SVP decided to challenge the police actions in court, with the support of the vendors involved. Those vendors, Alberto and his mother Patty, were overcome by the groundlessness and the trauma of the arrest; Patty was brought to the hospital to be treated for a panic attack, and Alberto felt beaten down first by the injustice of the arrest and then by the loss of nearly $5,000 worth of food, goods, and cash from the impounded truck. The family had to ask for a loan from Alberto’s aunt in Mexico to get the truck running and restocked again. They relocated a few times, but continued to encounter resistance from the police at each location. “We were trying on Broadway,” Alberto explains, “but even there they said ‘You got to go, you got to go and we’re going to tow you every time you come.’ So I was thinking they were the racist type, you know? And that was it, it’s awful.” The constant criminalization of their work caused the family a massive amount of stress. As Alberto recounts, “Every time I see a cop, I would feel this thing in my guts, like a bad feeling, scared, panicked ... I still get scared by the police sometimes, you know?” The judge ruled against SVP in the lawsuit, an outcome that added insult to injury for Alberto and Patty and one that also angered many gourmet food truck vendors, for whom the metered parking space was a crucial issue. One gourmet truck owner claimed SVP’s approach was counterproductive. “It increases the hurdle for us ... Our approach has more been to go to the city and say, look, the rules aren’t really up to date and don’t work, right? We want to work with you to come up with something that makes sense for everybody. A less hostile approach I guess. And that—we don’t view the city as the enemy. I can’t say that [SVP] does. I can’t really speak for them, I’ve never been to their meetings. But for us, we’re trying to get a constructive relationship with the city.”

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Gentrifying Precarious Retail: An Insider Approach in an Excluded Industry New York’s new class of gourmet food truck owners entered into a profoundly marginalized industry fraught with regulatory challenges. In 2011, a small number of gourmet food truck owners came together to form the NYCFTA, led by David Weber, who also co-owns the popular Rickshaw Dumpling truck (and restaurant).5 In 2011, there were under thirty members, but forty-five food truck businesses now are members of the association. As one might expect, this group represents a different constituency in the city’s vending landscape, one that is a small minority at present but has achieved a tremendous amount of success in a short period. A crucial factor in that success has been a city government amenable to the group’s arrival and facilitative of its profitability. Although many upscale food trucks are not members of the NYCFTA, the association restricts its membership to the owners of branded food trucks; franchises or vendors who do not own their mobile food vending unit may not join. Several members run multiple trucks, and some own brick-andmortar restaurants or plan to open one soon. A few NYCFTA members own food truck businesses in other cities as well. Others run only one truck and change their offerings based on the season and/or turn toward private catering in addition to street vending. Gourmet truck owners in New York tend to be white and native-born (with some notable second-generation immigrant truck owners as well) and highly educated; those who belong to the NYCFTA pay monthly dues that are three times SVP’s yearly dues and ten times VAMOS’s; these dues help subsidize administrative costs for event planning and lobbying. The group is specifically motivated to reform the city’s vending regulations that constrain the ability of food truck owners to hire staff quickly and that limit where food trucks may park legally. As its website states, the NYCFTA aims to “reinvent food truck vending,” to assure that food trucks operate as “good citizens,” and to “advocate on behalf of food trucks with local and state government for fair laws that reflect the changing realities of street vending.”6 Most of these more affluent food vendors entered street vending because they could not access the commercial real estate rental market; they saw street vending as a way to build their brand and attract investors. As one truck owner explained: “I tell everybody that we’re not selling tacos here. We’re selling our brand.” Indeed, when asked open-ended questions about their working conditions, gourmet food vendors tend to speak the

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languages of marketing, business plans, and mitigating risk. Many would prefer to run brick-and-mortar businesses, given their product and clientele. One explained: “When people want to pay [only] $8 for lunch, something has to give to make those economics work. You know, I want organically sourced, yummy things that are totally healthy, and I want to eat in a super friendly and clean, nice environment, and I want my staff to speak perfect English and be extremely cordial and responsive—all the desires that people have translate into a price. ... People want it right at the base of their office building, but the rent right there is $250 per square foot. The real estate question is a crucial part of the entire calculation. ... All things being equal, if the rent were cheaper, I’d rather open a store.” Their experiences with the police are in the main a nuisance, but manageable for most. Gourmet vendors have far less trouble with police, and none of the fifteen that I interviewed had ever been arrested for street vending. By and large, many owners did not speak extensively about the police. According to one: “We haven’t had that many problems with the police. We’ve only had, like, one run in. The only thing we could complain about is the Health Department.” Another owner explained: “I think the police only come if the—the local merchants or whoever calls to report you. And you know, you try to be on their good side, and you never try to park in front of restaurants, and be respectful. And I think if you follow all those things, I think you’ll be successful.” When gourmet vendors did talk about the police, they often characterized the policing of vendors as inefficient, but not as an injustice. As Weber explains: We’re happy to follow a broad set of laws, and we do. But there’s so much oversight of the industry. And we work really hard to be sensitive and comply with as much as we can. [Customers] are asking us to come, and then the NYPD is asking us to leave. So we’re just trying to educate everybody about what’s going on, and then come up with a broad set of agreements that everyone can agree on. So we can satisfy the needs of New Yorkers, satisfy the administration, and maybe free up some of these police officers to focus on things that are really important.

Such viewpoints express a dramatically different relationship with the state than the one lower-income immigrant’s experience. The comparatively weaker impact of policing on gourmet vendors’ livelihoods has been crucial to their growth and expansion in New York. As anyone familiar with the industry knows, it is highly unlikely that these vendors are operating in full legal compliance with vending codes, given the more than

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thirty-year-old cap on food vending permits. As the caps give rise to an underground rental market, comparatively affluent vendors can drive up the going rate for permit rentals—and they have. Food vendors in New York would rather not disclose the details of how they obtained the permits for their carts or trucks. When I first began to ask about permits in early 2011, the few vendors who would discuss the details mentioned prices in the $10,000 to $13,000 range. By 2012, Eddie Song, a co-owner of the highly celebrated Korilla BBQ Korean fusion food truck, “came out” about his permit situation in an interview, admitting that he had to pay $20,000 in cash to rent the permit for his truck (Marritz 2012). Since then, Sean Basinski, the head of SVP, has stated several times that permit rentals in this price range are now the norm. For all practical purposes, the caps on food permits have privatized the market for them, and that property market is now undergoing rapid gentrification. Unless reform is undertaken, this gentrification by innovation will continue to push out or block lower-income vendors from renting food permits—permits that would provide them with greater autonomy in their workplace and more protection from arrest. For more affluent vendors, access to the street food market has already yielded significant upward mobility. Between 2011, when the NYCFTA first formed, and 2012, Weber attests that 40 percent of the group’s members now own their own brickand-mortar restaurants (Clark 2012). In contrast, staff from the SVP attest that only a handful of their 1,300 members have made this same transition during the organization’s ten-year existence; for VAMOS Unidos, organized in 2007, only one vendor out of five hundred has been able to leave the street and open her own restaurant. Beyond this immediate material effect, the success of upscale trucks has attracted corporate interest in “street marketing,” usually one-off events by multinational brands that use food trucks to hawk their brands and/or new products. In New York, brands include Victoria’s Secret, the AMC television network, Gap, and Air France, to name a few. One NYCFTA member described the organization as a “one-stop shop” for brands looking to rent trucks for such promotional purposes, providing a likely handsome revenue stream for the members of that organization. The culture of street vending has been appropriated for commodification, not simply by small-scale restauranteurs but by massive multinationals eager to market to the everprofitable urban youth demographic. This question of street vending’s cultural appropriation, rather than material displacement through a permit market, may prove more salient to

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patterns of street vending gentrification in other cities because it proceeds in dialectical tension with immigrant vendor criminalization. Food trucks working with greater economic power and catering to a more upmarket clientele can produce street food that conforms to upper-strata cultural expectations of both dining out and public space. Although much of the culinary repertoire of these trucks is appropriated from immigrant and working-class cuisine (see Johnston and Baumann 2010 on foodie culture), their classed (re)presentation of street food has enabled street vending reforms that empower truck owners but not those working from the sidewalk (Frommer and Gall 2012). This is precisely the battle unfurling in both Chicago and Los Angeles, two other large cities with sizeable immigrant vendor populations that remain criminalized on the sidewalk, while the food truck economy has found ways to flourish (Martin 2014; Frommer and Gall 2012). In New York, several gourmet food vendors pointed to what they perceived as the differences between their innovative industry and an outdated industry comprised of poor immigrants. Speaking about what little they knew of SVP, one gourmet vendor noted, “One general sense I get [about SVP] is that they represent vendors, food vendors, from illegal ones to legal ones. So even the lady in the subway who’s selling those churros, she doesn’t have a permit but she’s represented by the Project. What’s specific about us is that we’re gourmet food trucks, we’re kind of like a new breed, and we’re trying to raise the standard in a legal way.” Against this perception stands the strong likelihood that nearly all food vendors are operating in a state of dubious legality at best; moreover, profiting from the appropriation of a people’s culinary culture while distancing oneself from the people themselves is many things, but it is not innovative. The continuing criminalization of these “illegal vendors” serves to strengthen the niche market of “high-quality street food,” in a good vendor/bad vendor dynamic that reproduces class, race, and nativist stratification in this most precarious of retail sectors. Shifting the Focus from the Built Environment to Its Builders Are food truck owners street vendors? For many food truck owners, the answer would likely be no—even though the sale of food on the street is one of the most common social practices of urban life. Perhaps the tenuousness of the distinction helps to explain why food truck owners and enthusiasts alike fetishize the truck itself—to invoke social distance from

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food vendors of lesser means, to denote ownership and perform conspicuous production of the “artisanal” variety. Food trucks cost a minimum of $35,000 and can go well into six figures once flashy paint jobs, oven and other cookware upgrades, and even thumping sound systems are in play. In common parlance, food truck has come to connote higher-class street vendor. The silent referent, in many cities, continues her work, like her more moneyed counterpart, but under far more hostile conditions. Should laws governing street food be bifurcated between the street and the sidewalk, when we know that difference is shaped almost entirely by race, nativity, and socioeconomic standing? Although many technocratic justifications could be made for maintaining a two-tiered system of street food citizenship, reform that leans even nominally in the direction of increasing social justice would seek to redress the strongly patterned classand race-based stratification present in street vending today. The current policy landscape is one in which vendors who look like class peers of planners and policymakers can effectively achieve, more often than not, reforms that work for them. There is no evidence that this pathway of reform has any beneficial impact for low-income vendors who are class or race outsiders to business-friendly city hall power structures. Participatory planning is a possible pathway for street vendors to build power through inclusion, one that would require shifting planners’ perception of vendors as inanimate “obstacles” in the streetscape to urban inhabitants who bring life to the city, generating employment and much-needed affordable retail options for other low-income urbanites. As Skinner (2009) documents, organized street vendors collaborated with city planners to incorporate space for their trading in the redevelopment of Warwick Junction, a major transport hub in Durban, South Africa. Although the associational power and savvy of the vendors was key to this development, so too was Durban city hall’s decision to prioritize the quality of life concerns of the urban poor. One could plausibly argue that a similar reorientation in US municipal politics is beginning to take shape. Community-labor coalitions, living wage campaigns, and the Fight for $15 movement have, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, brought actionable plans to redress urban poverty to the table in dozens of cities. These initiatives have street vending counterparts in the campaign to legalize sidewalk vending in Los Angeles and in a bill backed by a long-standing Latina/o vendor group in Chicago’s South Side to grant licenses to sidewalk vendors there as well. New York’s vendor groups are also gearing up for their next campaign to tackle the caps on food permits and merchandise licenses.

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Social justice for street vendors cannot be achieved by continuing to ignore the profound stratification that food trucks and food truck policies have intensified in several cities. Reforming street vending requires social justice in the process of reform, which means that street vendors of all strata—not only food truck owners—must build power and voice in the planning and policy-making process. Planners and policy-makers might ask a new set of questions about the built environments they are charged with governing: Who builds them? And are those who build and sustain the everyday lives of our streets able to inhabit their creation, or not? Notes 1.  All quotes from street vendors, food truck owners, and their advocates that are presented in this chapter are drawn from these interviews. Interviews were conducted in 2011 and 2012 during the course of fieldwork carried out in New York City. 2.  Personal correspondence with a Department of Health official, 2011. 3.  Street vendors are not independently classified in the US Census, and the municipal records kept on street vendors in New York do not cover First Amendment vendors or those who vend without any authorizations. 4.  Gender does function as an important axis of stratification, particularly among lower income vendors; see Dunn 2014, 2015. 5.  I interviewed food truck owners who were and were not members of this organization; due to the branded nature of each gourmet food truck business, I have not named any gourmet food truck owners interviewed, except for David Weber when citing comments he made in his capacity as leader of the NYCFTA. 6. See http://www.nycfoodtrucks.org/.

References Austin, Regina. 1994. “‘An Honest Living’: Street Vendors, Municipal Regulation, and the Black Public Sphere.” Yale Law Journal 103 (8): 21. Bhowmik, Sharit. 2010. Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy. New Delhi: Routledge. Celik, Ercüment. 2010. Street Traders: A Bridge Between Trade Unions and Social Movements in Contemporary South Africa. Freiburg, Germany: Nomos.

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Clark, Ethan. 2012. “Hell on Wheels: Why Food Truck Owners Are Increasingly Turning to Brick-and-Mortar Shops.” Grub Street, July 11. http://www.grubstreet.com/ 2012/07/food-trucks-turn-to-stores-for-convenience-reliability.html. Cross, John C., and Alfonso Morales. 2007. Street Entrepreneurs: People, Place and Politics in Local and Global Perspective. London: Routledge. Crossa, Veronica. 2009. “Resisting the Entrepreneurial City: Street Vendors’ Struggle in Mexico City’s Historic Center.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (1): 43–63. Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz. New York: Vintage Books. Devlin, Ryan. 2010. “Informal Urbanism: Legal Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and the Management of Street Vending in New York City.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Donovan, Michael G. 2008. “Informal Cities and the Contestation of Public Space: The Case of Bogotá’s Street Vendors, 1988–2003.” Urban Studies 45 (1): 29–51. Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dunn, Kathleen. 2014. “Street Vendors in and against the Global City: VAMOS Unidos.” In New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement, edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, 134–149. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dunn, Kathleen. 2015. “Flexible Families: Latina/o Food Vending in Brooklyn, New York.” In Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy, edited by Kristina Graaf and Noa Ha, 19–42. Berlin: Berghahn Books. Engels, Friedrich. (1845) 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Estrada, Emir, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. 2011. “Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (1): 102–131. Frommer, Robert, and Bert Gall. 2012. “Food-Truck Freedom: How to Build Better Food-Truck Laws in Your City.” The Institute for Justice, November. http://ij.org/ report/food-truck-freedom/. Gallin, Dan. 2001. “Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in Times of Globalisation.” Antipode 33 (3): 531–549. Graaf, Kristina, and Noa Ha, eds. 2015. Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy. Berlin: Berghahn Books.

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Greenberg, Miriam. 2008. Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71 (1): 3–17. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herod, Andrew. 1997. “From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism.” Antipode 29 (1): 1–31. Herod, Andrew. 2003. “Workers, Space, and Labor Geography.” International Labor and Working Class History 64 (1): 112–138. IBISWorld . 2015. “Street Vendors in the US: Market Research Report.” IBISWorld, October. http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/default.aspx?indid=1683. Independent Budget Office (IBO). 2010. “Sidewalk Standoff: Street Vendor Regulations Are Costly, Confusing, and Leave Many Disgruntled.” Fiscal Brief, New York City Independent Budget Office, November. http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/ peddlingnovember2010.pdf. International Labour Conference and International Labour Office (ILC/ILO). 2002. “Decent Work and the Informal Economy Sixth Item on the Agenda.” http:// www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---emp_policy/documents/ publication/wcms_210442.pdf. International Labour Office (ILO). 2008. Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward. Geneva: ILO. International Labour Office and Employment Sector (ILO/ES). 2002. Women and Men in the Informal Economy: Statistical Picture. Geneva: ILO. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Low, Setha M. 2000. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Low, Setha M., and Neil Smith. 2005. The Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge. Marritz, Ilya. 2012. “Broken Permitting System Forces Food Trucks into Black Market.” WNYC, June 6. http://www.wnyc.org/story/214757-food-trucks/?utm_source =sharedUrl&utm_medium=metatag&utm_campaign=sharedUrl. Martin, Nina. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883.

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McCann, Eugene J. 1999. “Race, Protest, and Public Space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the U.S. City.” Antipode 31 (2): 163. Meneses-Reyes, Rodrigo, and José A. Caballero-Juárez. 2013. “The Right to Work on the Street: Public Space and Constitutional Rights.” Planning Theory 13 (4): 370–386. Mitchell, Don. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press. Martínez Novo, Carmen. 2003. “The ‘Culture’ of Exclusion: Representations of Indigenous Women Street Vendors in Tijuana, Mexico.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22 (3): 249–268. New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT). 2008. “World Class Streets: Remaking New York City’s Public Realm.” NYCDOT. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/ downloads/pdf/World_Class_Streets_Gehl_08.pdf. Roever, Sally. 2014. “Informal Economy Monitoring Study Sector Report: Street Vendors.” WEIGO, April. http://wiego.org/publications/iems-sector-report-street -vendors. Rosales, Rocio. 2013. “Survival, Economic Mobility and Community among Los Angeles Fruit Vendors.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (5): 697–717. Schwartz, Carly, and Aaron Sankin. 2012. “Nancy Pelosi Food Truck Tour: Our Congresswoman Goes off the Grid (PHOTOS).” Huffington Post, January 23. http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/nancy-pelosi-food-truck-tour_n_1210899 .html. Skinner, Caroline. 2009. “Challenging City Imaginaries: Street Traders’ Struggles in Warwick Junction.” Agenda 23 (81): 101–109. Stoller, Paul. 2002. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swanson, Kate. 2007. “Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street Vendors in Ecuador.” Antipode 39 (4): 708–728. Swider, Sarah. 2014. “Reshaping China’s Urban Citizenship: Street Vendors, Chengguan and Struggles over the Right to the City.” Critical Sociology 41 (4–5): 701–716. Theodore, Nik, Abel Valenzuela, and Edwin Meléndez. 2006. “La Esquina (The Corner): Day Laborers on the Margins of New York’s Formal Economy.” Working USA 9 (4): 407–423. Vitale, Alex S. 2009. City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. New York: NYU Press.

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Wasserman, Suzanne. 1998. “The Good Old Days of Poverty: Merchants and the Battle over Pushcart Peddling on the Lower East Side.” Business and Economic History 27 (2): 330–339. Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). 2014. “Executive Summary—Informal Economy Monitoring Study: Street Vendors.” WIEGO, April. http://wiego.org/publications/iems-executive-summary-street-vendors-report. Wilson, William Julius. 1997. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage.

4  To Serve and to Protect: Food Trucks and Food Safety in a Transforming Los Angeles Mark Vallianatos

One of the strangest evolutionary products of the industrial age in the Southland is the lunch truck. It flourishes here as nowhere else in the world. —Leap 1959

Food trucks are magical urbanism on four wheels. They unmoor food from the “brick and mortar” of traditional retail, bringing meals and commerce to parts of the city where it is barred by zoning or absent due to economics. Industrial catering trucks provide a break from tightly controlled assembly lines. Taco trucks offer quick and fulfilling food to workers ending shifts far from home, to locals too worn out from the day to want to cook, and to anyone out on the town or enjoying a break on the streets. There is nothing magic about getting sick from a meal. In an era of public health letter grades and Yelp reviews, we expect our food to be safe, just as we sometimes like it to be “street.” We simultaneously value the spontaneity and informality of food trucks and rely on policy and bureaucracy to keep their products safe as it travels from commissary to curb. This chapter considers food trucks through a lens of food safety. Focusing on the LA region, it examines the coevolution of food trucks and policies to regulate them in order to investigate how regulators and society address real and perceived dangers. I explore how new forms of food trucks arose and how their design and business models became embedded in safety regulations. Policy is just one of many factors that shape how food trucks are designed and where and how they operate. Changes in vehicle and food service technologies and shifts in economic and geographic patterns also have influenced the mobile food industry profoundly. I look at policy because it is one of the key ways that we try to collectively determine how we should live. In the case of food trucks, this has come to mean: How do we ensure that the food they sell is safe to eat? As businesses staffed by people of different

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backgrounds and races, with products and visual cues that embody cultural identity, food trucks can also raise broader questions. Who can use streets and public places? As roving, visible, and social-media-trackable symbols, food trucks have helped mark the borders of legitimacy. Can they also shift those borders? I came to questions of food truck policy and history via their humble cousin: the food cart. Sidewalk vending has been illegal in the city of Los Angeles for decades, and in conducting research on food carts I familiarized myself with some of the basic health code requirements for carts and for food trucks (Vallianatos 2014, 214). When thinking of the roles that food trucks played in the region, I began to wonder about the origins of these trucks and the food safety standards that apply to them. I was aware that food trucks at some point had evolved from mobile snack shops selling food cooked at commissaries into a new role as mobile restaurants, with meals cooked inside the trucks. As I tracked down regulations related to this key evolutionary leap in food truck operations, I became increasingly aware that food trucks have long been a core building block of Southern California. Food trucks have impacted Los Angeles’s built environment, its economy, and its cultural fabric. Industrial catering trucks helped the region industrialize rapidly during World War II and the Cold War, serving workers up to a million meals per day in the 1950 and 1960s (Leap 1959). Food trucks also proved adaptable when Los Angeles deindustrialized. Taco trucks provided employment for immigrants who couldn’t find formal employment and served culturally relevant food to the increasingly immigrant workforce of the region’s shrunken, lower-wage manufacturing sector. Food trucks have marked the boundaries of immigrant neighborhoods; they could potentially help mash up and bridge Los Angeles’s diverse cultures. Another revelation for me was how modern food trucks that we see on streets today are almost entirely a product of Southern California. The idea of selling food from and cooking food on a vehicle wasn’t invented in Los Angeles. There are plenty of parallel developments in other regions and industries, and Los Angeles had its own precursors to food trucks. However, the modern, self-propelled, “cook-aboard” food truck as it is known in many communities and celebrated in popular culture was born in, evolved in, and reached its apogee in the LA region. Food trucks’ evolution proceeded in several stages over the approximately seventy years since World War II. At key points in this evolution, new food safety regulations were passed at state and local levels. These regulations intersected with the design and operation of food trucks, both as

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cause and effect. Figure 4.1 shows a timeline of the development of the modern food truck alongside significant food safety legislation and regulation. This chapter follows this give and take, from food truck precursors and parallels to the rise of industrial catering trucks during and after World War II to the shift to “hot” or cook-aboard food and taco trucks to contemporary Twitter trucks. Precursors and Parallels People need to eat while traveling, and vehicles have obvious advantages for distributing and selling food. Therefore, equipment and methods for cooking on the move and/or for taking food prepared in fixed-location kitchens to where customers live or work have evolved numerous times. Ship galley kitchens, military field kitchens, chuck wagons, and railroad dining cars are among the many different models for feeding passengers or carrying a kitchen from place to place. New England–style lunch wagons or cars provide one example that illustrates how vehicles can adapt to cooking and serving food. Lunch wagons originated in and around Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1880s. They were divided into a “kitchen apartment”—in which an operator made sandwiches, cut slices of pie, and poured coffee—and space for customers to stand and, later, sit inside (Gutman 2004, 9). Some of these lunch wagons (later called lunch cars when they were pulled by trucks) were moved to different sites, but many were fixed in place, evolving into diners with full menus and restaurant-style cooktops, ovens, exhaust hoods, and so on. A few lunch cars remained mobile. They were mounted onto or pulled by trucks, cooking and welcoming customers on board well into the 1980s (Gutman 2004, 29, 81). Los Angeles had its own precursors to and variants of food trucks. In the 1880s and 1890s, “a cavalry of two-by-four pushcarts and eight-foot-long wagons with walls that opened up to reveal cooks inside wheeled their way towards the Plaza” in downtown Los Angeles in the evening to set up and sell tamales to laborers and customers of area taverns (Arellano 2012, 55). In the early twentieth century, Angelinos embraced motor cars early and in large numbers (Brilliant 1965, 191). Food delivery trucks became common sights. Some, like Helms Bakery, delivered to homes from trucks painted with the slogan “daily at your door,” letting residents pick out loaves, donuts, and cakes (“Why I Like Helms Olympic Bread” 1932; Last One on the Bus 2013).

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East Coast lunch cars

Parallels

Other mobile food services

(trains, airlines, mobile homes, ships, etc) > Late nineteenth to twentieth centuries > Food prepared on board (trains, ships, mobile homes) or offsite (planes) > Customers on board

California Restaurant Act

> 1947 > Treated vehicles as restaurants > Not applied to food trucks

Food safety laws

> Revised 1961 > Covered vehicles & itinerant restaurants > Catering trucks treated as vehicles

Commissaries and mobile units > 1968 CA statute > Regulated mobile food preparation units > Cook-aboard food trucks considered mobile units

> 1880–1920 > Food heated, prepared on wagon

LA food delivery trucks (bakery, 1930s to 1960s; ice

cream, 1920s to present) > Food prepared elsewhere > Sold from truck

Pretruck industrial catering

> 1940s > Food prepared elsewhere > Sold on foot or from auto trunk

Industrial catering trucks

> 1940s to 1950s > Food prepared elsewhere > Sold from truck

Industrial catering trucks with hot food

> 1950s to 1980s > Food prepared elsewhere, kept warm on truck

‘Hot’ or ‘cook-aboard’ trucks

> Mid to late 1960s to present > Food cooked on truck > Sold from truck

Taco trucks

> 1974 to present > Hot truck specializing in Mexican food

Twitter trucks Letter grades for mobile food > 2011 LA county ordinance > Twice-annual inspections

> 2008 to present > Hot truck announcing location via social media

Figure 4.1 Coevolution of Southern California food trucks and California food safety laws.

Direct lineage

California Restaurant Act

LA tamale wagons

Precursors

> 1880–1970 > Food prepared offsite or onboard > Usually fixed location > Cooks and customers onboard

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The Rise of Industrial Catering Whereas bakery and milk trucks were associated with domesticity and plied their wares on suburban streets, the modern food truck emerged from the industrial hubs of the metropolis. Residents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles were conflicted about the desirability of industrialization. Whether debating growth, securing a harbor and water projects for the city, or engaging in regional and local planning, Angelinos struggled to reconcile what historian Robert M. Fogelson described as “their ambitions for a great metropolis with their visions of the good community” (Fogelson 1967, 273). Many LA elites invested in real estate. They worried that manufacturing would ruin residential districts—but some also wanted to ensure there was space for the industry needed to build a greater Los Angeles. Industry did eventually find places to locate. Movie studios, petroleum wells and refineries (Viehe 1981, 5–11), branch factories of national corporations (Fogelson 1967, 128–129), and airplane firms (Graham 2012, 249–251) sited facilities throughout LA County. These industries helped shape the region as one of multiple centers, often with a major factory or factories supporting adjacent residential suburbs. World War II led to a rapid buildup of war industries. Every month, tens of thousands of additional workers moved into Southern California. By 1941, there were already four hundred thousand defense workers in LA County (Graham 2012, 251). These workers needed places to eat. With so many new facilities opening and existing plants expanding in industrial-zoned sites that often lacked close restaurants or grocery stores, there was a demand for coffee and breakfast in the morning and meals at lunch break. Food trucks helped stitch together the region’s far-flung industrial networks and bring food into industrial districts. The first industrial caterers were individuals who could meet a demand by bringing sandwiches to job sites. A 1964 news article notes in retrospect: “Necessity mothered this industry. During World War II the rapidly expanding war plants had few or no food facilities. This led to some enterprising individuals selling box lunches on the corner. As business grew, the operators loaded small trucks with the lunches and added coffee-filled vacuum urns. Finally, someone cut the sides out of an old panel truck and added a pan of ice for milk and other cold beverages. All this led the sheet metal industry to design and manufacture truck bodies for the mobile food truck operators” (“Catering Story Paces City’s Great

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Growth” 1964). By the end of the war, industrial catering had developed into a major business. Catering companies owned commissaries in which food items were assembled and packaged and operated fleets of lunch trucks to carry items to businesses. In 1945, for example, Canale Foods Inc. established a commissary in the city of El Monte, southeast of Los Angeles. Over the next twenty years, its fleet grew to fifty trucks. In 1966, following a major client (a home pool equipment company) that relocated to a neighboring county, Canale opened a second food prep site in the city of Colton, forty miles east of El Monte (“We’re Celebrating Our First Anniversary” 1967). By the late 1950s, the industry consisted of thirty or more “catering houses” (what we call commissaries today), preparing food for between 1,500 and 2,000 lunch trucks that served 750,000 meals and 46,000 gallons of coffee a day (“Caterers Will Celebrate ‘Coming of Age’” 1957). The industry had its own trade group, the Industrial Caterers’ Association, and a sense of professionalism, a belief that its operations were more sophisticated that just “the man who just goes out and gets a truck, loads it up and merrily drives down the highway with his telephone book at his side” (Ingrassia v. Bailey 1959). In granting a preliminary injunction against a former employee, an appeals court agreed that industrial catering relied upon information and organization that might be considered trade secrets: “(1) The number of employees, (2) the number of employees who would likely patronize a catering service, (3) the type and quality of food, beverage, and sundries which would be required, (4) the likes, dislikes, fancies and buying habits of prospective customers, (5) what plants furnished eating facilities for their employees, (6) the time to arrive and the duration of the stop, and (7) the order in which [to] make the stops for the most efficient operation of the route” (Ingrassia v. Bailey 1959). This decision underscored how catering had matured as an industry, to the point that catering company operating procedures and relationships with industrial facilities were considered worthy of legal protection as intellectual property. It also detailed the symbiotic connection that had developed between industrial caterers and many employers in the region. Food Safety Standards for Catering Trucks The sophisticated industrial catering industry that arose in Southern California developed initially under a regime of state food safety regulations put in place after World War II. The focus then was on fixed-location

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restaurants and commercial kitchens more than on trucks. Updates to the rules in the early and late 1960s began to address the circumstances of food trucks in more detail. The state legislature passed the California Restaurant Act in 1947. It defined a restaurant as “any coffee shop, cafeteria, short order cafe, luncheonette, tavern, sandwich stand, soda fountain, or other eating or drinking establishment which sells or offers food to the public, as well as kitchens in which food or drink is prepared on the premises for sale or distribution elsewhere” (California 1947, 964). Among its standards, the act mandated that surfaces be kept clean, hot and cold water be provided to rooms in which food was prepared, utensils be cleaned by immersion in hot water of at least 180 degrees Fahrenheit or in a chlorine bath, and openings be screened against bugs (California 1947, 964–967). Although the definition of restaurant doesn’t mention trucks, section 28626 states: “Every restaurant, excepting vehicles, shall be provided with adequate and conveniently located toilet facilities on the premises for its employees or operatives” (California 1947, 965). This implies that a catering truck is a restaurant under the act. I haven’t found evidence that the 1947 act was regularly applied to food trucks; instead, the food code evolved to more directly reference mobile food preparation and service. Counties and municipalities were allowed to adopt stricter regulations if they chose to. In the city of Los Angeles, health regulation forbid caterers and vendors from handling hot foods other than coffee, tamales, and hot dogs (Senn 1955, 35). This meant that nearly all food trucks were technically in violation, because many industrial caterers sold “complete hot meals, hot sandwiches, meat and poultry pies, beef stew, spaghetti and meat balls, baked beans, soups, salads, [and] dairy products” (Senn 1955, 33–34). In 1953 and 1954, the city worked with the industrial catering industry to relax restrictions on hot food in exchange for truck equipment upgrades so that meals could be “packed, packaged, or prepared at a temperature that prevented contamination by staphylococcus or normal pathogens. The vehicles were equipped with hot food storage cabinets heated by charcoal or butane. The latter are most desirable since they can be thermostatically controlled. Charcoal-heated chambers were redesigned so they can be kept at the desirable temperature of over 180 F” (Senn 1955, 34–35). Although this pilot program suggested the feasibility of food safety standards tailored to catering trucks, it took more than five years for California to update its Restaurant Act to account for the rise in sales of hot food items from trucks. Catering companies favored rules that would distinguish

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their vehicles from other food establishments. During a 1957 California Assembly committee hearing, the general counsel of the Industrial Caterers’ Association “urged that special laws be written for catering trucks selling pre-wrapped food and beverages in individual containers.” He argued that “catering trucks should not be considered restaurants and made to comply with dishwashing, hand-washing and other similar requirements” (“L.A.’s Food Poisoning Cases” 1957). A few years later, the state again considered the need for better rules for catered food. A 1960 state senate hearing included testimony from health officials that, in addition to insufficiently heated hot meals, soft sandwiches stored at above 50 degrees Fahrenheit posed greater risks of food poisoning (“Food Handling Problem” 1960). In 1961, a new version of the California Restaurant Act was passed and signed into law. It split what had been a single set of food safety standards into four sections: restaurants, itinerant restaurants, vehicles, and vending machines. Itinerant restaurants included “any mobile unit on which food is prepared and served” (California 1961, 1814). A vehicle was defined as “any vehicle upon which food or beverage is displayed, sold or offered for sale at retail, or given away to the public, but not including bakery delivery trucks which are used to carry bakery products in sealed packages” (California 1961, 1814). It mattered which set of regulations were applied to food trucks. Itinerant restaurants were required to have hot and cold running water, to have two- or three-chambered sinks for washing multiuse utensils, and to provide mechanical ventilation hoods above cooking equipment (California 1961, 1822–1824). Vehicles did not need these safeguards, but were required, like restaurants and itinerant restaurants, to keep all “readily perishable food or beverages, capable of supporting rapid and progressive growth of micro-organisms, which can cause food infections or food intoxications” at or below 60 degrees fahrenheit; or, if the food was being served hot, at or above 140 degrees fahrenheit” (California 1961, 1828). With the revised Restaurant Act, both industrial caterers and health officials had achieved some of their goals. If they didn’t prepare or cook food on their trucks, catering trucks were considered vehicles and covered by a separate section of the health code. Health officials had temperature requirements for storing perishable food applied to all food trucks, whether regulated as itinerant restaurants or vehicles.

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The Start of Hot Trucks, the End of the Cold War, and the Reign of Taco Trucks A hot sandwich always tastes better than a cold one. —Joe Merio, executive director, the Industrial Caterers’ Association, 1978 (Gepfert 1978)

Probably the greatest evolutionary step in the design and use of food trucks was the start of cooking on trucks. In retrospect, there were significant advantages to what the industrial catering industry and regulators called hot trucks or cook-aboard trucks, to distinguish them from the traditional cold trucks that carried and sold food that had been prepared in commercial kitchens. The primary benefit was a result of the fact that many people prefer the taste of just-cooked food. The option of adapting trucks for cooking aboard long had been available to the industrial catering industry, yet no catering company had transformed its fleet of trucks. When and where did food truck owners start cooking aboard, and why did this transition happen? News accounts of the transformation of the food truck industry in Southern California in the 1970s state that the first hot trucks started operating in LA County in the 1960s (Gepfert 1978). This is consistent with the best evidence that I have been able to track down on early cook-aboard trucks, which consists of classified ads for catering trucks and want ads for food truck employees. A typical ad for a catering truck in the early 1960s reads: “’61 Ford Catering Truck. f-250 Custom Cab. Stainless steel, coffee urns. Fully equipped and ready to work. Only $600 down and $183.14 per month puts you in business” (“Display Ad” 1962). The earliest ad for a cook-aboard truck I have located is from 1966. It offers a 1956 Ford equipped with a much more extensive set of cooking equipment: “steam table, grill, coffee urns, butane, generator or plug in” (“Catering Truck Ad” 1966). By 1968, ads were using the term catering hot trucks (“Catering Truck Ad” 1968) and seeking fry cooks to work on catering trucks. This revolution in food trucks was sparked by a few independent caterers who converted cold catering trucks to hot trucks. Existing industrial catering companies were slow to follow, partly because of the greater cost of cook-aboard trucks but also because such a change required adjustments to their business models. In 1978, a decade after cook-aboard trucks were pioneered, two-thirds of the companies that were members of the Industrial Caterers Association were still cold truck operators (Welkos 1978). Al Ely, general manager of Orange County Food Services, Inc., commented

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while reminiscing that year that hot trucks “spread like a prairie fire,” but “we had such a nice operation until the hot trucks came along,” so “we refused to make the transition for a long time” (Welkos 1978). Ely and his company were eventually “forced into the hot truck business” and started buying two hot trucks per month after fifty to one hundred factories they had serviced canceled their business due to a desire for freshly cooked meals. During this transition, Ely admitted that he still was urging Orange County health officials to ban hot trucks in hopes of reclaiming market share (Welkos 1978). With cook-aboard hot trucks rapidly supplanting older-style catering trucks, the food truck industry finally caught up to the expectation in the state health code that trucks could be regulated as restaurants. In 1968, just as the first hot truck operators started cooking food onboard their trucks, the state passed a new update to its food safety rules relating to vehicles. The statute moved trucks and carts on which food was prepared out of the itinerant restaurant category and into a new category of mobile units: “All mobile units, upon which food is prepared ... shall operate out of a commissary or other facility approved by the local health officer. All mobile units upon which food is prepared shall be subject to approval by the local health officer and shall be cleaned at the approved commissary after each day’s use and before being used again” (California 1968). The ordinance also authorized the state Board of Public Heath to implement additional regulations for mobile units and commissaries. Agency rule-making in 1969 defined a mobile food preparation unit as “any vehicle upon which ready-to-eat food is cooked, wrapped, packaged, or portioned for service, sale or distribution” (“Mobile Food Preparation Units” 1969), while exempting bakery trucks and meat, fish, poultry, or produce delivery trucks. All such mobile food preparation units were required to have a two-chamber sink with hot and cold running water—three chambers if multiuse utensils were used on board—and a separate single-chamber sink for hand washing. Perishable foods were to be kept at 50 degrees Fahrenheit or below by mechanical refrigeration (note that this is ten degrees colder than the 1961 itinerant restaurant rules) or kept heated at 140 degrees and higher (California 1969, 290.3). County health departments had responsibilities to inspect and approve food trucks and the commissaries in which every truck had to be stored and cleaned. Hot food trucks spread out from LA County, gaining market share and regulatory approval. San Diego County legalized cook-aboard trucks in late 1978 despite arguments from an attorney for the traditional

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industrial catering industry that hot trucks were “moving firebombs” (Welkos 1978). Around the same time, surprise inspections of hot trucks in Orange County revealed troubling health and safety concerns. Three out of four hot trucks lacked running hot and cold water, making it difficult for employees to wash their hands. Nearly nine out of ten lacked soap and paper towels. Close to two-thirds failed to keep cold and hot food at target temperatures. There were also concerns that cook-aboard trucks lacked seats for cooks, who were forced to stand next to uncovered grills and deep-fat fryers when the trucks were on the move (Gepfert 1978). Orange County considered banning hot trucks but was satisfied with new regulations to protect the safety of workers (Byron 1979). The creation of, rapid adoption of, and reaction to hot trucks shows how food trucks were partly shaped by health codes (sinks, bottled water for hand washing, refrigeration and heating units, etc.). In turn, the operation of these trucks in the real world sometimes led to new safety concerns and new regulations. Cook-aboard trucks also reflected and influenced transformations in the economy, demography, and culture of Southern California from the 1970s through the 1990s. The industrial catering industry in the region had grown while servicing a manufacturing industry anchored by defense contractors and other heavy, durable goods factories, for tires, automobiles, steel, and the like. As catering trucks transformed from mobile snack shops to mobile restaurants, industry in the LA region was also beginning to change. The aerospace industry began a period of leapfrog development that took factories to the outskirts of Southern California and increasingly to Southern states. With the end of the cold war, employment in the sector plummeted (Graham 2012, 263–264). Over the same period, other heavy manufacturing sectors moved or reduced their presence in Southern California. Although the LA metropolitan region still has the most manufacturing employment in the United States (Morath and Van Dam 2015), manufacturing jobs have been halved from 1.1 million in 1991, with close to two-thirds in higher-wage heavy manufacturing, to just over five hundred thousand in 2015, most in in low-wage manufacturing sectors like garments and food-processing (Gottlieb et al. 2005, 85–86; Morath and Van Dam 2015). Immigration from Latin America and Asia to the LA region also accelerated starting in the 1970s and peaked in 1990. Combined with white flight,1 immigration reshaped the demography of the LA region. Today, LA County is plurality Latino.

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Economic transformation and demographic change overlapped to make work and life for immigrants more precarious than for the largely white workforce that industrial caterers had served in its 1950s and 1960s heydays. South Gate, an industrial suburb south of Los Angeles, was a microcosm of these trends. Latinos comprised just 4 percent of the population in 1960, 46 percent in 1980, and 94 percent in 2010. From the 1970s to mid1980s, just as Latinos were approaching a majority of the population, plant closings in South Gate led to a loss of more than 12,500 jobs, a huge blow for a city with fewer than seventy thousand residents in 1980 (Nicolaides 2002, 329). Becky Nicolaides, who researched the relationship between race and work and politics in twentieth-century South Gate, described the jobs available to immigrants after many of the big factories left as part of “a new sweatshop economy ... [that] turned the clock backwards about 100 years in terms of wages, work conditions and the prevalence of the open shop” (Nicolaides 2002, 329). Partly in response to the erosion of steady, middle-class manufacturing jobs, immigrants steered the food truck industry in new directions. Raul O. Martinez Sr., often considered to be the originator of the LA taco truck, “immigrated to the United States in 1969 and worked around the Los Angeles area as a dishwasher and meatpacker.” After selling food from a barbecue, in 1974 he “transformed a $3,000 ice cream truck into a roving restaurant to sell tacos near a popular nightspot, and after noting steadily increasing sales, he opened his first King Taco [restaurant]” (Sanchez 2005). Martinez and his pioneering taco truck are illustrative of some of the ways that food trucks reflect changing times and places. Whereas a member of an earlier generation of domestic migrants to Southern California might have found a steady job in heavy manufacturing, Martinez worked in service and lower-wage manufacturing jobs. When he went into the food truck business, he joined the early wave of hot trucks. He was also among food truck innovators who parked their trucks in neighborhoods and commercial districts in the evening rather than (or in addition to) following the workplace lunch circuit during the day. With a growing immigrant population and a shrinking manufacturing sector, adapting the LA industrial catering truck into a mobile Mexican restaurant that could sell to both workers and residents was good business strategy. The rise of loncheras and taco trucks was also in a sense the revenge of the independent operator, the “man who goes out and gets a truck” who had been disparaged in the 1959 lawsuit described earlier in the chapter (Ingrassia v. Bailey). Under the late 1960s state regulations, all trucks had to

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be stored and cleaned at commissaries. Commissary owners and catering companies therefore still played a major role in the food truck industry— but shifts in the economy and society and innovations in hot trucks created more incentive and opportunity to operate a food truck without needing to work for a large catering company or have preexisting relationships with factory owners. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, food trucks became heavily identified with Latino customers, drivers, and neighborhoods. Taco truck operators contributed to a sense of cultural identity in many immigrant communities. All societies have foodways, which are “complex symbol systems by which people continuously affirm or redefine their cultural heritage” (Ellis 2009, 55). Food trucks were a new way to deliver Mexican and Central American foodways. They offered familiar foods and were welcomed by immigrant residents who grew up receptive to street food. In her dissertation on Latino vending landscapes, Lorena Munoz suggests that “nostalgic memories are in part what is being consumed and what creates a certain ‘sense of place’ for the vendors as well as the consumers” (Muñoz 2008, 147–148). Identification of food trucks as a Latino phenomenon also raised the specter that taco trucks could be targeted for inspections, enforcement, and regulation as part of a backlash against immigrants. Since as far back as 1970, the rise of hot trucks and diversification of some catering trucks beyond industrial worksites had sparked concern by some restaurant owners and consideration of laws to restrict where food trucks could operate (Donaldson 1970). Taco trucks originally sold food in East Los Angeles and other Latino neighborhoods, but as they became “very popular,” they followed “the Mexican from West Side construction sites to Discotecas in Hollywood” (Rojas 1991, 55). The intrusion of “Mexican” trucks into majority white areas and/or rapid demographic shifts that turned formerly white neighborhoods into Latino-majority communities could give a racial tinge to policy debates over food trucks. Under California law, local governments generally are not allowed to ban or heavily restrict where trucks stop and sell food. This is in part due to the organization of Latino food truck operators into trade groups or associations, like the Los Angeles Association of Ice Cream Vendors in the early 1990s (Frook 1990) and La Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California in the late 2000s, to lobby and litigate against restrictions (Early 2012). Food safety rules that apply to all retail food operations may seem less susceptible to racial bias, yet discrimination has motivated food safety

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concerns before, such as the way that the City of Los Angeles regulated Chinese fruit and vegetable vendors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “From the beginning, efforts to benefit ‘the public’s’ health legitimized and reinforced a racial order in which the Chinese occupied the lowest sector. Since the Chinese already bore the dual stigmas of difference and inferiority, they seemed especially vulnerable to the additional labels supplied by health-conscious city officials. The white population of Los Angeles did not need much convincing that the residents of Chinatown were carriers of dirt and disease and purveyors of vice” (Molina 2006, 17). Even if you believe, as I do, that food safety regulations for food trucks are mainly valid, scientifically based safeguards, the immigration status and ethnicity of many taco truck employees may rationally make them wary of enforcement actions or inspections (Early 2012). Twitter Trucks and Beyond In late 2008, a food truck selling Korean BBQ tacos showed up on the streets of Los Angeles. A week after its launch, before its success made him famous, Chef Roy Choi of Kogi Truck defined its signature dish as Los Angeles in a meal: “It’s the 720 bus on Wilshire, it’s the 3rd street Juanita’s Tacos, the Korean supermarket and all those things that we live everyday in one bite. That was our goal. To take everything about LA and put it into one bite” (Behrens 2008). The Kogi truck unleashed a wave of what are usually called gourmet food trucks or Twitter trucks, not just in Los Angeles but nationally and internationally. By blending ingredients not just from food but from the landscapes and identities of the city, Kogi signaled that food trucks could bridge culture and places that contribute to Los Angeles’s diversity, rather than reinforcing the identity of a single community. At least, this is what the marketing suggested. Writing of the regulatory framework that allowed gourmet trucks to flourish in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Kregor argues food trucks had previously needed deep roots in a neighborhood, needed to offer a generic menu to meet the tastes of passersby, or needed to obtain a captive audience by locating at a business or construction site. The Kogi team opened a new path, based on sharing the truck’s location on social media: “Due to the history of loncheras in Los Angeles, it was possible for other local entrepreneurs to build quickly on Kogi’s innovation. Health laws were in place and inspectors knew what to do. There were approved trucks and commissaries

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available for use; in fact, plenty of trucks were available. The recession had hit. Trucks that had previously catered to construction workers were abundantly available to be repurposed into gourmet trucks” (Kregor 2015, 5–6). In 2011, as twitter trucks widened the geography and population served by food trucks, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health began applying the letter grade system it has used to rate restaurants since 1998 to food trucks and carts. The letter grade is given based on what are supposed to be two inspections each fiscal year (County of Los Angeles Department of Health 2010). If the early kinks in the rating system (socalmfva 2012) can be worked out, it will provide customers with additional information about food safety, as well as help cement food trucks’ evolution from delivery vehicles to full-fledged restaurants on wheels. After mapping the location of early twitter trucks, sociologist Oliver Wang wisely linked them to their predecessors: “I don’t care if your truck is mashing up Vietnamese bahn mi with Philly cheese-steak or serving Filipino chicken wrapped in lavash bread; if you’re a catering truck serving cheap food off the streets, you’re still following the lead of the old fashioned taco trucks that have been a part of this city’s food fare for 30+ years. Respect the architects” (Wang 2010). Gourmet food trucks followed the lead that taco trucks took in branching out onto nonindustrial streets and in creating a culture of street food in the region. Taco trucks built upon the cook-aboard innovations of the hot truck. Hot trucks incorporated refrigeration and food-warming technologies developed when catering trucks carried hot meals to hungry workers. Before hot meals were transported, fleets of lunch trucks loaded on cold sandwiches (but hot coffee) each morning, and before the first panel truck was modified as a catering truck, people stood outside defense plants to sell snacks. It’s appropriate to describe this lineage of food trucks as (mobile) architecture, one of the structures that has linked and divided and connected Southern California for the past seventy-five years. Food safety rules have been components of this architecture from the start. At first, they fit badly, because trucks were determined by the laws to be restaurants when they were not. As food trucks evolved into roving restaurants, they have more fully incorporated equipment and procedures to suppress contamination and foodborne illness. Perhaps if Los Angeles continues to evolve its streets into more multimodal places (Goodyear 2015), food trucks will be retired, scrapped, or fixed in place as stationary taco stands. But for now, the region’s food trucks and food safety laws continue to serve and to protect millions of hungry Angelinos.

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Notes The chapter title is an intentional reversal of the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department, which is “to protect and to serve.” Street vendors in Los Angeles frequently complain about harassment by the LAPD, and because many are immigrants and people of color, they may avoid reporting extortion attempts or other criminal activities out of fear of the risks of interacting with law enforcement. As a model for reform and community-based policing, residents might hope that law enforcement could become more like food trucks: present in the community, staffed by drivers who are from or understand the neighborhood, and providing reliable and democratic service and offering eyes on the street. See LAPD 1963. 1. White flight refers to the rapid out-migration of white residents from areas experiencing a rise in non-white population. The cause can range from very direct reactions to the entry of non-whites to neighborhoods to more indirect trends, namely, whites relocating to follow industries and jobs that have moved to exurban areas or to different states.

References Arellano, Gustavo. 2012. Tacos USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. New York: Scribner. Behrens, Zach. 2008. “Eat This: Korean BBQ with the Edge of a Street Taco.” LAist, December 4. http://laist.com/2008/12/04/kogi_bbq.php#photo-1. Brilliant, Ashleigh E. 1965. “Some Aspects of Mass Motorization in Southern California, 1919–1929.” Southern California Quarterly 47 (2): 191–208. Byron, Doris A. 1979. “County to Await New State Rules: Supervisors Delay Action on Ordinance Banning Hot Trucks.” Los Angeles Times, May 9. California. 1947. California Restaurant Act. Statutes 1947, Chapter 394, 964–968. California. 1961. California Restaurant Act. Statues 1961, Chapter 633, 1814–1828. California. 1968. An Act to Amend Section 28619 and to Add Sections 28536, 28616.1 and 28694.5 to the Health and Safety Code, Relating to Restaurants.” Statutes 1968, chapter 1093, 2101. California. 1969. CA Register 69, Section 13603, 290.3. “Caterers Will Celebrate ‘Coming of Age.’” 1957. Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2. “Catering Story Paces City’s Great Growth.” 1964. Van Nuys News, March 17, 47–48. “Catering Truck Ad.” 1966. Long Beach Independent, January 3, 32.

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“Catering Truck Ad.” 1968. Valley News (Van Nuys), December 28, 27. County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health. 2010. “Approval of Ordinance to Amend Los Angeles County Code Title 8: Re Regulations to Establish Letter Grading for Mobile Food Facilities.” Adopted October 12. “Display Ad.” 1962. Los Angeles Times, June 29, E9. Donaldson, Charles R. 1970. “Burbank to Look into Catering Truck Issue.” Los Angeles Times, November 13, SF6. Early, Ingrid V. 2012. “Criminal Clinics in the Pursuit of Immigrant Rights: Lessons from the Loncheros.” UC Irvine Law Review 2:91–124. Ellis, Bill. 2009. “Whispers in an Ice Cream Parlor: Culinary Tourism, Contemporary Legends, and the Urban Interzone.” Journal of American Folklore 122 (483): 53–74. Fogelson, Robert M. 1967. The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Food Handling Problem Told State Senate Group.” 1960. Los Angeles Times, June 29, A9. Frook, John Evan. 1990. “They All Scream About Ice Cream: A Trade Group Crystalizes in the Face of Regulations.” Los Angeles Business Journal, July 30, 1. Gepfert, Ken. 1978. “Even Some Owners Are Cool to the Hot Lunch Truck.” Los Angeles Times, November 4, OC A1. Goodyear, Sarah. 2015. “L.A’s New Mobility Plan Envisions a Different Kind of City.” CityLab, August 14. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/08/las-new -mobility-plan-envisions-a-different-kind-of-city/401351/. Gottlieb, Robert, Mark Vallianatos, Regina M. Freer, and Peter Dreier. 2005. The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graham, Wade. 2012. “Blueprinting the Regional City: The Urban and Environmental Legacies of the Air Industries in Southern California.” In Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, edited by Peter J. Westwick, 247–273. Berkeley: University of California Press and Huntington Library. Gutman, Richard J. S. 2004. Images of America: The Worcester Lunch Car Company. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Ingrassia v. Bailey. 1959. James Ingrassia, Respondent, v. Raymond C. Bailey, Appellant. Civ. No. 23770. California Court of Appeals. Second Dist., Div. Two, July 17. Kregor, Elizabeth. 2015. “Food Trucks, Incremental Innovation and Regulatory Ruts.” University of Chicago Law Review: University of Chicago Law School 82 (1): 1–16.

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“L.A.’s Food Poisoning Cases Highest in U.S.” 1957. Los Angeles Times, October 30, 16. Last One on the Bus. 2013. “Rolling L.A.’s Helms Bakery Trucks Out of the Past.” January 28. http://last1onthebus.com/rolling-l-a-s-helms-bakeries-trucks-out-of-the -past/. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). 1963. “The Origin of the LAPD Motto.” LAPD, December. http://www.lapdonline.org/history_of_the_lapd/content_basic _view/1128. Leap, Norris. 1959. “Mobile Restaurants Serve 750,000 Daily.” Los Angeles Times, July 26, D1. “Mobile Food Preparation Units.” 1969. CA Register 69, No. 52, Section 13601, December 17, 290.2–290.6. Molina, Natalia. 2006. Fit to be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morath, Eric, and Andrew Van Dam. 2015. “Where are the Most U.S. Manufacturing Workers? Los Angeles.” Wall Street Journal, July 15. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/ 2015/07/15/where-are-the-most-u-s-manufacturing-workers-los-angeles/. Muñoz, Lorena. 2008. “Tamales ... Elotes ... Champurrudo: The Production of Latino Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. Nicolaides, Becky M. 2002. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. Chicago: University of California Press. socalmfva. 2012. “Protecting Public Health.” Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association, January 26. http://socalmfva.com/uncategorized/protecting-public -health/. Rojas, James. 1991. “The Enacted Environment: The Creation of ‘Place’ by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles.” Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sanchez, F. 2005. “King Taco Now a Southland Staple, and It All Started in a Truck.” Press-Telegram, Long Beach, CA, May 16. Senn, Charles L., FAPHA, and Paul P. Logan.1955. “Sanitation Aspects of ‘Take-Out’ Type Foods.” American Journal of Public Health 45:33–38. Vallianatos, Mark. 2014. “A More Delicious City: How to Legalize Street Food.” In The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor, edited by Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaido-Sideris, 209–226. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Viehe, Fred W. 1981. “Black Gold Suburbs: The Influence of the Extractive Industry on the Suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1890–1930.” Journal of Urban History 8:3–26.

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Wang, Oliver. 2010. “Ode to the Taco Truck.” Atlantic, August 11. http://www .theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/ode-to-the-taco-truck/61292/. Welkos, Robert. 1978. “Supervisors OK Cooking on Trucks Despite Objections.” Los Angeles Times, November 1, SDA7. “We’re Celebrating Our First Anniversary.” 1967. San Bernardino County Sun, December 3, 25. “Why I Like Helms Olympic Bread.” 1932. Display ad. Los Angeles Times, July 7, 5.

5  Stuck in Park: New York City’s War on Food Trucks Sean Basinski, Matthew Shapiro, and Alfonso Morales

Patricia Monroy and Alberto Loera, a mother and son taco truck vending team who operated in New York City, were introduced in chapter 3. In this chapter, we further detail the injustices they experienced at the hands of local government and the legal system. Patricia had always been entrepreneurial. As a single mother raising five children in her native Mexico City, she started a small business selling American-made sport clothing door to door. In 2001, at age thirty-eight, she traveled to the United States, leaving three children behind but joining her two sons, hoping to expand her clothing business contacts before returning to Mexico. She found temporary work as a cook in a taquería in New Jersey, and before long was dreaming of starting her own restaurant. At the same time, Patricia’s son Alberto, who had been living in California, came to the East Coast to be with his mother. They both moved to New York City. Patricia knew that opening a taco restaurant in New York City would be impossible on her budget. During a visit to Los Angeles, she saw many taco trucks and had the idea to start her own truck in New York. Following the leads of some contacts in Los Angeles, she had a truck built and shipped east. She took a Health Department food handling course and, over the span of many months, obtained all the required mobile food vending licenses and permits. She had a colorful mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe painted on the side of the truck. Then, in August 2008, with the help of Alberto, as well as Patricia’s daughter Irma, Patty’s Tacos opened for business. Patricia chose a location in Manhattan’s East Harlem, on 110th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. This area, near where Patricia lived, had a large Mexican population that she hoped would translate into strong sales. With her children pitching in, Patricia thrived in the new business. After a few months, however, she began to look for a new spot. Sales had

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been passable, but Patricia had higher hopes for her taco truck. While reviewing a list of restricted streets for food vendors in New York, she noticed that Lexington Avenue near Eighty-Sixth Street was not on the list. Located near an express subway train used by a majority of the neighborhood’s commuters, this block had strong foot traffic. Despite the area’s close proximity to exclusive Park and Fifth Avenues, many young professionals open to eating from food trucks lived in the high-rises to the East. Many Latino immigrants also worked in the nearby chain stores and luxury buildings. It seemed that Lexington Avenue near Eighty-Sixth Street might be an ideal location for an authentic Mexican taco truck, so Patricia decided to move the truck there. Her business improved markedly, and the truck quickly became profitable, serving not only tacos but also other traditional Mexican street food, such as cemitas, tlacoyos, and huaraches. Locals soon took notice of the food, which began to receive praise on local websites. One commenter on Yelp wrote that “in a barren land of good eats, a.k.a. The Upper East Side, Patty’s Tacos is like a shiny glimmer of hope.” (Ro P. 2009). Others praised the authenticity and affordability of her food, which was described by one as “the best Mexican food east of the Hudson” (Jay F. 2011). Although little more than a mile away from her spot on 110th Street, Patty’s Eighty-Sixth Street location placed her in a very different neighborhood. The Upper East Side is 88 percent white (US Census Bureau 2010c), compared to East Harlem, which is 80 percent black and Hispanic (US Census Bureau 2010a, 2010b). The Upper East Side’s household income, around $85,000, is more than four times what it is in East Harlem (ibid.). However popular she was with some people her arrival was opposed by powerful interests in the area, including elected officials and a local neighborhood association, as Patricia would discover. The campaign to remove Patricia from that block, ultimately successful, would not only destroy one beloved immigrant-owned small business, it would establish a legal precedent by which no food truck could legally occupy a valid parking space in any commercial area in the entire city, it would permanently stall an otherwise exciting new model for entrepreneurs to incubate new retail food businesses in the nation’s largest city, and it would become a case study in how a city government’s response to mobile food vending can prioritize powerful special interests at the expense of expanding economic opportunities that embrace the greater public good.

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A Brief Digression on Our Methods We are a team of scholars and practitioners, and our methods reflect our experience and expertise. First, two of the authors are attorneys with more than twenty years of experience supporting vendors and vending, and the third author has twenty-five years of scholarly experience researching markets and vendors from economic, legal, and social perspectives. In short, the team deployed three methods: legal analysis, participant observation, and document review. Legal analysis is the close examination of case law, legal precedent, and law-related documents and practices, including those of the police and regulatory authority. The approach reveals assumptions in precedent and practice and is aimed to exploit such on behalf of the client. In this sense, the method is normative and oriented to an objective. Second, we were participant observers of the case. This meant that we were occasionally in the field with Patricia and close to the lived experience of the various parties to the case. In this sense, we became “strangers” to the case in order to tease a coherent narrative from what was often complex and confusing. However, we also used our participation on behalf of Patricia; how successfully we did this is what the narrative describes. Third, we were close observers of various media reporting on the case. Bringing these methods together helped enhance the narrative and provide its structure. Now, on to the details. Round One: Oppressive Legislation For two years, Patricia gradually built her business on Lexington Avenue. To be sure, there were daily inconveniences. Parking spots were scarce, and Patricia sometimes received tickets for double parking as she waited for a spot to become available. The parking meters allowed her to remain for only one hour at a time, requiring her to move to a different nearby spot many times each day or risk a ticket for feeding the meter—occupying the spot for longer than the permitted time. Parking tickets, like periodic citations from Health Department inspectors, were the cost of doing business in such a highly regulated small business environment as New York City. Like other vendors, Patricia also had to pay licensing fees, taxes, rent on the commissary in which she parked the truck at night, and wages for her team of employees, which grew to as many as three, plus her extended family members on busy days. While Patricia focused on her business, local opposition to her presence was growing. In July 2009, the local Community Board passed a resolution

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Figure 5.1 Patricia and her son Alberto inside Patty’s Tacos on the Upper East Side. Photo credit: Street Vendor Project.

declaring that street vendors were a “serious problem” in the community and that the situation was deteriorating (City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8 2009). Without enumerating what problems exactly the vendors were causing or mentioning food trucks specifically, Community Board 8’s resolution called for increased enforcement of vendor rules and regulations by a dedicated task force.1 It also declared that local businesses (a term that evidently did not include local vending businesses) were being burdened by a supposed increase in the number of street vendors in the neighborhood. The following summer, a local elected official made food truck parking a citywide issue. Jessica Lappin, the council member for the eastern half of the neighborhood, held a press conference on the steps of city hall to announce legislation that would revoke the permit of any food truck vendor who accumulated three violations of Parking Rule 4-08(h)(5), the regulation prohibiting parking in a metered space for “more than the time period lawfully permitted.” Although Lappin claimed a widespread problem

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of trucks feeding the meter, she focused on one truck—Patty’s Tacos. Much bigger than a dispute over a single parking spot for the council member, the truck’s continued presence invoked something greater: a moral struggle over who had the right to control public space. “There is a vendor on 86th and Lex. who thinks that he [sic] owns the northeast corner,” she stated. “And that bothers me. I don’t think it’s right” (Lappin, quoted in Hinds 2010). To Lappin, the issue was clear: The parking spaces existed to benefit nearby brick-and-mortar establishments, not a mobile vendor like Patricia. “If you want to have a storefront, get a storefront,” she stated. However, vending is a typical entry point for low-income entrepreneurs, like Patricia, who cannot yet afford to open a store (Resto-Montero 2010). Standing next to Lappin at the press conference was Michele Birnbaum from the East 86th Street Association, a nonprofit organization that seeks to “enhance quality of life in the East 80’s.” For Birnbaum, chairwoman of the Vendor Committee for the association and a woman who would later go on to chair the Community Board’s Vendor Task Force, it was equally clear who those parking spots belonged to, and it was not Patricia. “We’ve had not only street crowding, not only sanitation issues, but we’ve also had merchants complaining that their parking spaces have been lost,” she stated (emphasis added). The fact that Patty’s Tacos had printed menus with the truck’s location on it and announcing that they offered delivery seemed particularly irksome to Lappin, who waved the menu in the air during her press conference and mentioned it to the media on several occasions. Although Lappin might have tolerated a Mexican taco truck temporarily passing through her district, the menu seemed proof that Patricia had staked out a permanent claim to the Upper East Side. “Mobile food trucks are supposed to be mobile,” Lappin stated to the New York Times. Issues of race and class seemed to dwell not far below the surface. As Elaine Walsh, president of the East 86th Street Association, would later say, ignoring the scores of neighborhood residents who loved the truck and felt very differently, Patty’s Tacos didn’t “permit people to feel comfortable walking in the area” (Zimmer 2011c).2 Moving beyond issues of comfort, Lappin’s bill threatened the basic survival of many food trucks across the city. If she believed her proposal would sneak through city council with little objection, she severely miscalculated. In the two years since Patricia had founded her business, food trucks had become a nationwide trend. Roy Choi had developed a craze with his Kogi truck in Los Angeles and was racking up awards for his Korean tacos, and

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the trend was rising in New York, too. Starting in 2008, dozens of new trucks began offering everything from cupcakes to schnitzel to dumplings on the streets of Gotham.3 The owners of those trucks, many laid off from their corporate jobs during the Great Recession, had recently invested tens of thousands of dollars each in their businesses. The threat that they might have their permits permanently revoked over a few parking violations got their attention—and the attention of the local media, who had jumped aboard the food truck bandwagon. The so-called gourmet food truck owners turned to the Street Vendor Project (SVP) for advice. As described in chapter 3, SVP is a membershipbased organization at the Urban Justice Center that advocates for New York City street vendors, including those who sell from trucks. Although just a few of them were Street Vendor Project members, SVP helped organize more than a dozen truck owners to testify at the public hearing called shortly after Lappin’s bill was introduced. Tesfalum Kiflu, an Eritrean-born truck owner and SVP member, testified first. More than a dozen food truck owners went next, vociferously complaining that it was unfair to single them out from FedEx trucks, UPS trucks, and other commercial vehicles that frequently received tickets while competing for parking on the city’s crowded streets. The vendors were contributing to the economy and serving the public, they said. Their food was inventive and affordable. Moreover, the penalty—revoking their permit—was far too harsh for committing three sixty-five dollar parking violations, a number that could easily be collected in a week. Unlike Patricia, this new group of food truck operators had active followings on social media, which they used to mobilize their customers against the proposal. One constituent emailed Lappin to say that “thousands of New Yorkers, [him]self included, depend on food trucks for costeffective and delicious food.”4 He was not alone. SVP created a Facebook page that quickly gained hundreds of followers. Taking to the street, the organization gathered and delivered to Lappin more than four hundred pink “citizen tickets,” citing her for infractions such as “denying the right to affordable street food.” One web-savvy food truck owner created an online petition that grew to four thousand names. Several city council members appeared at the hearing to voice their disapproval. Midway through the testimony, Lappin announced that she had received a letter from the mayor’s office stating that even Mayor Bloomberg did not support the bill. Lappin and the East 86th Street Association suddenly seemed to be standing all alone.

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Figure 5.2 Jessica Lappin, Michele Birnbaum, and council member Karen Koslowitz at a press conference, announcing Lappin’s proposal to revoke the permits of food truck owners who receive three or more parking violations. Photo credit: Street Vendor Project.

Round Two: Creative Enforcement Roundly rejected in the court of public opinion, Lappin’s bill stalled at city hall. Patricia’s opponents, however, would not be dissuaded. Within several months, they found a new line of attack—resurrecting an obscure parking regulation that prohibited vending “merchandise” from a metered parking spot. The regulation, codified by the Department of Transportation in parking rule §4-08(h)(8), states that “no peddler, vendor, hawker or huckster shall park a vehicle at a metered parking space for purposes of displaying, selling, storing or offering merchandise for sale from the vehicle.” This regulation, dating back to 1965, was not new—but it was newly applied to food trucks. Months prior, the NYPD had taken the exact opposite position, declaring that food trucks were “subject to the same rules as any other commercial vehicle.”5 Indeed, the whole premise of Lappin’s bill was that food trucks could legally sell from metered parking, so long as they, like other vehicles, did not feed the meter. The trucks’ very right to conduct their

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business, whether they overstayed their time on the meter or not, was now being challenged. Curiously, the regulation mentioned “merchandise” but said nothing about the sale of food. Did it even apply to food trucks like Patty’s Tacos? Behind the scenes, the NYPD apparently adopted the position that it did. Moreover, they decided to use this novel interpretation as the basis not only to issue Patricia parking tickets, but to physically evict her from the spot altogether. In November 2010, officers from the local precinct began to inform Patricia that she was no longer welcome on that block. Some officers, while privately expressing sympathy, told Patricia that unnamed “very powerful forces” were putting pressure on their commander. Should she return, one threatened, there would be trouble. Indeed, there would be. On November 30, 2010, officers demanded that Alberto close the truck and leave the location. Patricia had stepped away from the truck, and Alberto, who did not have a driver’s license, was unable to move the truck by himself. He asked the officers to wait for his mother to return, but they had lost their patience. The police arrested Alberto and towed the truck. All its contents, including not only food and drinks but the cash register, the fire extinguisher, and a generator worth $2,300 on its own, would later be removed from the truck and never recovered. Alberto was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and obstructing governmental administration. Patricia, returning to the spot in time to see her son in handcuffs, hyperventilated, requiring a trip to the hospital. Alberto spent about twenty hours in confinement.6 Justifiably shaken from the incident and fearful of returning to work, Patricia and Alberto came to the SVP office. With the Lappin bill behind it, the organization was in the midst of a legislative campaign to pressure city council to pass a law lowering the fines vendors received for violating minor regulations, such as vending within ten feet of a crosswalk or vending while failing to conspicuously display a vendor’s license. Carrying penalties of up to $1,000, these prohibitive fines often prevented vendors from renewing their licenses. Although technically distinct from the parking dispute Patricia was facing, the fundamental issue seemed the same: oppressive enforcement of minor violations to drive vendors out of business. SVP realized that parking rule §4-08(h)(8), if applied to all food trucks, could spell doom for the upstart industry. In New York, outside of strictly residential blocks, virtually all parking spots are metered. For SVP, it seemed important to take a stand, both for Patricia and the entire community. In addition, the Upper East Side was strategic for SVP’s campaign.

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Although Council Member Lappin had already made public her opinion on vendors, the council member from the western half of the neighborhood, Daniel Garodnick, had not. Garodnick had recently been appointed chair of the council’s Consumer Affairs Committee, in which the proposal to lower the fines would be debated. With that in mind, SVP mobilized a group of vendors to support Patricia and her family when they returned to their location on a cold and icy January 18, 2011. As Patricia served tacos, SVP members gathered on the sidewalk nearby, collecting signatures on postcards requesting that Garodnick support SVP’s efforts to lower the fines. Little did they know where Garodnick really stood. While SVP was asking for his support, Garodnick was lining up against them. Within two hours, a van full of police officers from the local precinct arrived at the scene. The officers issued Patricia a ticket for violating parking rule §4-08(h) (8), claiming she was selling merchandise from a metered parking spot. The usual remedy for a parking violation—issuing a ticket—was not enough. Patricia was given the option of moving her truck or having it towed. Perhaps inspired by the support of SVP, and feeling protected by the presence of the media that SVP had invited, she stood firm. “My mother felt like she was not breaking the law,” Alberto told the press, standing in for his mother, who does not speak English (Zimmer 2011b). Consequently, the police officers towed the truck as SVP members, customers, and reporters watched. Back at the office, Patricia and Alberto sat down with staff from SVP to strategize their next steps. SVP lawyers believed that parking rule §4-08(h) (8) did not apply to food trucks and that a judge at the Parking Violations Bureau would likely agree with them. If they could get a decision from a judge, even at the lowly parking court, it would give Patricia the upper hand against the police. The following day, Patricia and Alberto, accompanied by attorneys from SVP, appeared at the parking tribunal to challenge the ticket. Although the team was ready to make legal arguments for why the ticket should be dismissed on the merits, the judge invalidated the ticket on a technicality, never reaching the issue of whether §4-08(h)(8) applied to food vendors. The law still unclear, Patricia was in a quandary—but she was undeterred. SVP lawyers suspected that, having towed the truck twice already, the NYPD might temporarily back down, particularly in light of the media attention its heavy-handed actions had begun to receive. Either way, Patricia had few other options. She recovered her truck from the impound lot, paid the tow fees, and, again accompanied by SVP members and

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Figure 5.3 The NYPD towing Patty’s Tacos on January 18, 2011. Photo credit: Street Vendor Project.

supporters, returned to Lexington Avenue. Once again, a team of police officers showed up, issued Patricia a parking ticket, and threatened to tow the truck. This time, however, a sergeant laid bare the motives behind the sudden enforcement of this decades-old regulation. “You guys know what’s going on,” the sergeant stated, in an exchange captured on video. “There’s an 86th Street neighborhood association; they’re unhappy with the vendors here.” Right after SVP members left the area, the truck was towed away again. Did a small neighborhood association really have the power to manipulate the NYPD to take such harsh action? Apparently it did. The group, founded by members of Community Board 8 in 2003 to address “congestion, beautification, sidewalk conditions, security, signage, construction, vendors and sanitation” in the neighborhood, seemed innocuous enough. It had previously been known primarily for its campaign to remove an illegal sign from a nearby pharmacy. However, the group’s power appeared to come from its connections, in part through cross-membership on the Community Board with local politicians. In addition to Lappin, the East 86th Street Association had established close ties to Dan Garodnick. Back in

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2006, it had worked with him to coordinate a vendor enforcement action in the neighborhood that, Garodnick boasted on his website, resulted in twenty-six summonses (“Garodnick and Mayor’s Office,” n.d.). Now, Garodnick was playing an active role in Patricia’s eviction. In the midst of the controversy, unbeknownst to Patricia and SVP, he pledged to the Community Board that he was “pushing the 19th Precinct to aggressively enforce the vendor laws.” His staff member even “congratulated the 86th Street residents for finally getting rid of the taco truck” (City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8 2010). Garodnick’s loyalty to the truck opponents was reciprocated. Birnbaum later noted publicly that Garodnick had been “very, very supportive, very helpful” of their efforts to remove vendors from the Upper East Side (CB8Speaks 2014). For weeks, Patty’s Tacos did not return to Lexington Avenue. Patricia’s customers took note of her absence with sadness. As Alberto stated to a local journalist: “They say the community does not like us ... [but] the community calls us every day, asking ‘Where are you?’” (Zimmer 2011d). Patricia tried moving to other neighborhoods, including the Upper West Side and Union Square. In one case, according to media reports, a customer researched the truck’s location online and trekked across town to find it. But unlike some of the newer trucks, Patricia’s business model was not based on tweeting out her location each day. Like most immigrant vendors, she relied on foot traffic and word of mouth among her loyal customers. Away from her regular clientele, Patricia found that business dropped by up to 80 percent. In some cases, the truck was chased away from its new location by a new batch of police officers. She tried returning to Lexington Avenue after 7:00 p.m., when the parking meters were no longer in effect—but the dinner rush wasn’t sufficient; she needed her daytime customers to sustain the business. Moreover, her cash flow was drying up. Patricia could no longer send money to support her daughter, who dropped out of law school in Mexico as a result. She fell behind on the rent at her storage facility and was unable to make her $1,500 monthly lease payments on the truck. The company in California that had sold her the truck now threatened her almost daily with repossession. Round Three: Litigation Running out of options after watching as her truck was hitched up and towed away for the second time in three days, Patricia and her family regrouped at SVP. Lawyers there had one final idea: to file a lawsuit in the

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New York State Supreme Court, seeking a judicial declaration that parking rule §4-08(h)(8) did not apply to the sale of food. Unlike cases handled in parking court, a Supreme Court judge would be required to address the legal issues head-on. Litigation was risky. A judgment against Patricia would not just apply to her business; it would clarify the NYPD’s right to enforce §4-08(h)(8) against all food trucks citywide. The move would not be popular among some food truck owners who made it clear that they preferred a less confrontational approach. On the other hand, there was little to lose. Even without a judicial ruling, the police could use the same parking regulation to harass other vendors, just as they had harassed Patricia. SVP lawyers heard rumors that such harassment already may have been happening. Patricia was a highly sympathetic plaintiff who presented a compelling set of facts. She had built a family business from scratch, working on the same block without incident for years. She was extremely popular, with a loyal fan base, the presence of which could attest to the benefits she brought to the neighborhood. And she had experienced harsh treatment. SVP lawyers and Patricia agreed to go forward with a lawsuit. Commencing a lawsuit and conducting the subsequent litigation is a time-consuming process. It might normally take a year or more to obtain a decision. For that reason, given the urgency of the matter, SVP filed a motion for a judge to issue a preliminary injunction. If successful, it would prevent the police from enforcing §4-08(h)(8) against Patty’s Tacos pending a full trial on the merits of the case. In early February 2011, SVP filed the required legal documents at the court. The case was assigned to the Honorable Geoffrey Wright, a member of a prominent Harlem political family. The hearing was scheduled for February 24, 2011. Hopeful that Judge Wright would mete out justice, Patricia and her family accompanied their lawyers to the State Supreme Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. The core issue in the case was whether parking rule §4-08(h)(8) applied to vendors who sold food. The Department of Transportation’s regulations did not define the term merchandise or suggest, one way or the other, whether it included food. Although SVP had a wealth of historical materials on street vending, it could find nothing to shed light on the history of §4-08(h)(8). The regulation, absent from the city’s traffic regulations in 1964, appeared as though out of nowhere in 1965. Yet parking meters had existed in the Big Apple since 1951. What happened in 1965 to prompt the change? Hours of research at the city’s municipal archives turned up nothing. Still, SVP lawyers felt they had a strong case. As they explained in their legal brief, New York City regulations had long distinguished between

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vendors who sell food and “general” vendors who sell nonfood items, such as clothing or accessories. Food vendors were licensed, inspected, and regulated by the Department of Health, while general vendors fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Consumer Affairs. Each agency had its own set of regulations governing the vendors under their control, separate and distinct from the traffic regulations at issue in the case. Significantly, although the Health Department did not have any regulations restricting food vendors from selling food from vehicles at metered parking spaces, the Department of Consumer Affairs had two regulations that prohibited nonfood vendors from doing so. First, §20–465(o) of the New York City Administrative Code prohibited general vendors from selling any item from a parked motor vehicle. Second, Title 6 of the Rules of the City of New York §2-304(b) prohibited general vendors from selling “merchandise” from a vehicle parked at a metered parking space. Thus, SVP’s interpretation of §4-08(h)(8) was twice-supported elsewhere in the city’s regulatory scheme. The city’s interpretation found no such support.

Figure 5.4 Patricia and her family along with Street Vendor Project lawyers outside the New York State Supreme Court on February 24, 2011. Photo credit: Street Vendor Project.

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Patricia’s lawyers advanced all of these points at oral argument before Judge Wright. The lawyer for the city argued that the plain meaning of the word merchandise included food, citing definitions from dictionaries and other legal cases in which the terms food and merchandise were used interchangeably. SVP lawyers countered by explaining how limited nonmetered parking was in the commercial districts of New York. Why, they asked, would the city give permits to food trucks while simultaneously depriving them of nearly every commercially viable parking spot in the five boroughs? The following day, Judge Wright issued his decision. He agreed with the city that §4-08(h)(8) did apply to food vendors such as Patricia Monroy. Patty’s Tacos had lost. The judge based his decision first upon an elaborate dictionary search for the definition of merchandise, which (per MerriamWebster’s Collegiate, 10th ed.) included goods, which were like wares, which was defined as something that came from a farm, as food does. He also noted that the words food and merchandise were sometimes used interchangeably in court cases. “The term merchandise is broad enough to encompass food in any of its varieties,” Judge Wright wrote in Monroy v. City of New York, et al. (New York Supreme Court 2011). More troubling was Judge Wright’s attention to issues peripheral to whether or not “merchandise” included food. For example, the judge mentioned that the block where Patty’s Tacos parked contained a Best Buy, a Staples, and a Starbucks, as well as many “drivers who may well be patrons of the above national chains” (ibid.). Although Judge Wright did not go so far as to state that national chain store customers should take precedence over local taco truck customers, that was the import of his decision. In addition, while faulting Patricia’s motion for not addressing the issue of crowding on city streets, Judge Wright failed to grasp a central point— that Patty’s Tacos truck did not contribute to crowding on Lexington Avenue. Heartbroken by Judge Wright’s decision, Patricia and SVP vowed to appeal. An attorney from a prominent law firm, McDermott Will & Emery, signed on to provide pro bono assistance. However, the time frame for an appeal to the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court is slow. It wasn’t until the following February—more than a year later—that Patricia and her legal team had filed their own appeal brief, responded to the city’s opposition papers, and waited for oral argument to be scheduled. This time, Patricia’s attorneys focused on the fact that the Department of Transportation had no jurisdiction over what happened after a vehicle was lawfully parked at a metered parking spot. The city’s interest in turnover of

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metered parking spots was specifically provided for by the prohibition on feeding the meter. Whether the parked vehicle was a flower delivery van, a private SUV, or a taco truck made no difference. The city advanced the same argument it had in the lower court— that it was reasonable for the NYPD to interpret §4-08(h)(8) as applying to food vendors. They claimed that the words food and merchandise were interchangeable in modern discourse. Unfortunately, Patricia would not be saved on appeal. The appeals panel affirmed Judge Wright’s ruling and found that §4-08(h)(8) applied to food vendors. In a nine-sentence decision in Monroy v. City of New York, et al., the court reasoned that there was “no reason for the Department of Transportation, in enacting its parking regulations, to distinguish between different classes of vendor.” The court gave deference to the NYPD’s interpretation of §4-08(h)(8), even when the evidence showed that it had been adopted, in a reversal of its prior stance, at the direct bidding of a group that sought to drive Patricia from its neighborhood. Instead of being a refuge for the powerless, the court had ceded to those who were so powerful that they had no need to turn to the courts; they could simply call their city council member! Aftermath and Effects Even before it was upheld on appeal, Judge Wright’s decision reverberated through the city’s food truck community. Within months, news of the ruling had spread from the Upper East Side to other precincts. “We are enforcing the law as it has been interpreted by the court,” said an NYPD spokesman, admitting to an increase in summonsing activity (Collins 2011). Vendors saw the enforcement firsthand. “They are saying it's off-limits now,” said Oleg Voss, owner of the popular Schnitzel & Things truck, speaking of the spot he frequented on West Fifty-Second Street (Colvin 2011). Vendors felt blindsided by the city’s actions. “I've spent years building up customers in [my] locations, and suddenly we’re cut off from them,” said Kim Ima, founder of Treats Truck and one of New York’s food truck pioneers. Ima announced in an email to her followers that, after four years there, she would no longer be selling in Midtown Manhattan. “We have so many wonderful regulars, and you all have made serving you such a pleasure,” she wrote. But the police had let her know that Midtown, the city’s largest and most desirable commercial district, was no longer available (Brooks 2011). The NYPD emphasized that it was issuing warnings to food truck vendors rather than writing tickets, and most food truck owners adopted a

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conciliatory tone. But orders to move, even for the Twitter-savvy trucks, were often more costly than sixty-five dollar parking tickets. “It takes trucks an hour to set up, so if the police shut them down at noon, by the time they go elsewhere and set up again, they have lost their lunch sales,” said David Weber of the Rickshaw Dumplings truck.7 Some vendors, suspecting the police were tracking them through social media, stopped updating their Twitter accounts. Others began seeking off-street spots, like Rickshaw Dumplings, which arranged with a building owner to park in their loading bay. Legions of food truck fans were naturally disappointed to see their favorite vendors disappear. Many seemed confused by the new rules and whose interests their enforcement was serving. “If they feed the meter, then they should be able to park,” said one street food aficionado. “That’s what the space is for” (Murnane 2011). For the food truck owners, perhaps the worst part was the daily uncertainty and insecurity. In September 2013, for example, a group of food truck operators who parked on East Forty-Seventh Street for several years were forced to move, reportedly after complaints from local building owners (Neuhauser 2013). As they did when threatened by the Lappin bill, food truck vendors banded together. In March 2011, a group of thirty-two “premium” food truck owners announced the formation of the New York City Food Truck Association. Headed by David Weber of Rickshaw Dumpling, the group’s sought to promote responsible vending practices among their members while advocating for fairer, less burdensome regulations. Top on their list of policy goals was to “work with NYC administration to establish a fair way to vend from metered parking or other locations” (“About,” n.d.). The association hired a well-known lobbyist to open doors for them at City Hall. Mayor Bloomberg’s office seemed amenable, stating at one point that it was “looking for spaces for these popular lunch options” (Murnane 2011). As reform dragged, food truck owners did their best to adjust. A few vendors traded in their trucks for pushcarts, which (because they are set up on the sidewalk instead of in the street) are not subject to §4-08(h) (8). Mirroring a model that had worked in other cities, the NYCFTA created food truck lots on private development sites in Tribeca, Battery Park City, and Long Island City, thereby devising an inventive, if temporary, solution.8 Other vendors shifted their business model entirely. The owners of Mexicue food truck, for example, announced a deal with an investor to begin opening brick-and-mortar locations. They would keep their truck, but only for private catering events. Another early entrant, the

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Green Pirate Juice Truck, announced plans to seek distribution through the wholesale market. For those who remained on the streets, ticketing increased. Over time, the NYPD’s new enforcement priority filtered down from its regular police officers to the thousands of civilian traffic enforcement agents who write the vast majority of parking summonses in NYC. “We get tickets every day that we park on the street,” said Susan Povich from Red Hook Lobster Pound. A survey by the NYCFTA found that 85 percent of trucks surveyed had been issued a ticket within the prior week, and 54 percent had been issued one the prior day! “The tickets are the worst part of the business,” said Josh Gatewood of the Yankee Doodle Dandy food truck (Eberhardt 2014). Gradually, food trucks began to close. Over the next few years, a few new trucks would appear on the streets each spring, but more would quietly disappear. The enforcement of §4-08(h)(8) was invariably listed among the factors for the closings (Fickenscher 2014). Even the most acclaimed food trucks were not immune. In February 2015, Adam Sobel, owner of the Vendy award–winning Cinnamon Snail, announced he was shutting down his two trucks, in part due to the cost and stress over parking tickets. While moving his trucks to New Jersey, he made plans to open a brick-and-mortar location. In October 2015, the owners of the popular Mexico Blvd. truck made a similar announcement, also attributing their closure, in part, to their inability to find legal parking spaces. With each food truck closure, New York’s reputation as a street food capital declined. Most US cities impose strict regulations on food trucks, including restrictions on how far away they must stay from certain landmarks, such as schools. Other cities, like Philadelphia, ban food trucks from operating within congested or tourist zones. However, many cities realize the value of mobile food vending and have liberalized their vending regulations in the past five years, and no city that licenses food trucks imposes such a stringent ban on where food trucks park as New York. In fact, some cities have taken active steps to accommodate food trucks. In 2013, the District of Columbia rolled out a system of mobile roadway vending zones, which assigns spots via a monthly lottery at popular areas like Farragut Square, L’Enfant Plaza and Metro Center. Food trucks that choose not to participate may vend from metered locations, but must stay two hundred feet away from the special zones. Boston, which created a similar lottery system in 2011, has gone a step further by actively encouraging its food truck community, establishing a Boston Food Truck Initiative within its Office of Food Initiatives. Among other things, the office has

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created an online schedule for public viewing, showing where each truck operates each day. As for Patricia, after Judge Wright’s decision she tried working in other areas. A location on Union Square showed strong potential—until the Department of Transportation removed the parking spaces where Patty’s Tacos parked. The east side of Midtown, along Park Avenue, proved popular with office workers but was subject to heavy ticketing from traffic agents. With the future uncertain, Alberto left the business for a job driving a delivery truck. Finally, in early 2015, Patricia sold the truck and exited the vending business. “Sometimes I felt like I was paying 50% of what I made to the city. But more than anything, I got tired of fighting them,” says Patricia today, reflecting on the experience. “The tickets, the police—I never knew when the pressure was going to end.”9 Patricia went to work in the kitchen of a small Mexican restaurant in East Harlem, the same neighborhood in which she first parked her truck. Over time, however, her paycheck began coming up short as the owner struggled to pay his bills. By winter of 2015, she had taken a job for a vegan food manufacturer in Brooklyn. Living in the Bronx, her daily subway commute is now more than an hour and a half each way. However, the work is steady, it pays well, and Patricia has no regrets. “I’m not sad or nostalgic,” she says. “In fact, I am very proud. Without speaking any English, without knowing much about this country, I built a business. The city didn’t offer us any help at all. We did it by ourselves.” Notes 1.  Although Community Boards are groups of volunteer residents and their role is an advisory one, they often carry influence with local elected officials. 2. The “discomfort” that some local residents feel in the presence of immigrant vendors was expressed by one attendee at a Community Board 8 Vendor Task Force meeting in April 2013, who objected to a Muslim vendor who washed his feet on the sidewalk. “That was part of his religious need, but was that really appropriate in front of a place where people are going in and out?” she asked (Bekiempis 2013). 3.  Although “lunch wagons” had been reported in New York as early as 1907 and ice cream trucks were commonplace since the 1950s, other food trucks were somewhat rare. 4. See http://streetvendor.org/campaigns-2/food-truck-bill-2010/email-to-jessica-lappin -2/.

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5.  The NYPD added that “they can park at metered commercial spaces, but when the meter expires the trucks are legally required to move” (Rutkoff, 2010). 6. It is not uncommon for vendors who are perceived as noncompliant by police officers to be arrested. In December 2011, for example, in advance of the opening of a Fairway supermarket near the location where he had set up for eight years on East Eighty-Sixth Street, police arrested food vendor Moustafa Eissawy (Zimmer 2011a). 7. See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/dining/food-trucks-shooed-from-midtown .html. 8.  By 2014, real estate development had forced all three of these lots to close. 9.  This quote is from an interview with Patricia on February 6, 2016.

References “About.” n.d. New York City Food Truck Association. http://www.nycfoodtrucks.org/ about. Bekiempis, Victoria. 2013. “Force Street Vendors to Use Matching Furniture, Upper East Sider Says.” DNA Info, April 9. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130409/ upper-east-side/force-street-vendors-use-matching-furniture-upper-east-sider-says. CB8Speaks. 2014. “Michele Birnbaum, Chair of Vendor Task Force, Is the Guest— Part 2 of 2.” CB8Speaks, April 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1-XLbJu1Ss. Brooks, Zach. 2011. “Treats Truck Decides to Leave Midtown under Pressure from the Police.” Midtown Lunch, June 23. https://midtownlunch.com/2011/06/23/ treats-truck-decides-to-leave-midtown-under-pressure-from-the-police/. City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8. 2009. “Land Use/Full Board Meeting Minutes.” City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8, July 15. City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8. 2010. “Land Use/Full Board Meeting.” City of New York Manhattan Community Board 8, December 15. http:// cb8m.com/sites/default/files/1210%20LU-FB.doc. Collins, Glenn. 2011. “Food Trucks Shooed from Midtown.” New York Times, June 28. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/dining/food-trucks-shooed-from -midtown.html. Colvin, Jill. 2011. “Police Driving Food Trucks off Popular Midtown Blocks.” DNA Info, June 6. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20110606/midtown/police -crackdown-driving-food-trucks-off-popular-midtown-blocks. Eberhardt, Alecia Lynn. 2014. “The Parking Ticket Problem.” NYC Food Truck Association, October 14. http://www.nycfoodtrucks.org/2014/10/the-parking-ticket -problem.

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Fickenscher, Lisa. 2014. “Food Trucks Stuck in Park.” Crain’s New York Business, May 11. https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140511/HOSPITALITY_TOURISM/ 140509816/food-trucks-stuck-in-park. “Garodnick and Mayor’s Office Combine for Street Vendor Enforcement Action.” n.d. Garodnick.com. http://www.garodnick.com/press-release/garodnick-and-mayors -office-combine-street-vendor-enforcement-action. Hinds, Kate. 2010. “Bill Seeks to Curb Food Trucks with Parking Violations.” WNYC, June 18. http://www.wnyc.org/story/87842-bill-seeks-to-curb-food-trucks -with-parking-violations/. Jay F. 2011. “Patty’s Taco Truck.” Yelp, September 6. https://www.yelp.com/biz/ pattys-taco-truck-new-york. Murnane, Paul. 2011. “Food Trucks Being Chased from Midtown Over Meter Rule.” CBS New York, June 29. http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/06/29/food-trucks-being -chased-from-midtown-over-meter-rule/. Neuhauser, Alan. 2013. “Cops Tell Midtown Food Trucks to Hit the Road.” DNA Info, September 16. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130916/midtown/ cops-tell-midtown-food-trucks-hit-road. New York Supreme Court. 2011. 943 N.Y.S.2d 510 (N.Y. App. Div. 1st Dept.). Resto-Montero, Gabriela. 2010. “Food Truck Vendors Targeted over Parking Tickets in New Bill.” DNA Info, June 10. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20100609/ upper-east-side/foodtruck-vendors-targeted-over-parking-tickets-new-bill. Ro P. 2009. “Patty’s Taco Truck.” Yelp, May 31. https://www.yelp.com/biz/pattys -taco-truck-new-york. Rutkoff, Aaron. 2010. “Food Trucks Could Face Ban for Too Many Parking Tickets.” Wall Street Journal, June 9. http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2010/06/09/food-trucks -could-face-ban-for-too-many-parking-tickets/. US Census Bureau. 2010a. “East Harlem-North Neighborhood Tabulation Area.” http://maps.nyc.gov/census/. US Census Bureau. 2010b. “East Harlem-South Neighborhood Tabulation Area.” http://maps.nyc.gov/census/. US Census Bureau. 2010c. “Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill Neighborhood Tabulation Area.” http://maps.nyc.gov/census/. Zimmer, Amy. 2011a. “Fairway and NYPD Kick Halal Man to the Curb.” DNA Info, December 16. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20111216/upper-east-side/ fairway-nypd-kick-halal-man-curb.

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Zimmer, Amy. 2011b. “Police Welcome Taco Truck Back to Upper East Side by Towing It.” DNA Info, January 19. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20110118/ upper-east-side/police-tow-taco-truck-upon-upper-east-side-homecoming. Zimmer, Amy. 2011c. “Taco Truck Towed from Upper East Side Again.” DNA Info, January 20. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20110120/upper-east-side/ taco-truck-towed-from-upper-east-side-again. Zimmer, Amy. 2011d. “ARTICLE TITLE.” DNA Info, MONTH DAY. https://www .dnainfo.com/new-york/20101214/upper-east-side/taco-truck-ousted-from-upper -east-side.

6  Learning from New Orleans: Will Revising or Relaxing Public Space Ordinances Create a Just Environment for Street Commerce? Renia Ehrenfeucht and Ana Croegaert

A Fundamental Contradiction and a New Approach Residents and visitors alike celebrate New Orleans’s public culture. Locals by the thousands come out for Mardi Gras Indians Super Sunday and dozens of neighborhood and citywide events, and the Jazz and Heritage Festival and Mardi Gras also attract national and international visitors. People sit on their stoops daily, and musicians play on street corners. Street vending can be seen throughout the city. However, the everything-goes attitude belies the highly restricted vending landscape. Hundreds of thousands of Jazz Fest attendees walk by unauthorized hawkers selling bottled water, and few of the vendors who sell barbeque and beer at weekly second line parades obtain the required license. When taco trucks began serving construction sites after the 2005 hurricanes and when New Orleans’s residents introduced fusion food trucks in 2011, residents and the city administration alike supported them. In 2012, the New Orleans City Council relaxed its food truck regulations. In the same period, it turned its attention to vending at second lines—neighborhood parades and street parties that take place around the city on Sundays—and the city council proposed a new second line vending ordinance. The city’s response highlights a fundamental contradiction in the current approach to street vending. To enable food trucks and street vendors, cities adopt new ordinances with regulations responding to specific contexts and controversies. The regulatory process takes the complaints, concerns, and existing restrictive regulations as the starting point. As different stakeholders—including those in competition with the vendors— participate, the process results in specific regulations that address a multitude of concerns. Because street vending responds to local environments, overly specific ordinances have the effect of impeding street commerce and forcing vendors to work outside the law.

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In this chapter, we argue that relaxing rather than revising regulations— and subsequently planning for ways to make street vending compatible with other activities—would be more effective and just. Through looking at the streets of New Orleans, we discuss the city’s response to food trucks. As the city revisited its food truck regulations, it sought to formalize other traditional street food vending. We explain why highly specific regulations lead to an unjust vending landscape and then explore New Orleans second lines in more detail. The authors participated in and observed second lines during one second line season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of a new second line vending ordinance, if it were enforced. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the new second line vending ordinance would have restricted vending without resolving identified concerns. New Orleans is an instructive case because the intent was to allow rather than eliminate vending. Regardless of intent, however, restrictive regulatory environments are adopted in city after city. In the conclusion, we discuss why relaxing restrictions to authorize street vending outright would be more effective. In this approach, cities would actively plan to increase compatibility between vending and other street activities without creating complex and specific ordinances. Instead of fostering disadvantage for vendors and limiting access for potential customers, the city’s most extensive public spaces could allow selling food and other goods where urban residents can most easily access them. New Food Trucks and Attention to Ongoing Street Vending The tension between the adaptive characteristic of street vending and the regulatory process can be seen in New Orleans, where the city intended to enable food vending but still created restrictive regulations. Over the last decade, the New Orleans City Council and residents actively encouraged food trucks. In 2007, the neighboring county, Jefferson Parish, engaged in a highly racialized dialogue to adopt ordinances to prohibit taco trucks. In response, New Orleans supported the taco truck proprietors, so much so that the New Orleans Times-Picayune published an editorial supporting taco trucks, welcoming both their critical service in the urban reconstruction period following the 2005 hurricanes and their contribution to local food culture. Since then, mobile food vending has gained popularity and attracted widespread attention in the United States. In 2008 in Los Angeles, Roy Choi’s popular Korean taco truck Kogi attracted new proprietors and

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customers alike to mobile fusion food vending (Shouse 2011). By 2012, there were over 1,400 new food trucks in cities across the United States (Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014), and the National Restaurant Association estimated mobile food industry sales at $650 million, or about 1 percent of restaurant revenues. Emergent Research and Intuit have projected that sales will increase to $2.7 billion by 2017 (Intuit 2012). In 2012, the industry market research firm IBISWorld identified street vending as one of eleven hot start-up industries (Investopedia 2012). In response to both the food truck explosion and pressure by brick-andmortar restaurants, in the 2010s US cities began debating how to revise regulations to enable food trucks. In some cases, cities are adopting more restrictive ordinances (e.g., New York, as discussed in chapter 5), but in others, food trucks have successfully advocated for a more favorable climate. In New Orleans in 2011, potential proprietors of new food trucks began to put pressure on the city to revamp its food truck regulations, which capped active vendor permits to one hundred, set forty-five-minute time limits, and had a six-hundred-foot restaurant and school buffer. In 2012, the city revised its mobile vending regulations to make the situation easier—if not ideal—for food trucks (Allman and Woodward 2012; New Orleans Municipal Code Chapter 110). Public officials have embraced food trucks because both their customers and proprietors are middle-income residents associated with gentrification and with creative class–oriented urban redevelopment (Martin 2014; Newman and Burnett 2013; Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014). Food trucks also have a localist, fresh food bent that appeals to this class of urban consumers (Intuit 2012), and they retain a gloss of informality that contributes to creating a controlled yet dynamic city that projects qualities such as spontaneity and vitality (see chapter 7). A focus on food trucks nevertheless overlooks other forms of street vending that also are increasing throughout US cities (see chapter 3). In the largest cities, sidewalk vending is widespread and widely acknowledged. Between ten thousand and fifty thousand vendors work Los Angeles’s sidewalks (Hsu 2014; The Economic Roundtable 2015), and in 2015 twenty thousand vendors worked the streets in New York (Street Vendor Project, n.d.). Farmers and public markets use streets, parks, and parking lots in cities throughout the country (Morales 2000). According to the USDA, the numbers of farmers’ markets have increased from 1,755 in 1994, when it started counting, to 8,476 in 2015. There was a 2.5 percent increase between 2014 and 2015 (USDA, n.d.). In addition, people turn to vending as opportunities arise.

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Vendors sell hot lunches to construction crews, come out for parades, and work large events and tailgate parties. The Contradictions of Street Vending Regulation Nevertheless, street vending regulation and regulatory processes have inherent contradictions, as can be seen in New Orleans. When the New Orleans City Council addressed new food trucks, it also turned its attention to informal vending. It began to enforce vending prohibitions and restrict informal parking markets near the Fairgrounds during Jazz Fest. However, the city’s approach was to formalize rather than eliminate vending, requiring permits and compliance with regulations. When public officials realized that second line vendors could not comply with mobile vending requirements in effect for mobile vending or special event permits, Councilmember Diana E. Bajoie proposed a new vending provision that would apply specifically to second line parades. To formalize mobile food vending, the city wrestled with regulations that reflected the unique situation of second line vending. The city proposed to amend Municipal Code Chapter 110 (Peddlers, Solicitors, and Itinerant Vendors), “creating a new Social Aid and Pleasure Club Vendor as a Class E Transient Vendor,” adding a new section that outlined the requirements specific to these vendors (Section 110–265.1). Vendors would be required to obtain permits for as low as twenty-five dollars annually. The fee did not appear onerous, and many liked the idea of an affordable license, preferring not to work under the threat of uneven enforcement. The new ordinance authorized vendors who participated in permitted second line parades and reflected the unique ways that second lines take place. It allowed prepared food, food cooked to order, and both hot and cold cooked food. It also allowed nonfood vending, because vendors sometimes sell anything from sports memorabilia to soap and cosmetic products. Even though the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Vendor regulation was permissive overall, it included provisions that were inconsistent with established practices. Across the United States, complex regulations make it almost impossible to vend legally in many US cities. Regulations include outright prohibitions, caps on the number of vending licenses, restrictions on products, and complex location and time restrictions (Kettles 2007). Although the local police and public officials often ignore vending, when they choose to enforce the rules, vendors are fined, have their goods confiscated, and can be arrested. Because the process is complaint driven, vendors

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Table 6.1 Text of the new ordinance on transient vending Section 110–265.1 Additional requirements for transient vendors under Class “E” (a) Vendors permitted under this division may sell from parked vehicles or pushcarts and on the sidewalks as long as pedestrian traffic may pass. (b) Vendors permitted under this division are prohibited from parking a motor vehicle on the neutral ground (c) Vendors permitted under this division that are stationary may be present in any single location for one hour previous to the parade and one hour after the parade has passed the location. (d) Vendors permitted under this division may also move with the parade if using pushcarts, walking, or other vehicle except for motor vehicles. All moving vendors must keep moving except when making a sale. No stands, card tables or the like, except hand-carried displays, shall be allowed on public streets, sidewalks, alleys, parks, squares, neutral grounds or rights-of-way for the sale or display of goods. (e) Allowed food items: Vendors permitted under this division may sell prepared and packaged foods, cooked food, food cooked to order, food cooked on, in, or adjacent to the vendor vehicle or cart. (f) Prohibited items:   (i) Vendors permitted under this division may not utilize propane grills.   (ii) Vendors permitted under this division may not sell alcoholic beverages. (g) Vendors permitted under this division must display a menu of food items with set prices that is attached to their vehicle, pushcart, or other conveyance for their wares. (h) Vendors permitted under this division must conspicuously display their permit on their vehicle, pushcart, or other conveyance for their wares. (i) Vendors permitted under this division must supply a trash receptacle while vending. (j) Vendors permitted under this division must keep clean from litter a ten foot radius extending from their vehicle, pushcart, or other conveyance while vending. (k) During the Mardi Gras season, it shall be unlawful for any vendor permitted under this division to cook, prepare, sell, or vend from a trailer, or other mobile temporary facility, or vehicle, or on foot, any food or merchandise on the sidewalk on the same side of the street, in the street, or on the neutral ground (median) in front of any lawfully operating restaurant, cafeteria, public or private school, or any concession operated by a booster club sanctioned by the department of recreation. The provisions contained in this section shall not apply to vendors who are issued permits under City Code section 34–35. Vendors issued permits under this article are prohibited in participating in vending during any Mardi Gras parade without the proper MG licenses and permits.

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operating legally might be harassed, and those violating a regulation might be left alone (Kettles 2007; Devlin 2011). Two provisions of the New Orleans ordinance became particularly controversial during the process of debating the new regulation: the prohibition on selling alcoholic beverages and the requirement for trash collection. These two provisions addressed complaints against the street vendors. Some expressed concern that alcohol sales took business from bars along the routes. Neighborhood residents in one part of the city also complained that second lines leave trash. There was a proposal to charge the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs (SA&PCs), the neighborhood-based community organizations that organize second line parades, with a street cleaning fee, but the SA&PCs were already paying for police details and resisted. Other provisions did not become as controversial, even though they also were inconsistent with established practices. Although charcoal grills were allowed and common, propane grills were also used at times. Posting a menu was common among stationary vendors (but often without prices listed), but not among people selling Jell-O shots, sweets, or drinks. The ordinance required moving vendors to keep moving, even though they might stay in one place during stops. Vendors were prohibited from parking on neutral ground (as medians are called in New Orleans), even though this was common practice. More than opposing the specific provisions, many people felt that second line vending permits should not be required, because they meddled with a long-standing tradition. In the decade after Hurricane Katrina, along with formalizing informal vending, the city has cracked down on parades accompanying funerals and on Mardi Gras Indians whose traditions eschew the fixed routes and/or prior permission required by parade permits. In 2006, the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force joined forces with the ACLU to demand that the mayor, governor, and police superintendent request an injunction against an ordinance that increased mandatory fees and permits for second lines by more than 300 percent. The increase was justified as protection against what police perceived as an “increased threat of violence” (Sakakeeny 2013, 34–35). Despite the city’s punitive actions, official city sources have embraced these public traditions—and second lines in particular— as uniquely New Orleans. Organized parades accompany convention and tourist events, weddings, and events organized by new residents. Prior research suggests strict regulations are unnecessary; public space users adapt readily to complex and changing public environments. Research into markets (Morales 2010) and sidewalk vending (Kim 2012) has shown that street vendors organize among themselves, responding to and

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developing local norms. Pedestrians also can maneuver complex environments and self-organize when spaces are crowded (Goffman 1971; Whyte 1988; Gehl 2011), and other public space users—including people who are homeless—act to manage and care for public spaces (Anderson 2011). Regulations also can produce and reproduce disadvantage. The politics within localist, fresh food movements have limited views of healthy food, and much sidewalk vending does not fall into the healthy food category, even though street vending can help alleviate problems associated with a lack of affordable fresh food (Morales and Kettles 2009). Therefore, the local food movement is reproducing patterns of racial disadvantage (Slocum 2007). These patterns are also being replicated when cities allow new food trucks that intentionally distinguish themselves from taco trucks but do not enable other forms of vending (see chapter 3). Food truck proprietors have established associations to represent their specific interests (Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014), and their successes have not benefitted sidewalk vendors (Martin 2014). Instead, one type of street vending can be used to curtail another, such as when cities attempt to end sidewalk vending by establishing vending districts or markets (Huang, Xue, and Li 2014; Donovan 2008; Kettles 2007; Stoller 1996). Highly specific ordinances can create an inequitable vending landscape when some vendors receive more support than others (Martin 2014; Reyes 2015). More fundamentally, however, even when vending is permitted, the rigidity of regulations runs counter to the adaptive nature of such activities. A defining characteristic of public space use is that it adapts to local, changing circumstances. Vendors work in various situations in which they can earn income. However, the regulatory process results in specific regulations that only allow particular activities in certain spaces (Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014). Vending at New Orleans Second Lines: To Permit Tradition? The new ordinance in New Orleans was intended to permit second line vending to continue, and therefore it was designed to reflect its specific patterns. Second lines wind through neighborhood streets and onto main thoroughfares, recognizing local businesses and the homes of recently deceased community members. The SA&PC members, accompanied by live brass band music, lead the parade. Residents and other onlookers follow along, making the “second line,” resulting in hundreds, and at times thousands, of people walking and dancing through the streets (figure 6.1). Participants come on foot, bicycle, tricycle, motorcycle, car, SUV, four-wheeler,

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Figure 6.1 Second lining in New Orleans. Photo credit: Renia Ehrenfeucht.

and horseback. Second lines take place weekly on Sundays in different neighborhoods across the city for nine months of the year. An ambiguous mix of formal and informal activities characterizes the street vending and parades. Second lines and other parades are protected as First Amendment activity. Parades are allowed with special event permits, fixed routes and times, and police details (for which the organizers pay). Within the event, activities are more informal, and at times participants walk in traffic, dance on neighboring porches, and climb on buildings, freeway overpasses, or construction equipment. During each second line, vendors—numbering from six to eight at smaller events to dozens at larger ones—move along and are interspersed with the crowd. They sell water, beer, and Gatorade from coolers pulled by wagons or carts (figure 6.2). Some vendors have two coolers on a wagon, both teeming with bottles of beer and water, and two men pull and push the cart full of ice and drinks. As the ice melts, it drains onto the street, and the vendors might refill ice and drinks from a truck along the route. Others

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Figure 6.2 Drink vendors pulling coolers on wagons. Photo credit: Renia Ehrenfeucht.

carry Jell-O shots, homemade praline candy, sweet potato pies, brownies, and other sweets on trays. On a good day, a water and beer vendor could sell upward of $1,000 worth of drinks, but most vendors make less. The vendors are also second line participants. They greet friends or acquaintances, dance to the music, and engage in other ways. The participants come from the local neighborhoods and around the city, as do the vendors. Some come out week after week to different second lines, whereas others only catch a few parades. Second lines, and the SA&PCs that orchestrate them, come out of neighborhoods that have endured long-standing neglect and structural inequality. They have poor-quality parks and streets and high rates of abandoned property. They have also been subject to redevelopment initiatives, such as federal HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods federal redevelopment projects, beginning in the 1990s and continuing after Hurricane Katrina (Arena 2012). Residents live with high levels of violence—including from the police—and the neighborhoods are overly policed. This tension pervades New Orleans, a city that people visit for its vibrant cultures that have come from African American communities. Although the city has taken a hands-off approach to much small-scale activity, it also actively attempts to control the streets. The SA&PCs belong to a group of organizations established to provide insurance and welfare for black Americans, who traditionally were not

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well-served by banks or conventional institutions and who were excluded from many forms of American wealth creation. Like immigrant Mutual Aid Associations, members collectively pool membership dues and contributions to assist one another. Many people relied on these organizations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they endure today. By taking to the streets, residents claim and reclaim their neighborhoods, thus owning the streets and producing community spaces (Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club 2006; Regis 1999, 2001; Grams 2013).1 Although the population has changed significantly in the decade since the city was flooded after the protective levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the city is still majority African American. In 2000, Orleans Parish was 67 percent African American, although the share of African American residents had dropped to 60 percent by 2010 (Orleans Parish has contiguous boundaries with the city of New Orleans). The poverty rate for black New Orleanians was 32 percent, compared with 14 percent among white New Orleanians in 2010 (The Data Center, n.d., analysis of 2008–2010 ACS data). The SA&PCs hail from neighborhoods that are majority African American and are also likely to have lower than average incomes. These are also the neighborhoods in which second lines begin. For example, the Seventh Ward neighborhood was 87 percent African American in 2010, and the average household income was more than $30,000 less than the Parish median income (2010–2014 ACS, demographic information from The Data Center, n.d.). Second line parades start in these neighborhoods, but they travel through New Orleans’s textured urban fabric, where wealthy residents live blocks from residents with very low incomes. At the time of writing, these historic neighborhoods are also sites of new development and debates over gentrification. To understand second line vending and how the new regulations, if enforced, would impact vendors, the authors participated in second lines throughout the 2014–2015 season, engaging in a total of thirty-two parades for between two and four hours each Sunday. In one case, a parade did not roll due to a problem with the permit. Each participation session included observing vending as second lines moved through city streets and watching the vendors close and leave at designated stops. Ten observations included passing a stop prior to the parade where vendors had parked or set up. Six observations included traveling back along the route to determine observable impacts after the parade passed. Second lines take approximately four hours from their start to arrival at the last stop. Numerous times along the route, they stop at neighborhood

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bars, clubhouses, homes, or other community sites. The SA&PC members enter an establishment while other participants wait on the street and sidewalks, talking, eating, and drinking. When the SA&PC members come out again, they restart the parade’s movement. The stops can be as short as fifteen minutes, but can last thirty minutes or more. In these intervals, street vendors and food trucks sell food to participants in many ways, and the proposed ordinance partially reflects this by enabling vending with few specific prohibitions. Food trucks sell snowballs and nachos. Trucks with catering trailers sell barbeque from grills set up in the trailers. Vendors sell straight from the flatbeds of their pickup trucks— in a few cases, trucks are rented from U-Haul. They grill hamburgers and sausages, while others pull hot turkey necks out of stew pots and hand them over in a plastic bag (figure 6.3). At smaller events, a few food vendors are at each stop, whereas large events might have food vendors parked along an entire block. For the larger parades, regular food vendors arrive early to the first stop to get a good spot and start cooking. When participants arrive, the vendors have the grill going, and other second liners can buy sausages or hamburgers, although they sometimes need to wait a few minutes. At times, food is cooked to order, and nachos and snowballs are prepared in the trucks while customers wait.

Figure 6.3 Vending from the back of a truck. Photo credit: Renia Ehrenfeucht.

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However, many vendors sell in ways that are prohibited, and the new ordinance creates vulnerability for vendors working in communities already subject to active policing. Some people grill using propane tanks. Many people sold beer and occasionally wine from coolers, and others also set up bars from the back of cars and pickup trucks and sell mixed drinks in plastic cups. In addition to the regular vendors, some people sell hot plates from card tables in front of their houses when a second line is stopping nearby. Food vendors did not always comply with the food health and safety standards to which food trucks are subject, since they do not have sinks or running water. The snowball truck and other food trucks that occasionally served second lines have sinks and water, but the catering trailers do not. Meat is pulled out of coolers, grilled, and sold in paper take out containers. Some vendors also sell candies or pies made at home. Nevertheless, it is important to note that food quality and safety were not concerns. This research project could not determine why health and safety were not raised as concerns. A newspaper article search for food related accidents or illness associated with second lines found no articles, suggesting this has not been an issue in the preceding decades. Because second lines can be characterized as self-organizing events, they unfold without compliance with a given ordinance. Interrelated permitted and informal activities smoothly roll along because all participants are responsive to others around them. When SA&PC members start or continue the parade, hundreds or thousands of people move collectively down the street. The walking vendors move with others, and when they slow down, nearby participants walk around them. When arriving at a site, food vendors self-organize when determining where to park. They cluster near the identified stop, but for large events vendors might extend along the block. At times, vendors block an intersection during the stop (when the intersecting street is full of people) and pull away as the second line moves on. The second lines occupy the whole street, often for blocks, delaying cars that are caught behind the parade or at an intersection that is closed while the parade passes. The police detail before and after the parade blocks the street for the second liners, but in many cases people walk alongside and around cars that travel slowly through the crowds. On large streets with neutral grounds, one side of the street will be closed to traffic, but people, bicyclists, and other participants will often walk on both sides of the street. Both the cars and people on foot and bike are responsive. Walkers move through and around cars, at times interacting with drivers by dancing in

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front of the cars and greeting the drivers. Cars respond patiently. Even when participants are outside of the area contained by the police detail, cars rarely honk and move slowly through the people. At times, drivers notably enjoy the second line, responding to the music and people and waving to acquaintances. Groups on three-wheelers, four-wheelers, and motorcycles also participate, often driving away from a stop through the walkers who still move along the street. The observations demonstrate that vendors have little additional spatial impact beyond that of the parades themselves. Walking and rolling vendors act like other participants. The vendors pulling wagons with coolers start at any point but, delayed by customers and the weight of the wagon, often end up close to the end of the parade, sometimes outside or trailing the police cars. One vendor who participates in numerous second lines pulls a cooler behind a personal mobility device in front of the parade. Women selling Jell-O shots work individually or in pairs, with one person selling from a tray and another from a cooler so that each can walk among the parade participants. The sweets vendors often stay to the outside and walk alongside participants. At the stops, they stand to one side or walk among the people. Some drink vendors collect empties in their wagons next to the coolers, but other than that, mobile vendors rarely have trash receptacles. They also do not post menus. The vendors that set up at the stops also have minimal unique spatial impact. In areas with traffic, they park along the streets, on the neutral grounds, or at times in vacant lots. In some instances, nearby residents purchase something prior to the arrival of the second line. For larger parades, vendors set up well in advance at the beginning or the end. People also come out early, so the vendors are one part of all the activity occurring. Alcohol sales occur throughout the events. Second lines feel like moving street parties. Although drinking alcohol is part of the event, participants do not become visibly drunk. Drinking alcohol in public is legal in New Orleans, and walking with drinks is common at second lines and other public events. In addition to the bars operating from the backs of trucks, second line participants buy beer from walking vendors. At times, there is a pause in motion at the time of sale, but often the exchange occurs without either person breaking stride. The prices are similar from different vendors (three dollars per beer, two beers for five dollars; two dollars for Gatorade; or one dollar for water). Vendors explain the prices, if asked, or call them out, but often drinks and money are exchanged as if the transaction is familiar to both parties. Because the parade is moving, without the vendors the participants would have to leave the second line to enter

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a bar or store to buy a drink. Along most segments, the street has few if any open bars and stores, and entering and waiting would be inconsistent with the event’s pace. It is also worth noting that in New Orleans alcohol in public cannot be in glass containers. Although people commonly drink out of glass bottles at public events, during the public discussion, no one raised the issue of the glass bottles. Instead, the alcohol itself was the subject of regulation. Given that most second liners would not leave the parade to enter a bar, most bars would not benefit if alcohol sales were curtailed along route. Some stops occurred at bars. In these cases, without vendors the bars would get a higher share of drink business. However, regulating alcohol to control competition with stores and bars is not an authorized use of police power. Because bars can give drinks in to-go cups and people can purchase drinks from stores or bring their own drinks, prohibiting alcohol vending would not reduce litter. In a city with few public trashcans and no street cleaning, litter has an impact. In addition, some neighborhoods have high numbers of vacant properties where garbage has been dumped; as a result, New Orleans has more visible litter than many US cities. The litter from second lines was dealt with informally. When the parades start to move, participants who are still eating begin to walk. The trucks pull away as quickly as the parade, towing or securing their hot grills, often to move farther along the parade route. After the parade moves from a spot, someone stays back to pick up litter, or an abutting business or resident picks up litter. In some cases, recyclers would follow and pick up cans. In most cases, within an hour (the time that passed before we returned to the site), the sites would not obviously look like an event passed. However, some neighborhood residents have complained because they must pick up trash. Along the route, after the parade passes, drink and Jell-O shot containers litter the street. One aspect of our research was walking back along the routes after the parades, and though drink containers were visible, the sight was not noticeably different than other streets in the vicinity. Participants also took numerous actions to centralize trash, such as piling bottles off the street or tossing them onto the neutral ground at the base of a tree, and trash cans were full and overflowing. The new ordinance requires vendors to pick up litter around their vending location. However, most vendors do not vend from one location. This requirement would only address litter around stationary food vendors such as trucks at stops, and in these cases the customers are mobile, walking around the site and therefore reducing the connection between the vendor

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and the surrounding litter. The vendors also work near one another, and therefore it is difficult to determine what trash comes from which vendor. The regulation shifts the burden of activity onto the vendors rather than requiring participants to put trash in cans. Our observations suggest that more trashcans along the routes—or along city streets—would have a significant effect. Second line vendors can now obtain mobile vending licenses, but the events unfold as they did before with a wide range of vendors working in different ways. Some have licenses visible while others do not. Vendors call out prices and people set up bars in the back of trucks. The new restrictions are inconsistent with established vending patterns, making vendors subject to uneven enforcement based on what they are selling, whether they set up early to get a good spot, or if litter is found in the vicinity. Many fear the new regulations could also lead to further restrictions, eroding a cultural practice in which vendors are part of the second line events. Whether this will happen is yet to be seen. Moving Forward: Reducing Barriers and Planning for Compatibility In all US cities, mobile food vending operates within highly regulated public landscapes, where vendors are subject to numerous health and spatial or public space regulations. When the City of New Orleans attempted to formalize informal vending practices, it created a new process for second line vending. Even though council members were not attempting to curtail the vending or impede second lines, the city made a common mistake by responding to complaints and existing regulations rather than carefully considering how second line vending occurred. Therefore, the regulations do not consider the event, regular vending practices, or customer responses. Instead of creating new but still complex regulations, an alternative approach could authorize vending subject to performance criteria, such as minimal distance from crosswalks or intersections. The basis for this approach would be decades of research about ongoing street vending and other street users who self-organize. It also requires learning from street vending rather than basing solutions on complaints and existing regulations. A new era for street vending and public space access must recognize that vendors adapt to local conditions and change where and how they work as opportunities arise. People engage in vending at different frequencies, with some augmenting other sources of income and others relying on regular

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vending for daily subsistence. Restrictive regulations make it impossible for vendors to legally change how and where they work. Regardless of the intent and the context in which ordinances are enacted, they produce vulnerability. When issues arise, the impulse is to revise the regulations rather than relax them. This privileges the most influential participants, who successfully advocate for more favorable conditions for themselves, and leaves others vulnerable to unpredictable enforcement in a complex regulatory environment. New mobile food vending regulations create an opportunity to plan for all kinds of street commerce. In New Orleans, the absence of an ordinance caused vendors to work outside the law, and the new regulation had the same effect. An easier solution is to relax the existing regulations to allow vending. Widespread informal vending takes place regularly without threatening health and safety, indicating that laws are too restrictive. Our observations of second line vending suggest an alternative approach. Allowing vending outright reduces the chance of erratic enforcement and pressure from police and private businesses. Extensive evidence suggests that public space users have the capacity to self-organize. Providing trash cans and designing spaces for active use can reduce potentially adverse impacts. Through this strategy, the city’s vast outdoor landscapes can become more accessible, more dynamic, healthier, and safer while creating a just public realm in which vendors, their customers, and others interact in mutually beneficial urban spaces. Note 1.  Despite a recent increase in white participants—both tourists and new residents— second lines continue to be majority African American events. With the exception of one vendor (a white man who appeared to be deliberately dressed as a street vendor from the early nineteenth century), all of the vendors were black.

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Kettles, Gregg. 2007. “Legal Responses to Sidewalk Vending: The Case of Los Angeles, California.” In Street Entrepreneurs: People, Place and Politics in Local and Global Perspective, edited by John C. Cross and Alfonso Morales, 58–78. London: Routledge. Kim, Annette M. 2012. “The Mixed-Use Sidewalk.” Journal of the American Planning Association 78 (3): 225–238. doi:10.1080/01944363.2012.715504. Martin, Nina. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12169. Morales, Alfonso. 2000. “Peddling Policy: Street Vending in Historical and Contemporary Context.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (3–4): 76–98. doi:10.1108/01443330010789133. Morales, Alfonso. 2010. “Planning and the Self-Organization of Marketplaces.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 30 (2): 182–197. doi:10.1177/ 0739456X10385561. Morales, Alfonso, and Gregg Kettles. 2009. “Healthy Food Outside: Farmers’ Markets, Taco Trucks, and Sidewalk Fruit Vendors.” Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 26 (1): 20–48. Newman, Lenore L., and Katherine Burnett. 2013. “Street Food and Vibrant Urban Spaces: Lessons from Portland, Oregon.” Local Environment 18 (2): 233–248. doi :10.1080/13549839.2012.729572. Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club. 2006. Coming out the Door for the Ninth Ward. Edited by Rachel Breunlin. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project. Regis, Helen A. 1999. “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals.” Cultural Anthropology 14 (4): 472–504. Regis, Helen A. 2001. “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line.” American Ethnologist 28 (4): 752–777. Reyes, Emily A. 2015. “L.A. Lawmakers Vote to Reinstate Ban on Park and Beach Vending.” Los Angeles Times, June 16. Sakakeeny, M. 2013. Roll with It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shouse, Heather. 2011. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels. New York: Ten Speed Press. Slocum, Rachel. 2007. “Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice.” Geoforum 38:520–533.

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Stoller, Paul. 1996. “Spaces, Places and Fields: The Politics of West African Trading in New York City’s Informal Economy.” American Anthropologist 98 (4): 776–788. Street Vendor Project. n.d. http://streetvendor.org/. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). n.d. “Farmers Markets and Direct to Consumer Marketing.” https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/local-regional/farmers -markets-and-direct-consumer-marketing. Whyte, William H. 1988. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday.

7  From Hippie to Hip: City Governance and Two Eras of Street Vending in Vancouver, Canada Amy Hanser

In the late summer of 1974, two Vancouver aldermen made an inspection tour of street vending on Granville Street, one of the city’s major downtown shopping streets. They were not happy with what they found. “That’s ridiculous,” Jack Volrich, one of the aldermen, was quoted as saying of a homemade brown-and-yellow-striped wooden kiosk. “It looks like an oversized outhouse” (Vancouver Sun, Aug. 31, 1974). Other vending setups, involving portable tables, were deemed “completely inappropriate” by city officials (Vancouver Sun, Aug. 31, 1974). By contrast, decades later, Vancouver city councilor Heather Deal described the city’s new food carts, first welcomed downtown in 2010, as “like public art ... it makes the streets a more exciting, vibrant place to be” (Province [Vancouver], Apr. 30, 2012). Serving foods described as “delectable” and “tastebud-boggling,” the shiny new carts and trucks generated enormous excitement. In the words of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, “We’ve got a world-class city, and people want a world-class street food scene to match” (Province, July 11, 2010). Or as Peter Waal, a Vancouverite who directs the Food Network Canada show Eat St., said of food carts, “It’s more like a party. It’s more like a backyard barbecue” (Mar. 2, 2012). What distinguishes the “outhouse” from the “party” on the street? Both the hippie vendors of the 1970s and the hip new food vendors of the 2010s were enmeshed in important instances of new standards or rules related to street vending being debated and decided upon in Vancouver. However, the contrast between the two time periods illustrates a pair of contradictory impulses shaping regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of formalization (the imposition of new rules, standards, and regulations) that seeks to tame the informality and “messiness” of street vending. In Vancouver, what I call hippie vending of the 1970s was viewed as disorderly, aesthetically unacceptable, and in violation of standards of fair competition. Therefore, the city enacted a new bylaw regime

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to impose a set of formal rules and standards that effectively regulated most of the unruly vendors out of existence. By the 2010s, however, a second, contradictory impulse had appeared: a seeming embrace of the vitality, spontaneity, and creativity associated with informality. Changing cultural values that embrace the informal—changes that themselves have roots in the 1960s and 1970s—produced new ideas about city streets and now identify street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” The result in Vancouver has been a city-led effort to introduce new forms of food vending to the city. However, this seeming embrace of the informal has nevertheless unfolded through the formal procedures that characterize much of how city governance operates (Valverde 2012), and as such food carts and trucks represent a highly regulated form of street vending. In fact, the vitality associated with vending—in Vancouver, at least—is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form (see chapter 13). This may, perhaps, be the essence of the difference between the hippie and the hip: True informality and marginality have been replaced with a gloss of the informal. This chapter draws upon archival research, newspaper and other media accounts, and interviews with food cart operators, city-elected officials, and (current and former) city staff in order to develop comparative accounts of vending in Vancouver in the 1970s and in the contemporary, post-2010 period. The comparison suggests the importance of social and political context to the regulation of street commerce and demonstrates how in the contemporary period changes to regulatory practice should not be interpreted as opening the streets to formerly marginalized populations and economic practices. In fact, much as Dunn (chapter 3) documents for New York and Lemon (chapter 9) describes for Columbus, in Vancouver in the 2010s it is not clear that social justice issues have ever been a motivating factor behind the introduction of food carts and trucks to the city’s streets. Background Numerous scholars—sociologists as well as geographers, urban planners, historians, and others—have documented and described urban sidewalks as sites of contention and negotiation, and in cities around the world street commerce has a long but often contested history. Historically, conflicts over street and sidewalk commerce have revolved around notions of what purposes sidewalk space is supposed to serve and what city neighborhoods

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are supposed to look like. In North America, “sidewalk wars” (Martinez 1991, cited in Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009) date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when public disputes about street vending were framed as debates over the commercial versus noncommercial uses of the street but were often rooted in concerns about social order and hygiene linked to immigration (Bluestone 1991; Southworth and Ben-Joseph 1993). Over the years, the urban sidewalk has come to be perceived as primarily a space through which pedestrian traffic should flow smoothly (Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009; Blomley 2011) and has been shaped by efforts to “specialize” urban space through municipal zoning laws (Benson 2006). Recent growth of street vending in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, usually dated to the 1980s and the arrival of particular immigrant groups in each city, has resulted in more restrictive municipal regulation for street vending, as well as efforts by neighborhood business associations to assert a “view of sidewalks as a landscaped strip” through which the pedestrian-shopper can move unobstructed (LoukaitouSideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009, 147; see also Kettles 2007; Duneier 1999; Stoller 2002). By contrast, advocates for street vendors present “a multipurpose vision for the sidewalks” (Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009, 148; see also Kim 2012) or characterize it as a “sustaining habitat” (Duneier 1999) for economic survival. Sidewalks and street vending are represented as spaces where and means by which marginalized people—recent immigrants, homeless men, and the poor—can eke out a living, though often under the threat of harassment from police or other city authorities (Stoller 2002; Duneier 1999; Devlin 2011) and in the face of social stigmas against working on the street (Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2011). These divergent perspectives on street commerce are also well-documented in studies of the “informal economy” and street merchants in modernizing cities of developing nations (see Bromley 2000 for a review; Cross 1998; Stillerman 2006). In such cities, conflicts over street commerce often center on ideas about modern, “rational” urban spaces (Boyer 1983; Harms 2009) that clash with the “informality” of street vending (Hunt 2009). In fact, governance of city streets and sidewalks is a prime example of what urban scholars have called police powers, a form of state regulation in the name of public good (Foucault 2009; Hunt 2006; see also chapters 4 and 13). As Blomley (2012) has argued, the city is the “quintessential police site,” where urban concentration demands many forms of government regulation and intervention. Therefore, although historically commerce

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has been conducted on city sidewalks and streets, it has been increasingly circumscribed and regulated, often in pursuit of some form of urban order (see chapter 2). In most North American cities, vending is largely banned, and when it is allowed vendors are usually limited to a specific range of products (artwork or handicrafts, for example, or certain types of food) and specific locations that reflect the sense that public sidewalks and streets should be preserved for more legitimate uses, primarily circulation.1 However, as the chapters in this text attest, in recent years there has been a resurgence of street commerce in the form of gourmet food carts and trucks, this time sanctioned and in some cases even promoted by municipal governments (e.g., chapter 11). Propelled in part by broad public interest in food trends, cities across North America have embraced new forms of street food. The contrast between the continued restrictions on more traditional forms of street vending and the welcome extended to new, trendy food trucks raises important questions about access and equity in public spaces. For example, Nina Martin (2014; see also chapter 11) has examined the contrast between the unsuccessful efforts by immigrant street vendors in Chicago to change restrictive regulations on street vending and the recent success of gourmet food trucks in convincing the city to allow their operations. The difference, Martin argues, can be found in how food trucks and their association with “creativity” enable local politicians to view them as part of an effort to build an attractive “creative city” (Florida 2005), whereas the activities of working-class street vendors are viewed as a nuisance; they are accused of importing developing-world practices and introducing noise, litter, congestion, and potential food safety hazards to city sidewalks. Martin observes a class bias in both discourses about creativity and in policies related to vending, as a creative city discourse has come to inform concrete regulation—a point reinforced by many chapters in this text (e.g., chapters 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, and 13). Similar observations have been made about the differential reception of gourmet food trucks and more traditional taco trucks in the Los Angeles region (Hernández-López 2011; Wang 2009) and, as discussed in this text, in New York City, Charlotte, and Columbus (chapters 3, 9, and 11). This trend reflects the importance of hierarchies of consumption to the regulation of space in contemporary North American cities. Scholars like Sharon Zukin (1991, 1995, 2010) and David Ley (1996, 2003) have highlighted the increasing importance of the symbolic economy of cities, with implications for the economic and spatial organization of cities as well as the identities of the people who live there. As Zukin (2010) notes, as cities

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have become important sites for consumption and as city governments have become invested in cultural strategies for urban (re)development, consumer tastes and cultural power increasingly shape how urban space is used and by whom. She argues that this new cultural politics of urban space mobilizes the “gentrifier’s aesthetic appreciation of urban authenticity” (18), an aesthetic that Valverde characterizes as a neoliberal interpretation of “diversity” and its role in competition between cities (Valverde 2012, 19; see also Peck 2012; chapter 13). Gabriella Modan (2008, 190) documents how in the context of gentrification in one Washington, D.C., neighborhood, the concept of diversity changes over time such that it becomes a depoliticized commodity for individual lifestyle consumption as opposed to a term representing social justice and equity goals. Why has the street, and street food, become a site for elite aesthetics and tastes to demand expression? What has made formerly problematic forms of street commerce quite literally palatable? The perceived authenticity of ethnic street foods (Zukin 2010), a “democratizing” trend among elite consumers embracing lowbrow foods (Johnston and Baumann 2010), and the perception of high-end street food as creative (Martin 2014) all partially explain the phenomenon. Each of these trends can also be linked to a larger set of cultural trends that have seen an embrace of certain elements of the informality associated with the rebellious and countercultural 1960s and 1970s (Binkley 2007; Frank 1997). Propelled by the “expressive revolution” (Parsons 1978, cited in Wouters 2007) and liberation and rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the latter decades of the twentieth century were marked by a process of informalization in social relations (Wouters 2007) and a “new spirit” of capitalism that has embraced flexibility, freedom, and creativity (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Could the excitement around and support for new forms of street food partly reflect a belief in the value of the informal and represent an effort to recuperate some of that energy on what have come to be seen as overly sanitized city streets? How deep is the embrace of informality? In Vancouver, have the hippie vendors been revived? The contrast between how street vending was characterized and addressed in Vancouver in the 1970s and how it is understood today illustrates a consistent discomfort with the messiness and informality associated with street vending across time. The experience of Vancouver’s hippie vendors in the 1970s specifically illustrates how a proliferation of street vending in the city’s downtown provided the context in which what Valverde (2012) terms “the law of the street corner”—in this case, regulations for vending—was elaborated and formalized, ultimately to the disadvantage of

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vendors. Today, that discomfort with street vending has been transformed into a desire to recapture the vitality associated with informality as an antidote to urban blandness. The introduction of food trucks and carts to Vancouver’s downtown in 2010, however, illustrates the tensions between the newly embraced appeal of the informal and city government’s relentless need to act through formalized mechanisms. In the end, only certain kinds of vending are considered acceptable; the hip vendor is far easier to manage than the hippie one. Hippie Vendors, Hippie Wares: 1970s in Vancouver Traces of all the themes described thus far and documented throughout this text—concerns about racialized immigrant populations; police concerns with unobstructed circulation, hygiene, and informal economic activity; and the imposition of elite visions of urban aesthetics—can be found in the history of street vending in Vancouver. In the 1910s, the Vancouver city government reacted to fears about Chinese merchants operating beyond the monitored bounds of Chinatown by taxing mobile Chinese vegetable peddlers out of existence (Anderson 1991, 118). In 1968, popcorn vendors along a beachfront road were threatened with expulsion after they were accused of creating traffic congestion (Province, July 9, 1968), and in the late 1970s the city cracked down on farmers selling produce from roadside locations because they were perceived as a threat to public health, blocked traffic, and used “unacceptable” weighing devices such as bathroom scales (Report to Council, Standing Committee on Transportation, June 28, 1979, p. 4). It was in fact in the 1970s that regulations on street vending underwent considerable scrutiny and revision, resulting in a set of changes prompted by a proliferation of hippie vendors in several key downtown locations. At the time, peddling was legal on city sidewalks, though licensed peddlers were required to spend no more than ten minutes in one place.2 Despite these restrictions, de facto street markets had developed in downtown Vancouver, especially in the historic Gastown neighborhood and along parts of Granville Street, a central boulevard that was simultaneously a key retail and transit location but also dubbed Canada’s “roughest main drag” (Punter 2003, 60). The vendors themselves were a varied group: one newspaper story describes local artisans; an American without legal immigrant status; and eleven-year-old Danny McGinnis, selling totem poles with his “license pinned to his lapel” (Vancouver Sun, July 28, 1973). Images of the vendors published in news reports portray long-haired men and women

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selling goods that reflect a hippie aesthetic: beaded jewelry, handcrafted leather goods, pottery, flowing skirts and dresses, and an abundance of candles.3 By the summer of 1973, the volume of vendors generated complaints from local shop owners concerned about unfair competition and congestion. The city’s license inspector, Milt Harrell, was quoted as saying that vendors were “taking over the sidewalk ... selling everything from candles to racks of clothing” (Vancouver Sun, July 28, 1973), prompting the city to review and revise its regulations for street vending. Although vendors argued that they acted as “a real tourist attraction ... People like the atmosphere we give the city, especially Gastown” (Vancouver Sun, July 28, 1973), a spokesman for a group of retailers accused the vendors of selling “shlock” on a “here today-gone tomorrow” basis (Vancouver Sun, Mar. 1, 1974) and called street peddlers “ugly things” (Province, Mar. 1, 1974). Such complaints from retail store owners, coupled with vendors’ dissatisfaction with the ten-minute rule and general difficulties in policing concentrations of vendors in certain downtown neighborhoods, led the city to spend more than a year consulting with local merchants, various city departments (engineering, social planning, law), and to a lesser extent with vendors themselves in order to draft a new street vending bylaw. The bylaw-writing process, by its very nature, involved an intensive effort to codify many details: How many vendors were acceptable? In what parts of the city? On what parts of the sidewalk? In what density per block? What could they sell? From what kinds of stands? How would licenses be distributed? How much should a license cost? From the initial memo by Jack Volrich, chairman of the committee drafting the new bylaw (April 30, 1974), to the joint reports issued by the engineering and social planning departments to the final bylaw itself, there was a steady movement toward more specificity—and more restrictiveness—through the imposition of detailed guidelines. For example, the new bylaw dictated the size of a space in which a nonmobile vendor might operate (six by three feet for a cart or eight by four feet for a stand; the practice of selling from a blanket was no longer allowed); specified the required distance from the curb, from property lines, and from intersections that vendors must observe; specified block densities (maximum of four vendors); and required vendors to purchase liability insurance and maintain at least a one-hundred-foot distance from competing brick-and-mortar retailers (on proximity bans and vending, see chapter 2). In addition, despite both committee and full council decisions to refrain from imposing restrictions on what vendors could sell, pressure

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from the city engineer for more discretion resulted in significant limitations on acceptable products, in the name of both fair competition with nearby businesses (clothing sales were prohibited, handicrafts encouraged) and public morality (hash pipes and drug paraphernalia were banned) (City Council Minutes, May 16, 1974; see report appended to City Council Minutes, Nov. 5, 1974). Although the new bylaw easily passed a city council vote, it was not without controversy. Bill Friedel, a representative for a group of vendors on Granville Street who feared they would be blocked from selling downtown, complained about the lack of consultation with street vendors (Vancouver Sun, Jan. 30, 1974), and at a city development committee meeting he argued that vending downtown represented a “lifestyle unique to very few cities in Canada” for artists and craftspeople selling their wares (Vancouver Sun, Jan. 18, 1974). Alderman Darlene Marzari, usually allied with the mayor, walked out of the council meeting in protest, arguing that the bylaw was a result of pressure from Granville Street merchants and that the city council was “flagrantly protecting one group over the other” (Vancouver Sun, June 12, 1974). Another city council member, Henry Rankin, viewed the new bylaw as overreaching in its level of detail, suggesting that the new rules would result in a Granville Mall where “every vendor will be told where to stand and every dog will be told where to urinate” (Vancouver Sun, June 12, 1974). In fact, one of the most important changes introduced by the new bylaw was that it did indeed tell every vendor where to stand. Because the bylaw was accompanied by detailed specifications about where vending might be acceptable, and to enhance the city’s ability to manage street vendors, the city’s Engineering Department was tasked with assigning vendors licensed under the new bylaw with fixed locations, a dramatic change from the old ten-minute rule that had required vendors to be mobile. The new security that vendors experienced under the revised vending bylaw led some vendors, especially those operating on Granville Street, to erect the semipermanent stands and stalls that led to Alderman Volrich’s inspection tour and outhouse comment. Ultimately, the unruly aesthetics of Vancouver’s hippie street vendors— what Alderman Harry Rankin described as “the inherent crappiness of big boxes up and down the street” (Province, Oct. 25, 1974)—could not be left to chance. In response to concerns about the appearance of vendors’ stands and carts, the city retained an architect to produce a series of approved vending cart designs, all of which were to be removed from downtown sidewalks at the end of each day. These designs were imposed upon Granville

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Street, though given the expense of making new kiosks and carts to city specifications, the city council agreed to help finance the construction of the new carts. This was one of the few points at which the livelihood aspects of vending seem to have been taken seriously by the city council. Ironically, the required kiosk designs were a consequence of the new bylaw’s creation of fixed vending locations, as formalization seemed to beget more formalization, more rules. The most marginal forms of vending—from blankets, or with no stand at all—and the most marginal vendors were given no legitimate space to vend downtown. Even for the vendors who received a fixed location, bought a kiosk, and went through the trouble of hauling their new kiosk to and from their vending site every day, they had effectively lost one of the key elements that initially lent much appeal to their vending—and perhaps the larger lifestyle associated with it: They had lost their “scene” (Woo, Rennie, and Poyntz 2015). In fact, the scene associated with hippie street vendors was not one city hall sought to support, and in many ways the real point of conflict around street vending was the presence of vendors on Granville Mall, a target for beautification and gentrification efforts at the time. Shortly after street vending was more formally regulated, a downtown stretch of Granville Street was redesigned on the model of Nicollete Mall in Minneapolis to create a more pedestrian-friendly, attractive urban destination. The street was even given gentle, undulating curves to soften the sharp edges of square downtown blocks. Jonathan Baker, the city’s social planner at the time, explained in an interview that there was a desire to create streetscapes in Vancouver that would emulate cities in Europe: “absolutely European and nothing else.” Ironically, at the same time that vendors came under greater regulation, the city was attempting to open sidewalks to restaurant cafés and dining spaces, again on the model of the European city. The high degree of informality that characterized the hippie street vendor scene, however, was not appealing to either the city or to local merchants, and the effort to rein in street vending followed what seems like an almost inevitable logic of greater control, regulation, and limitation. Food Carts: Street Vending Becomes Hip In the spring of 2008, one of Vancouver’s city councilors, Heather Deal, read an article about New York City’s GreenCarts program in the New York Times and the effort to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods through the introduction of city-subsidized

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mobile grocery carts. Deal, inspired by a good idea, thought it would be great for Vancouver to do something similar, so she wrote and forwarded a motion to city council that called for the city to expand street food offerings. The motion called for work on a report to explore expanding the range of foods sold and the areas in the city where food vending was allowed, as well as possibilities for “increasing access to affordable, nutritious food in low-income communities” through street vending (City Council Minutes, Mar. 13, 2008, pp. 3–4). As Deal later told me in an interview (Jan. 19, 2012), “no one could come up with a reason not to like it,” and the motion passed unanimously. However, Deal was a member of a minority party at the time, so the idea was effectively shelved until after the next election returned Deal to office, this time with a new mayor and a majority control over city council. At the same time, some local entrepreneurs, such as aspiring food truck operator Jason Apple, had started lobbying the city to relax restrictions on food vending to allow food trucks to operate in the city. By the time concrete efforts began to expand street food in Vancouver, the plan quickly shifted from green carts (which would require subsidies from the city) to food carts and trucks selling “culturally diverse” and often gourmet offerings. Why would the city government go to all this effort to reintroduce street food vending? The hippie vendors of the 1970s, who had not even sold food products with potential public health concerns, had long since disappeared under the weight of city regulations and changing social and economic times. Part of the story is most certainly the cultural currency of food, as noted earlier, particularly as food connoisseurship has been broadly popularized (Johnston and Baumann 2010; Hanser and Hyde 2014; see also chapter 15). But another key factor is a renewed interest in the virtues of informality, what David Ley (1987) has characterized as the “expressive” or “romantic” tendency in urban planning and design, an ideological position that emphasizes aesthetics and experience over the function and efficiency valued by the “instrumental” tendencies of rational modernism. Ley portrays these competing, and counter, ideologies being written upon urban landscapes like the swinging of a pendulum. In a similar vein, contemporary food carts and trucks were believed to offer an expressive antidote to the anonymity, corporate dominance (i.e., food chains), and blandness of downtown spaces, promising to inject a dose of the spontaneity, creativity, and vitality associated with informality into the relatively rigid, regulated spaces of an urban downtown. This embrace of informality was expressed in a variety of ways: From the outset, reports and documents generated by city staff characterized food

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vending on city streets as “an effective means” to “enliven the public realm, promote neighborhood vitality ... [and] improve sense of place” (Administrative Report to Standing Committee of City Services and Budgets, Jan. 7, 2011). Interviews with Councilor Deal and city staff also revealed an orientation toward city streets that emphasized the virtues of informality and, in contrast to the 1970s, now valued them. For example, when I asked Councilor Deal why the new food carts were good, she described her commitment to “vibrant streets” and noted how the “jumbled form” of food carts helps “animate” a public realm that has become too sterile (Jan. 19, 2012). In an interview, Alan Rockett, the coordinator for the street vending program in Vancouver’s Streets Division (part of City Engineering), also introduced the notion of lively streets in connection with food carts. He said, “We want people to be out on the street and having the streets be lively, so this was just another avenue that was available to us” (Feb. 13, 2012). In a comment echoing Ley’s (1987) portrayal of the pendulum swing of city planning, Chashma Heinz, from Vancouver’s Social Planning Department, told me: “I think it’s—it’s a reinvigoration of what is a street. I mean, I think a lot of our society used to take place on the street. You know, it’s that kind of like pendulum swing, right? If it goes too far one way, it's gonna come back the other way” (Feb. 21, 2012). Support within city hall for food vending was more than matched by enthusiasm in the local media. Before even the first round of new vending licenses had been issued, newspaper articles profiled aspiring food vendors inspired by the lively street markets of Asia or Latin America (Vancouver Sun, May 3, 2010). A letter to a local paper called on city hall to “liven up the place a little and give us some variety” (Vancouver Courier, Apr. 30, 2010), and an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun observed that opening the streets to more street foods is “a political move even the most hardened civic cynic can get behind” (Vancouver Sun, May 29, 2010). Numerous news and opinion pieces identified “archaic rules” enforced by the city and the regional health authority as stifling Vancouver’s street food scene (e.g., Province, May 12, 2010). Interestingly, arguments that vendors in the 1970s had advanced to defend their place in the city—that “people love us” and that vending enlivens downtown areas—reappeared in these public discussions about food vending, only this time such points found widespread support both from the public and city hall. In fact, the process for bringing this breath of fresh air to dull downtown sidewalks was carefully regulated and in some ways became even more so over time (on this process in Vancouver, see also chapter 13). This was particularly true of the evolution of the system for issuing new food

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vending permits. Building on the practice first institutionalized in the 1970s, the city’s Streets Division (under the authority of the city engineer) had identified suitable sidewalk and street-side locations (for carts and trucks, respectively) that conformed with the requirements of traffic and pedestrian flow and other engineering regulations, and in June 2010 the City of Vancouver announced a call for applications for seventeen downtown food vending locations to be awarded by lottery, the procedure that had been used to distribute licenses to the existing hot dog vendors for many years. New applicants were required to “offer menu items other than hot dogs and pre-packaged, non-perishable food like soft drinks, chips, candy bars, granola and nuts” (“Request for Applications,” 2010; emphasis in original). Excitement over the prospect of new, trendy forms of street food resulted in an explosion of interest, and some eight hundred lottery entries for the seventeen initial locations. The result seemed chaotic—many winners of the lottery announced at the beginning of July were not ready to start operations at the end of the month, whereas other entrepreneurs who had already secured trucks and designed menus were left without vending locations. Some lottery winners appeared to have no intention of ever setting up their own business, instead renting their vending locations to other vendors for a profit. There were many expressions of dissatisfaction in the local media, both with the wait and with the seeming unfairness and randomness of the lottery system (e.g., Vancouver Courier, July 14, 2010). In part as a response to these criticisms, the next two iterations of licensing involved increasingly elaborate application processes. After the city council voted in January 2011 to expand the street food vending pilot program, city staff called for applications for fifteen additional downtown vending locations. This time, however, applications had to include a business plan, a proposed menu that conformed to minimum nutritional standards developed by the regional health authority, and a waste management plan, and applicants were evaluated on these elements as well as “readiness, experience, qualifications ... menu diversity, innovation, [and] use of local/ organic/fair trade food” (Administrative Report to Standing Committee of City Services and Budgets, Jan. 7, 2011). Ultimately, fifty applications were shortlisted for a panel of judges made up of local chefs, food bloggers, nutritionists, and ordinary community members; in April 2011, nineteen new food carts and trucks were approved by the city. The new, more elaborate process was not without controversy, however. Two members of the judging panel quit, presumably because they

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were unhappy with how nutritional value expectations and emphasis on “organic and fair-trade menu choices” were emphasized in the selection process (Globe and Mail [Toronto], Mar. 31, 2011).4 There were other complaints about the city acting as “nutrition police” (Vancouver Courier, Jan. 19, 2011), and an article in the Vancouver Sun acknowledged that the new selection process disadvantaged some applicants, especially longtime, immigrant hot dog vendors with language limitations (Vancouver Sun, June 25, 2011). A third round of permitting unfolded in early 2012, and yet another step was added to the selection process: City staff decided to add a taste test judged by a panel of community members—essentially a cooking competition—to determine who would receive permits for twelve new vending locations. Recognizing the complexity of the application process, the city also offered an information session and a business plan resource guide to assist potential applicants in navigating an application that required food safety certification; a food safety plan; plans for a vending unit; evidence that the unit was already or could be operational within a short time; a tentative rental agreement for a commissary kitchen; a pitch about why the new business would be “offering something unique to Vancouver and the Street Food Vending Programme”; a waste management plan and any special sustainability practices that would be adopted; a menu plan accompanied by a chart for applicants to highlight homemade, unprocessed, organic, and fair-trade ingredients; a nutritional “write-up”; information about future suppliers/producers of ingredients; and a business plan completed with an executive summary, a market research section, a marketing strategy, and a financial plan (City of Vancouver 2013; see also chapter 13). Several these components come from the minimum requirements from Vancouver Coastal Health (the regional health authority) for operating a mobile food unit, but even so the application was far more detailed and complex than that for the original lottery draw in 2010. From the original fifty-nine applications, twenty-five were short-listed to compete in a February taste competition held at a local community college, producing dishes that one judge described as “gloriously tasty and often thrillingly unexpected” (Vancouver Sun, Feb. 25, 2012) in a fast-paced but carefully coordinated atmosphere that one participant likened to “a reality TV program.” Although some were critical of the latest iteration of permitting—one letter written to a local newspaper called the taste test “a colossal waste of money” (Vancouver Courier, Jan. 20, 2012)—the announcement of the new vendors in April 2012 was greeted with excitement. As one newspaper headline exclaimed, “City Gets Hooked on Street Food.”

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The article went on to quote Vancouver’s mayor dubbing the vendors “the ambassadors of the streets” (Province, Apr. 3, 2012). By the beginning of 2014, the city had expanded the number of stationary food vendors to 110 from the 61 carts, mostly selling hotdogs, that had been operating just four years earlier. Roaming vendors operating outside of the downtown area, unknown on city streets prior to 2010, numbered almost fifty. Interestingly, 2014 also brought a proposal from the city’s Engineering Services to repeal the old street vending bylaw, first implemented back in 1974, with a new, modernized version more suited to the current configuration of street vending and sidewalk use in the city and designed to limit elements of unfairness resulting from the current permitting process, such as the subleasing of vending permits (for similar problems in New York, see chapter 3). Indeed, unlike the imposition of order on unruly sidewalk use in 1974, the introduction of street food vending in Vancouver in the 2010s saw the careful, iterative development of a program that conformed with food safety requirements, engineering guidelines for sidewalk use, and the nutritional, aesthetic, and culinary standards of an “expert” panel, and it was meant to promote, rather than impede, street vending. Conclusion The language that celebrates the food cart or food truck often locates its virtues in its informality: the excitement of eating with your hands, chance encounters in line, friendly and direct interactions with those preparing the food, and, of course, the unexpectedly delicious food delivered by an unconventional form of food service. These vendors break up the monotony of the downtown grid of streets and sidewalks that primarily service the flow of cars and pedestrians, instead making the city street a destination in itself and returning urban vitality to a space people believe was once central to public life. Ironically, attempts to rejuvenate the appeal of informality associated with vending, and street food in particular, have nonetheless resulted in a highly formalized form of vending. In many ways, this should not be surprising. Cities are key sites of police powers that organize and manage space to promote commerce, protect public health and safety, and uphold public morality (Blomley 2012; Valverde 2012); as Mariana Valverde notes, cities are primarily “concerned with regulating space and activities and providing services to property,” an orientation that is captured in the accretion of codes, bylaws, regulations, and other legal infrastructure that cities

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accumulate over time (Valverde 2012, 27). Indeed, the differential reception of Vancouver’s hippie vendors in the 1970s and its hip food cart and truck vendors of the 2010s reveals how the desire to embrace the energy and vitality associated with informality—a fundamental element of 1970s counterculture—can seemingly only occur through the codifying and formalizing mechanisms of city governance. By contrast, the conflicts surrounding street vending in Vancouver in the 1970s reflect the inability of not only the city government but also other key stakeholders—most notably brick-and-mortar merchants—to tolerate the unruliness and fluidity of a grassroots, informal street market. The process of bringing that market to heel closed off street vending to more and more categories of people, and, as a former social planner for Vancouver in the 1970s mused in an interview, the imposition of kiosk standards probably killed vending on Granville Street entirely (Aug. 14, 2012). Today, lauded for the vitality and creativity they inject into downtown streetscapes, the new food vendors represent a highly regulated form of street vending, and it is this high degree of formalization that has made their integration into closely governed downtown streets and sidewalks possible. None of this is to suggest that, in the contemporary period, Vancouver’s city staff have imposed an oppressive and stifling legal and regulatory infrastructure upon a group of food vendors who sought less bureaucracy and less interference. In fact, vendors almost uniformly praised city staff in interviews for being helpful, professional, and genuinely concerned about making street food vending businesses viable in Vancouver, and the increasingly elaborate selection process represents a good faith effort on the part of city staff to correct problems with earlier application rounds. As one vendor conceded, the complicated application process reflected a desire within the city government to see permits go to people who had a good chance of business success (Feb. 28, 2012). Of course, those with more resources are better positioned to be successful in the first place. Indeed, the ways in which what I have identified as the virtues of the informal—creativity, spontaneity, vitality, and perhaps even authenticity— have come to be associated with a particular form of street vending—carts and trucks wrapped with professionally designed logos, often serving locally sourced gourmet fare—help explain why other forms of vending continue to be viewed as marginal or even illicit but certainly not creative, such as the immigrant, working-class vendors in Chicago discussed by Martin (2014). In Vancouver, the newly formed Street Food Vendors Association excludes most hot dog vendors on the basis that the food that they serve is heavily loaded with preservatives and lacks homemade ingredients.

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Such groups, like the jumble of Vancouver’s hippie vendors in the 1970s, offer little perceived value to urban streets and sidewalks. Notes 1. For example, in 2012 Los Angeles police cracked down on nonartist vendors along LA’s Venice Beach who, in the words of one local artist, were selling “Chinese trinkets ... pretending they’d made [them] themselves” and putting counterculture artists in the uncomfortable position of being allied with local police; art, in this instance, was understood as speech, not commerce (Carroll 2012). 2.  The only exception was a mobile retailer’s license, which allowed owners of retail shops to apply for a fixed, city-approved vendor location. The special license was meant to facilitate the introduction of flower stands (considered beautifying) to city streets (Province, Aug. 26, 1970). 3.  There were no food vendors among this group, because at the time city health regulations prohibited the street vending of almost all food items. An exception was the well-established vending of popcorn along some downtown beaches. 4. In another instance of (legal) formalization, they did not say much publicly about their reasons for leaving the panel, thanks to a nondisclosure agreement signed with the City of Vancouver.

References Anderson, Kay. 1991. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Benson, Joshua. 2006. “Regulating Street Vendors in New York City: Case Studies.” MS thesis, Department of Urban Planning, Columbia University. Binkley, Sam. 2007. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blomley, Nicholas. 2011. Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. London: Routledge. Blomley, Nicholas. 2012. “Colored Rabbits, Dangerous Trees, and Public Sitting: Sidewalks, Police, and the City.” Urban Geography 33 (7): 917–935. Bluestone, Daniel. 1991. “The Pushcart Evil: Peddlers, Merchants, and New York City’s Streets, 1880–1940.” Journal of Urban History 18 (1): 68–92. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Verso.

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Boyer, M. Christine. 1983. Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bromley, Ray. 2000. “Street Vending and Public Policy: A Global Review.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (1–2): 1–29. Carroll, Rory. 2012. “Venice Beach Back to Bohemian Ideals after LAPD Cracks Down on Hawkers.” Guardian, April 20. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/ apr/20/venice-beach-bohemian-lapd-hawkers. City of Vancouver. 2013. “Permit Applicant Resource Guide,” http://vancouver.ca/ files/cov/street-food-vending-permit-application-resource-guide.pdf. Cross, John C. 1998. Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Devlin, Ryan. 2011. “‘An Area That Governs Itself’: Informality, Uncertainty and the Management of Street Vending in New York City.” Planning Theory 10 (1): 53–65. Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Estrada, Emir, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. 2011. “Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (1): 102–131. Florida, Richard. 2005. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lecture at the College de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hanser, Amy, and Zachary Hyde. 2014. “Foodies Remaking Cities.” Contexts 13 (3): 44–49. Harms, Erik. 2009. “Vietnam’s Civilizing Process and the Retreat from the Street.” City & Society 21 (2): 182–206. Hernández-López, Ernesto. 2011. “Las Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests.” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 43 (1): 233–268. Hunt, Alan. 2006. “Police and the Regulation of Traffic: Policing as a Civilizing Process?” In The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, edited by M. Dubber and M. Valverde, 168–184. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hunt, Stacey. 2009. “Citizenship’s Place: The State’s Creation of Public Space and Street Vendors’ Culture of Informality in Botogá, Columbia.” Environment and Planning: D, Society & Space 27:331–351.

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Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Kettles, Gregg W. 2007. “Legal Responses to Sidewalk Vending: The Case of Los Angeles, California.” In Street Entrepreneurs: People, Place and Politics in Local and Global Perspective, edited by J. Cross and A. Morales, 58–78. London: Routledge. Kim, Annette M. 2012. “The Mixed-Use Sidewalk.” Journal of the American Planning Association 78 (3): 225–238. Ley, David. 1987. “Styles of the Times: Liberal and Neo-conservative Landscapes in Inner Vancouver, 1968–1986.” Journal of Historical Geography 13 (1): 40–56. Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ley, David. 2003. “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40 (12): 2527–2544. Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia, and Renia Ehrenfeucht. 2009. Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martin, Nina. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883. Martinez, Ruben. 1991. “Sidewalk Wars: Why LA Street Vendors Won’t Be Swept Away.” Los Angeles Weekly, December 6–12, p. 20, 24. Modan, Gabriella. 2008. “Mango Fufu Kimchi Yucca: The Depoliticization of ‘Diversity’ in Washington, D.C. Discourse.” City & Society 20 (2): 188–221. Parsons, Talcott. 1978. Action Theory and the Human Condition. New York: Free Press. Peck, Jamie. 2012. “Recreative City: Amsterdam, Vehicular Ideas and the Adaptive Spaces of Creativity Policy.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (3): 462–485. Punter, John. 2003. The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Planning and Design. Vancouver: UBC Press. Southworth, Michael, and Eran Ben-Joseph. 1993. Regulated Streets: The Evolution of Standards for Suburban Residential Streets. Berkeley: University of California at Berkley, Institute of Urban and Regional Development. Stillerman, Joel. 2006. “The Politics of Space and Culture in Santiago, Chile’s Street Markets.” Qualitative Sociology 29:507–530. Stoller, Paul. 2002. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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8  Reflexive Food Truck Justice: A Case Study in CLiCK, Inc., a Nonprofit, Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen Phoebe Godfrey

In the popular film Chef (2014), gourmet chef Carl Casper quits his restaurant job and ends up freewheeling around the country in a food truck. With some help from his son’s social media skills, as well as his and his sous-chef’s culinary skills, collectively they produce a Cuban sandwich worth waiting for. Tapping into what is now a $1 billion industry that experienced an 8.4 percent growth rate between 2007 and 2012 (Entrepreneur Staff 2011), the film celebrates the tale of the rebellious yet talented entrepreneurial chef who uses a food truck to work his way to owning his own restaurant, as is becoming a growing trend (Clark 2012). What the film doesn’t show are the less renegade aspects of a food truck and food cart business. Due to regionally based health codes and laws, many cities, towns, and regions, including those in Connecticut, require that mobile food trucks and food carts be affiliated with a commissary or commercial kitchen. This affiliation provides the mobile food business with a space for storage (everything from food to the truck or cart), prep, and cleanup, as well as support in securing business and food licensing. Options include working out of existing restaurants, owning or renting a private kitchen, or renting space from a shared-use commercial kitchen. Because shared-use commercial kitchens are the most affordable option, they are attractive to new businesses and to aspiring entrepreneurs with limited start-up capital. Focusing on this intimate, behind-the-scenes connection between food trucks and commercial kitchens, this chapter provides a case study of how one such shared-use 501c3 nonprofit commercial kitchen, Commercially Licensed Co-operative Kitchen (CLiCK), is attempting to innovatively address not only the food policy and community economic development matrix, but to challenge the realities of unequal access to resources for low-income and minority entrepreneurs who could potentially benefit from the growing food truck and food cart movement. Shared-use commercial kitchens are well situated not only to assist in the incubation of

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small-scale food businesses but also to act as agents of progressive social change, and thus situated social justice (Aldarondo 2013, 152) that specifically targets the interfaces among these businesses’ internal operations, their community assets needs, and their local food economies. They can achieve this through being part of what McLaren and Agyeman (2015) term the “solidarity economy”; their “spaces, services, and goods” are delivered “with rather than for users, their families and neighbors” (11; emphasis in original). However, to move toward such situated social justice and to achieve a solidarity economy that promotes well-being for all involved, a shared-use kitchen must engage in “reflexive food justice” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011), both in theory and in ongoing practice. In the spirit of such reflexivity, I have an insider’s perspective as the cofounder and board president of CLiCK; therefore, I have an implicit bias in CLiCK’s favor, but such intimacy nevertheless allows me to present an otherwise impossible level of detail in terms of the inner workings of CLiCK as an organization. Hence, this chapter is a fluid mix of an ethnography and an autoethnography, in that I am simultaneously and inextricably analyzing through the lens of reflexive food justice for both CLiCK as a nonprofit and how I interpret CLiCK given my role within it. In addition, I am also a white, married, lesbian sociologist (my wife is CLiCK’s other cofounder) committed to theorizing and practicing reflexive social justice within my personal and professional life and, by extension, through CLiCK. Therefore, CLiCK has provided me in particular, as well as my wife and other board members, a unique opportunity to experientially be “part of a movement that seeks to develop closer links between food producers and consumers, hoping thereby to enhance sustainability and justice” (McLaren and Agyeman 2015, 116) and to attempt to do so in ways in which the desired and idealized ends don’t overtly compromise the complex and challenging means. CLiCK’s mission statement reads: “Grow, Cook, Share: To grow the vitality of our local economy and community by offering shared use commercial kitchens to farmers and culinary entrepreneurs seeking to create food-based businesses; and to improve the health of our local community by teaching gardening, culinary arts, nutrition and other food-related classes” (see the CLiCK website, https://clickwillimantic.com/). This combination of both economic development and health/nutrition education is unique as far as we know (Freake and Godfrey 2016), but the focus here is on CLiCK’s role in incubating new food businesses, including food trucks and food carts. This aspect of CLiCK’s mission as a shared-use kitchen based on the cooperative

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values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity promotes the tenets of community economic development (Sobel and Agyeman 2013) by using a model that is both supportive of individual businesses (be they farming, culinary, or both) and rooted in the solidarity economy. Situated in Windham County, the poorest county in Connecticut based on per capita income, and located next to the town center of Willimantic, the third poorest town in Connecticut (United States Census 2010a, 2010b), CLiCK seeks to serve the social and economic needs of a culturally diverse and overwhelmingly impoverished community by enabling entrepreneurs of limited means to begin food businesses, including food trucks and food carts, with minimal start-up costs. In addition, Willimantic has a thriving underground food economy involving both new immigrants and longer-term residents, both immigrant and nonimmigrant, who sell food and/or run catering operations from their kitchens, cars, and unregistered carts. Unfortunately, all of this economic underground food activity is illegal. Therefore, CLiCK seeks to work with individuals who wish to legalize their businesses, in order to increase their markets and their margins. CLiCK also encourages and facilitates the purchase of locally grown products whenever possible to support the cooperative values upon which CLiCK is based. However, between an individual’s idea and social realities lies the pervasive shadow of structural economic and racialized restrictions that makes the process of either legalizing an existing underground food business or starting a new one extremely difficult, if not seemingly impossible, for many low-income, would-be legal entrepreneurs. As such, despite CLiCK’s commitments to the promotion of community economic development through local food production, processing, and other culinary endeavors, the pervasive shadow of structural economic and racialized restrictions prevails. It is therefore the intention of this chapter to address and access how CLiCK is attempting to counter this pervasive shadow in relation to the incubation of new food businesses, including food trucks and food carts, for those who seek to do so but lack the social or economic means due to the inequalities of the existing capitalist social and economic system. CLiCK encourages small business development in a way that empowers individuals to become economically self-sufficient, which could in turn help support CLiCK’s attempt to ultimately not have to rely on federal, state, and foundational funding (INCITE! Women of Color against Violence 2007). That said, CLiCK has received over $300,000 in funds in the last one and

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half years from local individuals and foundations, as well as from state and federal sources, with the goal to use such funds in ways that do not mimic their origins but rather aid, as Guilloud and Cordery (2007) state, in “developing a real community-based economic system that redistributes wealth and allows people to gain access to what they need” (111). In keeping with solidarity economy principles, CLiCK redistributes these granted funds to members through access to the commercial kitchen space and equipment, thereby challenging the neoliberal economic model based on the increasing privatization of the commons. Although each business at CLiCK is individually owned, all are mutually dependent on the success of the others in that the financial well-being of all is what will enable CLiCK to sustain itself for the collective benefit. This model fosters solidarity, as opposed to competition. To access and address CLiCK’s success in promoting such solidarity and in putting the precepts of situated social justice into ongoing practice, I seek to critically apply what DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman (2011) refer to as “a reflexively localist approach” to CLiCK’s practices and to use this process to critically explore the intersections between concepts of “the local” and “justice” (297) through a case-study analysis. DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman offer seven “imperfect” descriptions of “reflective localism as a practice” to theorize how a localist food movement can move “toward reflexive food justice” (297). Aspects of their seven imperfect descriptions will be applied to relevant facets of CLiCK as part of this movement. In fact, my writing of this chapter is itself part of the goal to critically engage with reflexivity as a praxis, in that it will provide further insight into “the meaning of the term social justice in local food politics” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 284; emphasis in original) in relation to CLiCK and ideally in relation to other shared-use kitchens or food-based nonprofits that seek to grow their situated social justice roots. The Seven Aspects of Reflexive Food Justice in Relation to Facets of CLiCK In exploring DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman’s (2011) seven imperfect descriptions of “reflexive localism as a practice” with respect to the experiences of CLiCK, there will be overlaps in the discussion of each aspect that collectively aim to create a richly colored and detailed whole. From this whole, we can continue “imagining new ecological and social relationships” (Alkon and Agyeman 2011, 5) in order to further put them into practice.

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A key theme of DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman’s concept of reflexive food justice is recognition of the pluralities of perspectives. This resonates with the concept of positionality that recognizes the ways in which people’s understanding of the world is shaped by their social positions, as in the intersections of their race, social class, gender, religion, nationality, and so on (Alkon and Agyeman 2011, 3). As DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman (2011) state when first introducing their concept: “A reflexive perspective works within an awareness of the tensions between different definitions of justice, environmental and bodily health, and good food, while admitting that local strategies are imperfect and contradictory” (297). In fact, so strong is this theme of contradiction that their first “imperfect definition” is as follows: “Reflexivity begins by admitting the contradictions and complexity of everyday life” (297). For CLiCK, founded in 2009 with funding from a small, grassroots poverty-reduction grant, an ongoing struggle has been trying to recognize, address, and practice solutions to existing social and economic inequalities in the food system resulting from the intersections of historical and current racism, classism, and sexism. In relation to the food system, these inequalities create contradictions of food abundance and inadequacy overlapping with physical obesity and hunger; although not overtly stated, these themes are all reflected in CLiCK’s two-pronged mission mentioned previously. However, it is CLiCK’s emphasis on farmers and on culinary entrepreneurs in relation to the creation of food-related businesses that addresses a specific contradiction in our area. First, the large rural area of Windham County is dotted with small farms owned almost exclusively by whites struggling to sustain their operations. These farms, many of which are organic and highly productive, still struggle to be economically viable, earning on average between $25,000 and $250,000 a year (Hladky 2015). Second, the small urban center of Willimantic is inhabited by a diverse population, with 40 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino and the rest a mix of various ethnicities that are generally classified as white, many of whom lack self-sustaining or meaningful livelihoods. Like many small New England communities, Willimantic was once a thriving mill town, but since the mills closed in the 1980s, it has struggled to successfully address economic deficits, resulting in a poverty rate of over three times the state average. These economic concerns are coupled with food insecurity resulting from lack of economic access, particularly to foods that are culturally appropriate and healthy, which contributes to subsequent health issues that exacerbate urban poverty. Therefore, in attempting to address the

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contradictions between the agricultural abundance of small-scale local farms that nevertheless seek to increase their economic returns and the need for self-sustaining and meaningful livelihoods among lower-income urban residents, the idea for CLiCK was born. As a shared-use commercial kitchen, food processing center, and teaching kitchen, CLiCK’s goals are to resolve these contradictions by enabling farmers to add value to their products and extend their markets; allow entrepreneurs who lack start-up capital to incubate small-scale food businesses using local farm products, including food trucks and food carts; and allow the larger community to benefit from healthy cooking and nutrition education classes. CLiCK now consists of a 5,600-square-foot building that has within it two commercial kitchens and a teaching kitchen. It employs a part-time general manager, a seasonal local food processor, and a nutrition outreach coordinator. All of this has been made possible by a combination of grassroots determination over seven years and a number of significant grants from state and federal sources, such as the Connecticut Department of Community and Economic Development (CTDCED), a USDA Rural Business Enterprise grant, a USDA Local Food Promotion grant, and a Connecticut Department of Agriculture grant, as well as funds from private foundations and local individuals. Given that these grants do not cover operational costs, CLiCK must remain viable by offering community members and CLiCK members an economic and educational service that is shared with them, thereby empowering them to address their needs. As such, CLiCK collects annual membership fees from individuals and institutions and charges an hourly rate for use of the commercial kitchens and the teaching kitchen and a monthly rate for storage. In the first year and a half since opening its physical doors in February 2015, CLiCK was unsurprisingly more successful with those entrepreneurs who are (for the most part) white nationals and who, generally speaking, came from the middle class and had social and economic resources to start their businesses. This outcome was seen to be contradictory to CLiCK’s mission; therefore, we reevaluated and reduced prices for kitchen use. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in social class and racial diversity among the new entrepreneurs. Any lost revenue in the price per hour for kitchen use has been offset by the increased number of members and the increased time for which members are using the space. In addition, CLiCK was awarded a $5,000 grant from a small local foundation to act as a match to $1,000 contributed by five low-income entrepreneurs. This grant has enabled CLiCK to further resolve the problems inherent in seeking to enable low-income entrepreneurs to incubate businesses and needing to

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cover operational costs. By “admitting the contradictions and complexity of everyday life,” CLiCK has seen how the process “becomes the discovery of practices that make society better without reinforcing inequalities” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 298). This is not to imply that inequalities in terms of access don’t still exist, both within CLiCK and in the surrounding community, but we acknowledge that by critically examining the specific contradictions in our practices and in our local community, CLiCK has been able to “make society better without reinforcing inequalities” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 298). The second imperfect description is the notion that “reflexive approaches emphasize process rather than vision” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 298). For this description, the authors state that “it is possible to speculate on some possible practices and processes (as opposed to ideals) that might lead to better (as opposed to perfect) local food systems” (298). They call for recognizing how “ideas about ‘good food’ and ‘community values’ have been used to marginalize certain groups” while also practicing “an ‘economy of regard’ with farmers that included an awareness of the history of rural-urban inequalities and consumer-producer conflicts” (298). For CLiCK, there has been focus on the long-term vision of our mission, but the ongoing emphasis has been on the process and on the everyday practice. To illustrate, I will discuss some ways that CLiCK intentionally has attempted to practice cultural inclusiveness through food and to create economies of regard and thus solidarity economies and communities in relation to both food and cultures. These efforts have focused on capacity and community building, rather than fundraising, to again prioritize process rather than vision, though the need for funds to cover operation costs is ongoing. First, starting last year—even before CLiCK officially opened—we hosted two food-based cultural events: a salsa festival in September and a coquito festival in December. CLiCK organized these events, along with members of the Mexican community for the salsa festival and the Puerto Rican community for the coquito festival. In 2015, we repeated the salsa festival in October and the coquito festival in December. We also added a community potluck meal and art event that aimed to bring community strangers together to share a meal, including local farmers and urban dwellers. This event was inspired by a similar one in St. Paul, Minnesota, that involved a shared community meal (Scholredt 2014). Although on the surface these may seem like small events attended by a combined total of about 150 people, the intention has been to practice (rather than just

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talk about) inclusion, diversity, and ultimately social justice by making sure groups marginalized (due to race and/or social class) within the dominant community find food-based cultural representation at CLiCK. In addition, because CLiCK’s mission is to incubate food businesses even for those with little or no start-up capital, such events build the social connections needed to target socially and economically marginalized groups. In fact, it was through the salsa festival that CLiCK connected with Jose (all names have been changed), its first Mexican immigrant member. This is a testament to the notion that such community events offer social networking opportunities that many low-income entrepreneurs don’t generally have access to (Barr 2015). Suffice it to say, CLiCK recognizes that cultural border crossing, including for cultures of race and ethnicity, social class, nationality, professions, and so on, requires much more than simple outreach; it requires ongoing relationship building in ways that are mutually beneficial. The third imperfect description is the recognition that “reflexivity does not favor any one scale of political practice” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 298). By this, DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman refer to “New Regionalist and Smart Growth initiatives that attempt to reunite inner-city and surrounding suburban and ex-urban interests” (299). Furthermore, they add that the “New Regionalist movements emphasize political inclusion and region-wide decision making,” thus connecting regions in more ways than merely “along the commodity chain” (299). For CLiCK, recognition of the need for “new regionalism” became a surprising real-life situation that resulted in a change in the business model of one of our members. This new member, John, a white New Englander, purchased a food cart in order to cook at CLiCK and then sell his food items in a neighboring county. However, John soon found that to so do required multiple permits from regional health departments and also realized that his plan would mean being outside during winter months. Hence, he sold the food cart and focused on selling products at a local food co-op throughout the year and at regional farmers’ markets during the summer months. CLiCK is not currently in a position to petition for changes in regional health department regulations, but we are collecting data on how these local barriers have influenced the business decisions made by CLiCK members. Susan, another CLiCK member and a white New Englander who had incubated a hot dog cart, encountered other barriers. For example, she was not allowed to vend on the streets and had to rent space in a privately owned parking lot. Her site was across the street from a Dairy Queen, but fortunately she was not subject to a proximity ban. As Michael Lasserre

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(2014) explains, such bans “regulate the distance a vendor may park from a brick and mortar store selling the same or similar type of goods” (286). However, in order to compete with Dairy Queen and seeking to support CLiCK’s mission, Susan was advised to add some healthy options to her menu. Making these additions added to her economic success. The experience of a member renting from a private lot initiated a conversation between CLiCK and a local social entrepreneur who has bought and cleared a small vacant lot specifically for CLiCK to create a food truck site in the future. According to Linnekin, Dermer, and Geller (2011), the “trucklot model likely represents the future of the industry” (55), as is the case in Portland (see chapter 15), and will hopefully represent a future for CLiCK members. In fact, we currently have a new member with a food truck who parks it on a lot in a larger neighboring town, and we are working to see if he’s interested in the new site once it’s ready with electricity. However, CLiCK’s plans for a shared-use food truck that members could rent for use on this site have yet to be realized, as I will discuss ahead. The fourth imperfect description addresses inequalities by recognizing that “reflexivity works within multiple notions of privilege and economy,” meaning that “racial notions of purity and privilege helped usher in both our spatial and our dietary inequalities” (299). In addition, “we need to understand the ways in which privilege, class and status struggles contributed to the rise in the industrial food system that now threatens the health of the entire population” (299). For CLiCK, recognizing and navigating such inequalities is an ongoing process and practice. As mentioned, the population of Willimantic is about 40 percent Latino, and the remainder is a mix of various ethnicities that are generally classified as white. In Connecticut, Willimantic is second only to Hartford in the percentage of Latinos, primarily Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, that make up the population. The poverty rate for this Latino community is 44.1 percent, as opposed to 16.8 percent for the white, non-Hispanic community (City-Data.com, n.d.). One way in which this poverty is addressed by some individuals, many of whom are unemployed (there is a 7.3 percent unemployment rate in Willimantic) or underemployed, is by engaging in the underground or informal food economy. Although specific data on the informal food economy is not available, Marc Koba (2013) writing for CNBC claims that the underground economy totals $2 trillion nationally. Likewise, Claire Goldstene (2015) writing for Truth-Out claims that the underground economy, “an arena wherein not only exploitative, but illegal, labor practices abound,” is on the rise, including an increase in food businesses.

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As for detailed case studies on the informal food economy, those found in academic journals focused on developing countries such as Haiti (Beasley 2012), Guinea-Bissau (Lourenco-Lindell 1995), and South Africa (Crush and Frayne 2011), to name a few. As anyone who has traveled to a developing country knows, one of the prices of development for industrialized nations has been the loss of vibrant street vending through the dominant institutionalization of shops and restaurants and the varying levels of bans for any unlicensed economic activity. In developing countries, the streets offer a wide range of economic potential for anyone seeking to sell anything, including a wide selection of foods, both raw and cooked. In the United States, it is only recently that such street vending, especially food vending, has begun to return in any significant way (Lasserre 2014; Linnekin, Dermer, and Geller 2011; Wessel 2012). However, for those who lack startup capital, transitioning from having an underground illegal food business to a legal food business is, in CLiCK’s experience, prohibitive in terms of the aggregate costs (licensing, insurance, kitchen rental costs, etc.). Given that CLiCK seeks to challenge the industrial food system by enabling small-scale local food producers and processors to gain access to even a minute portion of the national market, ways must be found “in which privilege, class and status struggles” (DuPuis, Harrison and Goodman 2011, 299) are directly addressed. As mentioned, CLiCK has been able to secure grant funds from a small local foundation that is matching potential entrepreneurs’ membership, licensing, insurance, and kitchen use fees, with the first award going to Sophia, an immigrant from Mexico who has had an underground food business for over fifteen years. These grant funds are an initial step toward CLiCK’s expansion in future years to working with partner agencies in order to offer microloans, as popularized by Grameen Bank (“Global Micro Lender Grameen Ramps Up in Indianapolis,” 2011; also see Freer 1997). Potential candidates like Sophia are screened for need, commitment, and likelihood of success while receiving hands-on mentorship for at least six months to help assure positive outcomes. Although none of these funds are adequate to fund the individual purchase of a food cart and food truck, they provide a step in the right direction. Sophia currently produces two hundred meals a day in her kitchen and transports them by car to a large wholesale tree and plant farm in the area where about four hundred people, mainly Mexicans, work. Because she has minimal expenses other than purchasing ingredients, Sophia can have a decent return for her labors. Operating out of CLiCK instead of her kitchen and living room would be much easier and could increase her ability to

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sell, given that her business would be legal; however, the start-up costs have kept Sophia from going that route until now. With the grant funds, Sophia recently joined CLiCK and will be able to increase the ways in which she produces and sells her food—and do so legally with support from the CLiCK staff and other existing members. Individually creating a legal food business has been prohibitive for Sophia, but through the shared costs and the administrative support provided by CLiCK’s general manager, she has been able to meet these requirements. In addition, the local high school— with 90 percent Latino students—has requested to purchase her food once it is made at CLiCK. Sophia’s story links to the fifth imperfect description, which states that “reflexivity distinguishes between equality and charity” (299). CLiCK’s goal is “promoting equitable distribution of resources and services” so that individuals have the possibility of creating their own businesses, rather than merely offering ways to feed, house, or clothe them. In Sophia’s case, she is already providing a valuable food service to members of our/her community, but CLiCK seeks to support her desires for economic expansion and to provide her with funding as well as legal protection by offering the use of a commercially licensed facility. Another real-life example of distinguishing between “equity and charity” is illustrated by CLiCK member Jose (mentioned earlier), who had a food business in Mexico but did not yet have one in the United States. He wanted to run a catering operation and sell at the summer monthly street festival, so CLiCK enabled him to join by setting up a monthly payment plan rather than insisting that he pay his membership in full, as was the rule. He started to use CLiCK and was doing well, but then had some personal legal issues that have prevented him from continuing with his business. Recognizing that his legal issues were linked to his immigration status, and no doubt his race, rather than his supposed criminality, CLiCK attempted to find free legal aid for him, but as a new nonprofit we lacked the capacity to help him in a more concrete way. This situation gave us further insight into the challenges involved as we seek to increase our outreach to marginalized individuals and groups who are confronted with multiple structural economic and racial barriers as well as legal barriers (as in this case specifically). Another way CLiCK is exploring ideas of equality rather than charity, as in developing with members (McLaren and Agyeman 2015), takes its inspiration from the Snowday Food Truck in New York City, described on its website as a “vehicle for social justice.” Not only does the truck serve “ingredients sourced from local farms,” but the workers themselves are

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part of a nonprofit program called Drive Change that “trains and employs formerly incarcerated youth in the hopes of helping them find work and keeping them out of prison” (Snowday Food Truck, n.d.). Using grant funding, CLiCK seeks to purchase its own food truck that would function much like Snowday, acting as both job training for interested low-income unemployed individuals and promotion for the products of CLiCK’s emerging entrepreneurs (these could be the same individuals, but wouldn’t have to be). In addition, the CLiCK Food Truck would partner with other local nonprofits that currently promote and/or seek to promote equity over charity, such as GrowWindham’s youth community gardening program (more equity based), the Windham NoFreeze homeless shelter (currently more charity based), and the Covenant Soup Kitchen (currently more charity based); the latter nonprofit provides free meals twice a day, six days a week. With a shared-use food truck, CLiCK’s partner GrowWindham, for example, would be able to have its youth sell healthy foods that they had grown locally and then prepared at CLiCK at venues such as local school sporting events and other events including the Willimantic farmers’ market and summer street festivals. This would provide job development skills for local youth and act as a potential introduction to the green economy (Falxa-Raymond, Svendsen, and Campbell 2013). In addition, the shareduse food truck would provide an affordable and healthy food option to local families at school sporting events and/or at church and community events. The sixth imperfect description keeps the theme of addressing inequalities in that “reflexivity works with a strong memory of past inequalities” (DuPuis, Harrison and Goodman 2011, 300) that looks not just at inequalities of race, ethnicity, and social class but also of location; in rural areas versus urban areas, for example, power resides mainly in urban areas, and rural areas are valued only for their ability to provide food. As they state: “Ever since eaters moved out of the countryside, food politics— whether the ‘farmer labor’ politics at the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘urban-rural food alliances’ of the 1970s and 80s ... or today’s ‘food policy councils’—have been based substantially in urban social movements” (300). CLiCK has attempted to address this divide by having a diverse board that includes kitchen users, farmers, and members from other marginalized groups along the lines of social class, sexuality, and those who are politically left. CLiCK has been less successful in recruiting and maintaining nonwhite board members, which is not an uncommon issue among nonprofits. In

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fact, it has been well researched by environmentalist Dorceta Taylor, who has created a comprehensive report on diversity in environmental groups titled “The State of Diversity on Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations and Government Agencies” (Taylor 2014). This report surveyed 191 environmental nonprofits and found a significant lack of diversity, particularly for board positions. On average, only 4.6 percent of board positions are held by people of color. This is ironic given that people of color, and Latinos in particular, support environmental protection issues at higher rates than whites (Mooney and Craighill 2014). One barrier that CLiCK has found is that the Latinos we have approached and who say that they would like to serve are prevented from doing so due to work and/or family commitments, which speaks to issues of economic, social, and racial inequality in the larger society, which is then reflected in who has the time and the resources to serve. This is not an excuse but rather a social analysis of the conditions that help create a situation for CLiCK and perhaps for some other organizations. In contrast to the finding that “efforts to attract and retain talented people of color have been lackluster” (Taylor 2014), CLiCK is working to ameliorate the situation with targeted outreach to qualified and interested members of the Latino community (broadly defined and itself very diverse) and to other underrepresented community members. Still, despite a lack of racial diversity, CLiCK’s board has experienced a fair amount of contention between those who are more conservative and those who are more liberal, which links to the final imperfect description. This last description states that “reflexivity does not insist on shared values or even shared views of the world” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 300), meaning that “local politics will always require people with different, sometimes countervailing, interests working together” (301). In CLiCK’s case, there have been many tensions over the years—particularly since we established a physical location—in terms of how to balance our need to generate income (as prioritized by more conservative board members) and our commitments to social justice (as prioritized by more leftist board members). CLiCK, as a nonprofit that seeks to be self-sustaining, is a social enterprise loosely defined as “promoting the power of business to achieve fundamental social change” (Teasdale 2011, 2–3). As such, both political sides are needed to stay in operation and to stay committed to our mission. The social enterprise model is gaining popularity as a downturn in the economy and increasing competition between nonprofits has caused income from grants to wane. However, in blurring the lines between nonprofit and earned income, CLiCK is contesting local tax laws for nonprofit

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status even as we provide a much-needed community economic development service. In their conclusion, DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman (2011) call for “a more ‘reflexive’ notion of justice, one that takes into account different visions of community, good food, and environmental and bodily health, and that pursues change well beyond the realm of the ‘local’” (301). They further emphasize that “rather than creating an alternative economy for the homogenous few, reflexive localism could work across difference, and thereby make a difference, for everyone” (302). Likewise, CLiCK has sought to work across difference and through difference and to do so in order to make a progressive difference in the lives of the many who seek to find creative ways to promote a more just and equitable local food system. This process has been and continues to be messy as we explore the “imperfection of political contestation over food” (301) in new and creative ways. Conclusion: Onward! Through vignettes of the experiences of CLiCK and its members, this chapter, framed by my insider’s viewpoint has explored aspects of CLiCK’s story and the ways it has endeavored to address the pervasive shadow of structural economic and racialized restrictions that make it difficult for those who currently lack sufficient start-up capital to incubate new food businesses, including food trucks and food carts. By using DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman’s (2011) seven imperfect descriptions of “reflexive localism as a practice” (297) as a framework to evaluate CLiCK’s progress, I have attempted to provide a useful model for ways in which shared-use commercial kitchens can move toward situated social justice, by engaging in reflexive food and food truck justice both in theory and in ongoing practice. In so doing, shared-use kitchens can, in ways both similar to and different from CLiCK, empower those with socioeconomic restrictions to become part of “the recent food truck phenomenon” (Sobel and Agyeman 2013) or to even eventually transition to their own brick-and-mortar establishments (Clark 2012). In addition, as CLiCK’s cofounder and board president, this reflexive practice has given me nuanced insights into both CLiCK’s successes in manifesting the reflexive food justice ideal and the ways in which we are currently falling short, along with renewed clarity for remediation. CLiCK will by no means completely overcome the local—let alone the national— structural and economic restrictions that limit access to the incubation of

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food-based businesses in brick-and-mortar locations or on wheels. Nevertheless, by continuing to apply and engage in reflexive localism and by continuing to become increasingly economically self-sustaining (Guilloud and Cordery 2007, 110), thereby furthering its role in the solidarity economy, CLiCK and other shared-use kitchens like it can take new steps on the path to exploring “the meaning of the term social justice in local food politics” (DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, 284; emphasis in original). Onward! References Aldarondo, Etiony. 2013. Advancing Social Justice through Clinical Practice. New York: Routledge. Alkon, Alison Hope, and Julian Agyeman. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Beasley, Myron. 2012. “Women, Sabotaj, and Underground Food Economies in Haiti.” Gastronomica: Journal of Food and Culture 12 (2): 33–44. Barr, Michael S. 2015. “Minority and Women Entrepreneurs: Building Capital, Networks, and Skills.” Brookings, the Hamilton Project, March. http://www .brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/11-hamilton-project -expanding-jobs/minority_women_entrepreneurs_building_skills_barr.pdf. City-Data.com. n.d. “Willimantic, Connecticut.” http://www.city-data.com/city/ Willimantic-Connecticut.html. Clark, Ethan. 2012. “Hell on Wheels: Why Food Truck Owners Are Increasingly Turning to Brick-and-Mortar Shops.” N.Y. Magazine, July 11. http://www.grubstreet .com/2012/07/food-trucks-turn-to-stores-for-convience-reliability.html. Crush, Jonathan, and Bruce Frayne. 2011. “Supermarket Expansion and the Informal Food Economy in Southern African Cities: Implications for Urban Food Security.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (4): 781–807. DuPuis, E. Melanie, Jill Lindsey Harrison and David Goodman. 2011. “Just Food?” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, edited by Alison Hope and Julian Agyeman, 283–308. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Entrepreneur Staff. 2011. “Food Trucks 101: How to Start a Mobil Food Truck Business.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220060. Falxa-Raymond, Nancy, Erika Svendsen, and Lindsay K. Campbell. 2013. “From Job Training to Green Job: A Case Study of a Young Adult Employment Program Centered on Environmental Restoration in New York City, USA.” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 12:287–295.

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Freake, Hedley, and Phoebe Godfrey. 2016. “Feeding Community: A Case Study of a Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen in Eastern Connecticut.” In Feeding Cities: Improving Local Food Access, Sustainability, and Resilience, edited by Chris Bosso, 113–128. London: Routledge. Freer, Jim. 1997. “Thinking Small: Miami Not-for-Profit Working Capital Gives Start-up Businesses a Boost with Micro Loans of up to $5000.” Florida Trend, August 1. https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19706155.html. “Global Micro Lender Grameen Ramps Up in Indianapolis.” 2011. Indianapolis Business Journal, August 6. http://www.ibj.com/articles/28707-global-micro-lender -grameen-ramps-up-in-indianapolis. Goldstene, Claire. 2015. “The Rise of the Underground Economy.” Truth-Out, July 29. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32115-the-rise-of-the-underground -economy. Guilloud, Stephanie, and William Cordery. 2007. “Fundraising Is Not a Dirty Word: Community-Based Economic Strategies for the Long Haul.” In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 107–113. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Hladky, Gregory B. 2015. “State Farmers Say New Regulations Will Be Costly.” Hartford Courant, April 27. http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-food-safety-ct -farmers-20150425-story.html INCITE! Women of Color against Violence. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Koba, Marc. 2013. “$2 Trillion Underground Economy May Be Recovery’s Savior.” CNBC, April 24. http://www.cnbc.com/id/100668336 Lasserre, Michael. 2014. “Location, Location, Location: The Food Truck’s Battle for Common Ground.” Cumberland Law Review 44 (2): 283–318. Linnekin, Baylen J., Jeffery Dermer, and Matthew Geller. 2011. “The New Food Truck Advocacy: Social Media, Mobile Food Vending Associations, Truck Lots, and Litigation in California and Beyond,” 35–58. In Food Fight: The Legal Debate over the Obesity Epidemic, Food Labeling, and the Government’s Involvement in What You Eat. http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/nex17&div=6&g_sent =1&collection=journals#. Lourenco-Lindell, Iida. 1995. “The Informal Food Economy in a Peripheral Urban District: The Case of Bandim District, Bissau.” Habitat International 19 (2): 195–208. McLaren, Duncan, and Julian Agyeman. 2015. Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Mooney, Chris, and Payton Craighill. 2014. “Why Do Black and Latino Americans Support Climate Action So Much More than Whites?” Washington Post, December 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/01/why-do-black-and -latino-americans-support-climate-action-so-much-more-than-whites/. Scholredt, Valerie. 2014. “Photo Essay: At a Half-Mile-Long Table, Chefs, Farmers and Volunteers Feed a Neighborhood for Free.” Yes Magazine, November 25. http:// www.yesmagazine.org/issues/cities-are-now/photo-essay-at-a-half-mile-long-table -chefs-farmers-and-volunteers-feed-a-neighborhood-for-free. Sobel, Hannah, and Julian Agyeman. 2013. “From Loncheras to Lobsta Love: Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice.” Julian Agyeman, June 28. http:// julianagyeman.com/2013/06/from-loncheras-to-lobsta-love-food-trucks-cultural -identity-and-social-justice/. Snowday Food Truck. n.d. “Snowday Food Truck.” http://snowdayfoodtruck.com/ #about-1. Taylor, Dorceta. 2014. “The State of Diversity on Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations & Government Agencies.” Green 2.0. http:// diversegreen.org/report/. Teasdale, Simon. 2011. “What’s in a Name? Making Sense of Social Enterprise Discourses.” Public Policy and Administration 27 (2): 99–119. United States Census. 2010a. “Selected Economic Characteristics: 2006–2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.” https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/ tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_5YR_DP03&prodType =table. United States Census. 2010b. “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010 Demographic ProfileData.” https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/ tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_DP_DPDP1&prodType =table. Wessel, Ginette. 2012. “From Place to NonPlace: A Case Study of Social Media and Contemporary Food Trucks.” Journal of Urban Design 17 (4): 511–531.

II  Spatial-Cultural Practices

9  The Spatial Practices of Food Trucks Robert Lemon

The title of this text—Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love—underscores the increasingly diverse variety of food trucks in America. A lonchera operator prepares typically traditional tacos for a primarily immigrant, Mexican, working-class clientele. Meanwhile, gourmet food truck operators are often praised by the American middle class for their “ingenious” flavor combinations. These current darlings of the foodie culture, however, would likely not have manifested were it not for the innovation of the California taco truck from Mexican migrants in the early 1970s (Lemon 2015).1 The gourmet food truck may be a simulacrum of the taco truck, but it is not an exact replication. Indeed, its spatial practices are quite dissimilar from those of a taco truck. In this chapter, I outline the spatial practices of the lonchera or taco truck, and those of the gourmet food truck. I assert that both types can be defined through their mobility practices, because the truck operators’ life circumstances—and ultimately their habitual routines—must conform to the urban landscape’s social and political dimensions. Further, I argue that cultural practices must respond to the opportunities and constraints of socially constructed spaces. For Lefebvre, the right to the city is to inhabit (1996, 173). One way in which individuals occupy urban space and express their identity is through the spatial practices associated with culinary customs. Here, the struggle for social justice takes the form of spatial tactics. It means being able to reconfigure the rigid geometries of the city to suit one’s cultural practices (Lemon 2015, 57–58). Accordingly, the evolving spatial arrangement of food trucks speaks as much about a city’s identity (or the marketing identity it wishes to portray) as it does about the function of a truck (ibid., 58). Through careful analysis of food trucks’ spatial practices, this chapter illustrates how truck operators navigate the cultural contours of Columbus, Ohio. This analysis begins with an evaluation of the idea of food as a spatial practice and the ways in which Columbus food trucks fit within

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this idea. The evolution of these food truck spaces is considered as just one component within the communities’ collective cultural consciousness. To this end, the text turns to how a mixed racial couple—a black woman, Lisa, and her Mexican husband, Luis—use their taco truck to negotiate the city’s social landscape. Through an evaluation that is both empirical and ethnographic, Lisa and Luis’s spatial narratives are deconstructed, illuminating the ways in which human mobility is itself tied to citizenship, ethnicity, race, language, class, and ultimately taste preferences—not to mention the basic responses to the socioeconomic spaces of the city. The chapter concludes by dissecting how a food truck operator’s movements in a Midwestern city reveal inequities in sociospatial relationships that may otherwise be concealed in the urban landscape. Food as a Spatial Practice In the past, food geographers have typically tied culinary practices to cultural regions (Arreola 2002; Shortridge and Shortridge 1998) and social boundaries (Bell and Valentine 1997). Recently, however, geographers have critically examined how the sociospatial dimensions of places affect the food system through the lens of social justice. Shaw (2006, 2014) has assessed the ways consumer practices affect a person’s or a community’s access to healthy foods. Slocum (2011) puts forth a philosophy of food and space through the prism of race. And, Guthman (2008a, 2008b) writes about how the performance of “whiteness” within farmers’ markets and community gardens exacerbates racial inequalities in the alternative food system. A missing link in food geography discourse is the impact of sociospatial routines on cuisine consumption culture—a gap that this text seeks to fill. An analysis of food trucks provides culinary scholars and cultural geographers the opportunity to better decipher how food and human mobility are intricately interwoven. De Certeau (1984) espouses that people habitually devise codes and tactics as a part of shaping everyday social routines. He succinctly notes that “space is a practiced place” (ibid., 117). Place can also be understood through a spatial hierarchy of human exchanges. To know a place is to understand its social pulse—rhythms punctuated by speed and pause—rather than merely its locale. As Cresswell (2006, 2010) affirms, particular places can be associated with distinct types of human mobilities and social interactions. Moreover, the way something moves and the intentions of those movements often become symbolic of class and ethnic practices, which can be further ascribed to particular places (Cresswell 2006, 2010).

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These mobility practices can then be linked to what people eat by the social spaces in which particular foods are found and how certain demographic groups must move to and through those spaces. For example, ethnic enclaves are often made evident by the aesthetics of culinary practices. Significantly, these sorts of spaces shape the rhythms and flows of people in a city. What happens when the food spaces themselves become mobile features of the landscape, such as through food trucks? In this configuration, I argue the relationships among cuisine, space, and human mobility must be further scrutinized to draw fuller conclusions about how their mutations affect one another. Cresswell’s (2006, 47) take on the discussion between mobility and space notes that the relationships between various types of spatial practices must be considered. “The study of the modern world is a study of velocity and vectors. Rather than comparing mobility to place, mobilities are placed in relation to each other” (ibid., 47). There are considerable differences in the degrees of mobility between a taco truck and a gourmet food truck—and, in turn, in the ways they socially shift space to create place. Likewise, trucks must intersect with other people’s spatial routines. To better evaluate the motives of movements between different styles of food trucks, the way culinary practices are tied to attributes of ethnicity, race, and class must be understood. The manifestation of the taco truck can be traced back to the inception of the taco. Pilcher (2008, 2012) notes that the taco became prominent at the turn of the twentieth century in Mexico City—during Mexico’s industrial revolution. Women would often sell inexpensive tacos from baskets on street corners to day laborers making their way to and from work (Pilcher 2008, 28). The taco was designed to eat easily on the go, often while standing and with one’s hands (no fork or plate required).2 Significantly, the taco took its form in part due to a spatial strategy, which in turn has further influenced social practices. De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol (1998) contend that food practices emanate from the body and influence social routines. Giard (1998, 153) argues that in childhood the body becomes accustomed to certain flavors and aromas, and it is therefore through the body that culinary practices are reproduced. The taco is one such comfort food that animates the body to activate social space. Certainly, the reiteration of cooking and eating tacos is imbedded into a taco truck’s spatial routine. Most often, traditional taco truck operators offer Mexican cuisines that represent a particular place of origin in order to evoke a sense of place in their immigrant clientele. The taco truck owner or operator is typically

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referred to as a taquero, the one who makes the taco. Taco trucks are an aspect of foodways; estranged emigrants search for fond memories of home through familiar foods and through the taquero who knows how to make such foods. In Columbus, only one of the Mexican taco truck owners and operators out of the twenty plus I interviewed had US citizenship, and only that one taquero could speak English well. Because of the taqueros’ life circumstances, they typically try to avoid being highly visible or mobile. The presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Columbus instills fear into the Mexican immigrant population. Franklin County ranks seventeenth in the United States for the number of deportations of “illegal” immigrants who have not committed any crime (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2012).3 Thus, taco truck owners and their customers in Columbus live in a precarious situation. About half of the taco truck owners I spoke with expressed various feelings of apprehension about moving their trucks. They dread traversing English-speaking areas of the city and having an altercation with someone in English, confronting ICE, or ICE scaring off their customers. Therefore, many of the taco truck owners prefer to remain in one place, often at the periphery of the city or in semiobscure places, instead of darting around the city throughout the day. There are also socioeconomic dynamics that often determine the ways in which taco trucks are constructed. The majority of taco trucks are makeshift. They are often converted old vehicles that were once designed for other forms of automobility, such as small school buses or moving vans. The average cost of a taco truck is approximately $15,000.4 Many taco trucks are barely roadworthy; although they are drivable, many have worn tires and engine problems. Therefore, taco truck owners worry about having mechanical problems out on the road. Moving the truck is also troublesome for kitchen operations. Taco trucks do not have refrigerator doors, shelves, pots, or knives that lock easily into place. The cost of gasoline is an added expense for taco truck owners, who try to keep their foods as inexpensive as possible. These issues of money affect the mobility of trucks and their spatial practices. Consequently, the mobility of traditional taco trucks is usually minimal. Also, traditional taco trucks most often locate in commercial strips or on vacant lots along well-transited arterial roads, which are convenient to where many Mexican migrants reside.5 The taco truck operators do this to intersect with the daily ebbs and flows of Mexican day laborers going to and from a job site.

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Immobile mobility best defines the sociospatial dynamics of taco trucks. Many undocumented taqueros stated that their trucks are stepping-stones to acquiring brick-and-mortar restaurants of their own. In the meantime, a makeshift kitchen on wheels allows them to seek affordable spaces in the city, where they can continue to earn and save money to fulfill their “American dream.” To put it another way, taco truck owners use mobile infrastructure to construct their permanency in the United States. This is much different from gourmet trucks’ mobility practices. I define gourmet food trucks as those that emerged in 2007 to 2008 and saturated American cities from 2009 to 2012 (Lemon 2015). Today, cities with populations over one hundred thousand have more than four thousand artisanal food trucks roaming their landscapes (Swanbrow 2014). In Columbus, these trucks are extremely mobile. From a windshield survey I performed of approximately thirty gourmet food trucks parked in Columbus Commons (a privately owned public park in the city’s center) during lunch time over the course of a week, all but one were owned and operated by Anglo-Americans. They tended to serve artisanal culinary delights to a primarily Anglo, middle-class clientele. Unlike taco trucks, many gourmet food trucks are extremely elaborate. They have solid and well-maintained wheels and tires, and most of their kitchens are easy to lock down in a few minutes. Most important, their operators rely heavily on social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) to announce their locations and food specials. Social media is central to gourmet trucks’ mobility in comparison to a taco truck. As Caldwell (2011) has established, social media is part and parcel of the eating experience at a gourmet food truck. Food truck practices in geographic space shape virtual space and, consequently, the spatial practices of their clientele. Although traditional taco truck owners have smartphones and mobile trucks, they do not employ these aspects together as a business practice. Traditional taco trucks often remain in one place to capture Latinos’ sociospatial rhythms. Conversely, gourmet trucks employ social media to manipulate their middle-class clienteles’ movements (Lemon 2015).6 Although Mexican immigrants and Anglo middle-class US citizens may both have access to the Internet on their phones, they do not use the devices for the same cultural or socioeconomic purposes. Tracking down a food truck on Twitter is a pastime primarily for the middle class. By contrast, the limited time and money of low-income Mexicans minimizes their mobility (Lemon 2015). Thus, people’s wealth and leisure time help define their movements and those of the food trucks. In addition to spatial

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practices, citizens’ attitudes toward the aesthetics and social practices of food trucks have also helped determine food trucks’ spatial arrangement in cities. Columbus’s Evolving Food Truck Spaces From 2005 to 2014, the City of Columbus’s Planning and Zoning Departments did not impose any regulations that restricted the time-space practices of food trucks.7 Primarily, the Columbus Public Health Department regulated and continues to regulate the mobility of food trucks. Food trucks are required to move once every thirty days, although the length of movement is unspecified, and the policy is lightly enforced. Because there are no stringent urban policies that might further affect a truck’s movement, it is easier to critique the spatial practices of food trucks from purely a social perspective. The lack of tight mobility regulations in Columbus reflects the progressively minded attitudes of city officials, urban planners, and many of the city’s residents. Thus Columbus’s current urban policies are fairly welcoming and inclusive toward all types of food truck vending. However, it has not always been that way. Taco trucks began to appear in Columbus in 2001. By 2005, there were at least twenty trucks on the west side of the city. From 2001 to 2005, residents and business owners in the west side clashed over the manifestation of taco trucks in their neighborhood. Many Westside residents perceived the trucks as blight. The trucks represented a reduced quality of life and threatened to undue the neighborhoods’ conventional landscape order. Many residents and business owners tried to regulate the food trucks out of the neighborhood but were unsuccessful. Over the past ten years, the residents’ perception of mobile food vending in Columbus has progressed. Taco trucks, which were unwelcome at first, became a semiotic marker of multiculturalism and cultural capital for the city. Today, with general national acceptance of gourmet food trucks, food trucks of all types are almost always a welcome presence throughout Columbus. City planners and urban branders marketed the city of Columbus in 2012 as a “smart and open” city.8 Food trucks fit into this urban branding framework. The trucks’ eccentric and entropic appearance in the urban landscape helped fashion a free-spirited identity for the city. The trucks’ acceptance demonstrated the community’s eagerness to become more cosmopolitan. The trucks became symbolic capital to promote the city’s imaginative civic culture in order to attract the “creative class” to advance economic development.9

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Columbus’s Anglo middle class became mesmerized with the inventive cuisines served from swanky trucks—so while the tattered traditional taco trucks remained mostly immobile at the city’s periphery or within its interstitial spaces, gleaming gourmet food trucks penetrated the city center. Places like the Columbus Commons and the Columbus Dinin’ Hall showcase different gourmet food trucks every day for lunch, and it is primarily Columbus’s Anglo middle class who mostly enjoy these spaces. Geographers have demonstrated that spaces are often codified by race and ethnicity (Guthman 2008b; Hoelscher 2003, 2006; Saldanha 2006; Schein 2006; Slocum 2007), and this is certainly true of Columbus’s newfound gourmet food truck spaces. For instance, the Dinin’ Hall is a place for Anglo middle-class consumption practices. It is a renovated warehouse located near downtown where food trucks can park during lunch hours. The facility is designed for a person to order a plate of food outside and savor it sitting down inside a climate-controlled environment (figure 9.1). In addition, customers pay for their meal indoors with cash or credit, and the food truck proprietors serve the customers at their table. The owners of Dinin’ Hall, Tim Lai and Eliza Ho, initially presented their idea in an online article for Columbus Underground: “The concept of Dinin’ Hall came from a simple desire to create a better dining experience of street

Figure 9.1 Inside the Dinin’ Hall dining space. Photo credit: Robert Lemon.

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food” (Ho and Lai 2012). According to Tim and Eliza, eating on the street was messy and inefficient, and they believed there must be a better way to experience cuisine served from a truck. Therefore they came up with the concept to put street food in a café. Street-food dining hall is an oxymoron; Tim and Eliza are formalizing the informal. Food trucks originated to provide a cheap and convenient way for the proletariat to eat on the go. However, middle-class Midwesterners feel compelled to modify ethnic and working-class street food practices to their own comfort level. Dinin’ Hall appeared to be successful when it first opened. Columbus’s Anglo middle class seemed to like the hybridity of the space. Tables and chairs refined street food space, as well as expanded the types of cuisine one could now order from a truck. Moreover, the customers also have plates, forks, and knives—not very traditional to street food practice, but perhaps more amenable. Thus, through the process of tailoring proletarian street food practices to middle-class preferences, Dinin’ Hall has further refashioned and recoded food truck space. While at Dinin’ Hall, I noticed the remarkable absence of Latinos. It was mainly Anglos ordering from gourmet food trucks. In many respects, the space privileges white, non-Latino middle-class customers and gourmet food truck owners. The geographic spaces within which traditional taco trucks and the gourmet food trucks operate are socially distinct—separated by the food trucks’ spatial practices and the communities’ taste preferences. However, there is one food truck that has learned to navigate across and along these uneven topographies: Dos Hermanos. The Dos Hermanos taco truck motors between where Mexican immigrants typically eat traditional street-style tacos (at the city’s periphery) and where the Anglo middle class wishes to sample new cuisines (the city’s center). The next section presents the spatial narratives of Lisa and Luis and the ways in which their taco truck negotiates Columbus’s divergent social spaces. Uneven Topographies Lisa and Luis Gutiérrez are a mixed-ethnic couple who own a traditional taco truck. Lisa is a black woman from Boston, and her husband is from Benito Juárez, Oaxaca. They employ a primary cook for the truck, Dulce Dominguez, who is also from Benito Juárez. This truck epitomizes the dynamic relationship between food spaces and mobility practices. For the owners, mobility is at the heart of their business model. Their truck has a permanent evening location in northeast Columbus until midnight (figure 9.2). During the day, the truck moves to more affluent spaces throughout

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Figure 9.2 The Dos Hermanos taco truck parked in the North-East Side of the city in the late afternoon. Photo credit: Robert Lemon.

the city, such as to Dinin’ Hall, Columbus Commons, and food truck events (figure 9.3). Lisa contended that to increase sales she had to be spatially flexible. She explained that during the day the operation had to move to find other avenues of capital. There were not enough Latinos frequenting the truck within the Latino district in which they were trying to base themselves. In addition, she needed to find places to park the truck where people could eat inside during inclement weather. This is why she started parking on occasion at the Dinin’ Hall and attending food truck festivals. Lisa recognized that her heightened mobility (compared to other traditional taco trucks) is due to her American citizenship, her fluency in English, and her inherent familiarity with American customs. Because of her place-based knowledge of American society, she is better able to navigate Columbus’s diverse social landscape, which gives her a spatial edge over her competition. Lisa emphasized that her mobility allowed her “to feed a mass amount of people in a short period of time.”10 She added that there were difficulties, but overall mobility was an advantage. She noted, “Of course there are expenses—your gas tank, your labor—but if you can drive to 500 people versus sitting sixteen hours a day, that’s a huge advantage.”

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Figure 9.3 The Dos Hermanos taco truck parked at Dinin’ Hall during the day. Photo credit: Robert Lemon.

Lisa further expounded on the way in which her US citizenship shaped her business routines: I think having American citizenship status is critical in this business as far as being mobile. That is why a lot of taquerías [taco trucks] are not mobile. I think maybe not having a valid driver’s license, the fear of being on the road with your entire business with you and possibly being pulled over, or deported, and things that come with that situation put fear in people. And I think that's why in the food trucking [business] you don’t see a lot of traditional taquerías moving. That’s why they are just sitting on private lots and building a customer base that way.

When I asked Lisa how language affects her mobility practices, she replied: “I think the language is huge. It is going to the banks to prepare for the day. You have got to be business-minded to be on the road. There are some things that occur. I mean we showed up here with a broken gas line before. You have got to be able to run out and get that fixed. You have got to be comfortable. And I think that not knowing the language and not having citizenship, that comfort level isn't there.” Clearly, language barriers and barriers to American citizenship affect spatial practices.

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For Mexican migrants, immobility or minimal mobility becomes a strategy to build familiarity with particular places in Columbus. Likewise, heightened mobility and unfamiliar spaces induce anxiety. Ironically, it is the economic hardships of a person’s place in Mexico that impel that person to search for prosperity in the United States—but once in the United States, the scale, type, and experience of mobility modifies to the spatial reality of life as an undocumented worker in an American city. Dos Hermanos combines the complexities of two social realities and expresses its compounded practices through time and space. The truck’s mobility is reliant on Lisa’s citizenship, her knowledge of Columbus, and the English language. Although Lisa finds her knowledge of English to be a huge advantage in navigating the urban landscape, she does point out that managing her operation can be problematic. She emphasized that her inability to speak Spanish makes it challenging for her to engage the Mexican community and converse with her employees, as well as with her husband: “The language issue is a struggle. It is a problem and I did not notice how much of a problem it was until we started to work together ... There are product issues and sales issues and staffing issues. Are people coming to work, not coming to work; what time we have to be somewhere now that we are mobile.” Lisa continued to describe the difficulty of communicating with Dulce about the groceries she needed and shopping at Mexican markets: I did not know how to purchase things in the Mexican markets. I wasn’t familiar with some of the spices Dulce was requesting. I had never heard of carne asada. Dulce gives me a grocery list and I am responsible for getting the items that she needs. It was a very big struggle in the beginning. Obviously most people don't speak English in the Mexican market, but she couldn't even convey to me what she needed. For instance a bay leaf, she would say that she would need “the leaf.” I’m like, what kind of leaf, Dulce? You know? We made a couple of trips together, which helped.

Lisa was learning to navigate Columbus through cuisine. In addition, she had to figure out how to manipulate the semiotic markers and the aesthetics of the truck to appeal to Mexicans. Lisa expanded on how their business must consider not only the traditional seasonings Mexican immigrants savor, but also the ways in which Mexicans interact: “I have had to adapt everything to attract Mexican clientele. We had to paint the truck the traditional red, green, and white as a visual. I think making sure that people who are on staff are fluent in Spanish and versed in Mexican customs helped. The menu of course, we do some of the traditional meats, such as cabeza

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(cow head) and lengua (cow tongue). We try to keep the tamales traditional to Oaxaca. We carry the traditional Mexican sodas.” Lisa also confided in me that the sight of a black woman working at the truck may have deterred Mexicans from patronizing their establishment: “I would see Mexicans pull up and see me at the window, and they would drive away. Perhaps they thought that a black woman operating a truck meant that the food was not truly Mexican. And being authentic is very important to our operation.” Culinary customs are embedded within human spatial practices at various scales and dimensions. Because Dos Hermanos can represent two cultural practices, Lisa and her husband must be strategic about who manages the truck and when. Indeed, the entire aesthetics and practices of the truck must morph to various urban venues at particular times. During the day, Lisa operates the truck around the more affluent Anglo business districts in the city center (figure 9.4). English is her native language, so she can converse with non-Latino customers about Mexican flavors and take orders with ease. However, she tries not to be visible at night and instead has her husband work the window. Lisa has found a balance of marketing to Mexicans and Americans through spatial versatility—that is, the truck’s movements based on specific

Figure 9.4 Lisa and Dulce operating the truck at Dinin’ Hall. Lisa takes orders, and Dulce works the kitchen. Photo credit: Robert Lemon.

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social behaviors at certain times throughout the city. The couple’s divergent origins of place contribute to the truck’s mobility practices. This allows the couple to navigate multiple ethnic preferences from a sociospatial perspective. The duality of cultural regions embodied in a singular vessel not only eases the truck’s mobility, but also makes mobility a necessity. Dos Hermanos’s economic survival relies on crossing cultural boundaries that are contingent not necessarily on spatial perimeters but social practices. Lisa shows me a calendar of where she will be moving for lunch during the day. The calendar is a map. It represents mobility, space, and place through time. Each day is a different place, a different space that will be socially transformed by their presence and practice (figure 9.5). Thus, the truck’s menu must also be modified to its locale. When the truck is downtown, it operates with an English menu and serves more Americanized food items (figure 9.6). The prices are also a bit more expensive due to extra costs of fuel and paying an event fee. During the evenings, the truck’s menu is posted in Spanish and serves more traditional Mexican regional specialties. I discussed with Lisa how cuisines change based on the truck’s location within Columbus.

Figure 9.5 Lisa shows me a calendar of where she will be moving for lunch during the day. Photo credit: Robert Lemon.

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Figure 9.6 Dos Hermanos’ English menu, used during the day. Photo credit: Robert Lemon. When we are mobile, it is more corporate lunches ... it’s mainly American people. During the day we are selling burritos, quesadillas, [whereas] it’s traditional tacos, tamales, cabeza (cow head) and lengua (cow tongue) at our home base. Where we normally locate, you might find menudo. We want to be competitive with the other trucks, so we often have different specials at night for our Mexican clientele. But during the day when selling around the city center to primarily white people, I make sure I have more sour cream, cheese, lettuce, and tomato on hand. They are a little bit reluctant about the traditional onion and cilantro.

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That evening I met with Lisa’s husband Luis to ask him about his perspective of the food truck business and about his culinary background. Luis told me about where he is from in Mexico and the hardships he endured in Oaxaca that made him want to migrate to the United States. When he first arrived in Columbus, he performed yard work and landscaping services. At night, he worked at The Cheesecake Factory, washing dishes. Luis continues to work as a cook at the Columbus Fish Market. He works sixteen hours every day. From seven in the morning to three in the afternoon, he cooks at the Columbus Fish Market, and then he works the taco truck from four in the afternoon until midnight. I asked Luis how he feels about the truck being mobile during the day. Luis was initially hesitant about the truck’s mobility because of his unfamiliarity with American customs and his lack of fluency in the English language. He has come to embrace the business aspect of the truck being mobile but is happy that he is not involved with its movement. “I think that it’s great that the truck is mobile because there are different people throughout the city that can try our foods. Some people try it and say, ‘Oh, this is Mexican food, right?’ I think that before I started selling it, people here hadn’t tried it yet, the flavor of real Mexican food.”11 Indeed, the truck’s mobility has become their primary way to market their business. “Our promotion is our mobility,” he proclaimed. “When we go around the city and Americans taste what real Mexican food should taste like, they learn what Mexican food is. Then they know where we are located at night and will drive here to eat. ... Americans really like Mexican food, but we have to go to them first, but then they know where to find us later.” Therefore, the truck’s mobility can also affect the movements of its non-Latino customers. Anglos who try tacos from Dos Hermanos within the confines of a space to which they are culturally accustomed—such as at Dinin’ Hall—then may consider driving across the city to sample other foods. To do this they would have to cross into Latino social space, which would certainly open them to a different ethnic eating experience. Thus cuisines influence mobility practices and create new sociospatial relationships. And this is what it means to say that food is a spatial practice. Conclusion In this chapter, I argued that sociospatial practices are an important aspect of understanding both the cultural geography of food and the socioeconomic landscape of a city. Mobility practices, as tied to culinary customs,

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provide a spatial lens onto the ways in which social practices shape spaces throughout an urban landscape. Significantly, this framework advances the epistemology of space, place, and landscape as it unveils the underlying motives of movements through taste preferences that profoundly contribute to the social rhythms of a city. Throughout the chapter, I described the operating differences between taco trucks and gourmet food trucks. I also demonstrated the ways in which cooking and eating practices ascribe meaning to spaces and how a multiethnically owned and operated taco truck came to navigate those spaces. There are two types of food truck practices and food truck spaces in Columbus, Ohio, which have developed into a spatial dialectic. Taco trucks and gourmet food trucks seldom vend in the same spaces, because the truck owners tend to cater to divergent clienteles; thus, their movements are also dissimilar. Most of the traditional taco trucks in Columbus are not mobile. The taqueros’ tenuous life circumstances, their unfamiliarity with the American city, and their food preparation practices tend to fasten them to a particular site in the city. Gourmet food trucks do not have to contend with these spatial uncertainties and are also able to use social media to their geographic advantage. Therefore, gourmet food trucks are much more mobile—and their dominant mobility is easier to market and make accessible to Columbus’s middle class. In addition, other social dynamics within Columbus supersede the ways in which spaces are shaped in the city. For example, Columbus’s dominant Anglo culture can dictate the social practices that take place throughout the city’s central spaces, such as the design of Dinin’ Hall’s space emulating ethnic street food in an Anglo middle-class manner, which almost guarantees that Mexican immigrant communities will be excluded in practice. Simultaneously, Anglo middle-class Americans may feel hesitant and unwelcome in traditional taco truck spaces—places where primarily Mexicans are conversing in Spanish and savoring foods often unfamiliar to an Anglo palate. Thus, the social spaces of taco trucks and gourmet food trucks are quite dissimilar, as the spaces are socially coded through their practices for a very different type of clientele, which is dictated by ethnicity and class. However, because food trucks are mobile, not all trucks are tied to particular types of social spaces. Lisa has demonstrated the difficulties in crossing the boundaries of such complex spaces. As a black woman, Lisa has had to learn how best to traverse the social terrains of both Anglos and Latinos through an understanding of both Anglos’ and Latinos’ eating practices and food preferences. Through her spatial narrative and itinerant practices, she has further elucidated the

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ways in which Columbus’s urban spaces are socially constructed and ethnically coded. The Dos Hermanos truck best exemplifies the nuances of food practices as a spatial experience among the intersections of multiple life trajectories that are intricately tied to origins of place, forging a new way to navigate the social dimensions of Columbus’s landscape. The Columbus community may currently consider the gourmet food trucks commonplace and a whimsical improvisational practice, but to a perspicacious individual familiar with the history of street food vending, they appear merely as hyperreal spaces. In fact, the verisimilitude of gourmet food trucks misrepresents multiculturalism. Gourmet food trucks cannot create cultural diversity where the only diversity is in the cuisine. For Columbus’s city planners and marketers to be inclusive, they must acknowledge and address the subtle ways in which many marginalized individuals tactically occupy space due to their tenuous life circumstances. Accordingly, to achieve social justice, invested stakeholders must come to terms with the myriad ways in which all communities contribute to the workings of the neoliberal city. Of course, the creative class contributes to the city’s economic development, but so too do many immigrant laborers that clean hotel rooms, landscape lawns, and cook in back kitchens. Although these two social identities can be reflected in the city’s budding food truck culture, the trucks carry divergent meanings. Columbus’s Anglo middle class may celebrate the ingenuity of gourmet food trucks as part of the city’s creative urbanity, but for many Mexican immigrants who live precariously at the urban periphery, taco trucks are emblematic of an essential cultural practice. Through their eyes, taco trucks are a symbolic space of hope and a place of perseverance in the United States. Given these points, the spatial practices of traditional taco trucks are one way Mexican migrants in Columbus claim their right to the city. Notes 1.  I have argued (Lemon 2015, 173–175) that traditional taco trucks make money from filling a cultural demand, whereas gourmet food trucks produce a cultural demand among the middle class where one did not exist before. 2.  This is not to argue that taco trucks serve the only true street food. Various trucks serve foods adapted to eating on the street in myriad ways. This is but one example, detailing how the taco itself became a spatial strategy. 3.  This is part of a larger overall deportation trend, largely due to the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which made it easier to deport immigrants who had been in the country without papers.

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4. This cost includes a refrigerator, a grill, running water, and all other kitchen amenities. 5.  A taco truck owner in Columbus will pay between $500 and $1,000 per month to rent a parking space for his or her truck. 6. Through empirical observations and interviews (Lemon 2015, 580–592), I have demonstrated the ways in which various income and ethnic groups use social media to navigate to food trucks in geographic space. 7. Although some food truck regulations are currently developing in Columbus, they are not overly restrictive of mobility practices throughout the city. 8.  “Columbus Partnership’s webpage details Columbus’s urban branding initiative: http://www.columbuspartnership.com. 9.  The marketing reflects Richard Florida’s quantitative analysis of the creative class. Florida’s 2005 work posits that better educated, well-rounded, tech-savvy people are attracted to cultural diversity and that the creative class is good for a city’s economy. 10. Personal interview, Lisa Gutiérrez, May 8, 2013. Subsequent quotes in this section are from here. 11. Personal interview, Luis Gutiérrez, May 8, 2013. Subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from here.

References Arreola, Daniel. 2002. Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. New York: Routledge. Caldwell, Alison. 2011. “Will Tweet for Food: Microblogging Mobile Food Trucks— Online, Offline, and In Line.” In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan, 306–321. New York: Routledge. Cresswell, Timothy. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Cresswell, Timothy. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning: D, Society & Space 28 (1): 17–31. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Florida, Richard L. 2005. Cities and the Creative Class. Ann Arbor, MI: Psychology Press. Giard, Luce. 1998. “Part II: Doing Cooking.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, edited by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guthman, Julie. 2008a. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15 (4): 431–447. Guthman, Julie. 2008b. “‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions.” Professional Geographer 60 (3): 387–397. Ho, Eliza, and Tim Lai. 2012. “Big Ideas: Columbus’ First Street Food Hub.” ColumbusUnderground, January 14. http://www.columbusunderground.com/a -proposal-columbus-first-street-food-hub. Hoelscher, Steven D. 2003. “Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (3): 657–686. Hoelscher, Steven D. 2006. “The White-Pillared Past: Landscapes of Memory and Race in the American South.” In Landscape and Race in the United States, edited by Richard Schein, 39–72. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Edited and translated by E. Kofman and E. Lebas. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lemon, Robert D. 2015. “Taco Truck Urban Topographies and the Spatiality of Orderly Disorder.” PhD diss., University of Texas Libraries. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 2008. “Was the Taco Invented in Southern California?” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 8 (1): 26–38. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 2012. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saldanha, Aran. 2006. “Reontologising Race: The Mechanic Geography of Phenotype.” Environment and Planning: D, Society & Space 24 (1): 9–24. Schein, Richard H. 2006. Landscape and Race in the United States. New York: Routledge. Shaw, Hillary J. 2006. “Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 (2): 231–247. Shaw, Hillary J. 2014. The Consuming Geographies of Food: Diet, Food Deserts and Obesity. London: Routledge.

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Shortridge, Barbara G., and James R. Shortridge. 1998. The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Slocum, Rachel. 2007. “Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice.” Geoforum, Post Communist Transformation 38 (3): 520–533. Slocum, Rachel. 2011. “Race in the Study of Food.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (3): 303–327. Swanbrow, Diane. 2014. “Study Identifies Factors That Contribute to Food Trucks’ Fast Spread.” Michigan News, August 16. http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/22337 -study-identifies-factors-that-contribute-to-food-trucks-fast-spread. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 2012. “Secure Communities: Monthly Statistics through August 31, 2012; IDENT/IAFIS Interoperability Statistics.” https:// www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/sc-stats/nationwide_interop_stats-fy2012-to-date.pdf.

10  Eating in the City: Fidel Gastro, Street Performance, and the Right to the City Edward Whittall

Matt Basile is a showman. Going by the stage name “Fidel Gastro,” he branded himself as the “rebel without a kitchen” because he neither trained as a cook nor owned a restaurant or a food truck. He was a vagabond performer, and his specialty was the pop-up, one-off events usually staged in little-used spaces around the city. His signature cuisine was “extremo” sandwiches, and his signature move was to ignite a call-and-response of “Olé” with the waiting crowd. He became a darling of Toronto’s alternative event and media scene, and within a dizzying year and a half of starting his popup kitchen, he found himself with his own television show, Rebel without a Kitchen, and with his own food truck, Fidel Gastro’s. Basile’s is a complex position in urban discourse. He employs the language of the neoliberal, creative city by describing his performances as branding, and yet describes his customers as his audience. With cheeky reference to the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and to his “rebel kitchen,” he points to his desire to overturn norms of urban social and commercial life. He lays claim to his right to the city while aspiring to be swept up by its forces of commoditization and spectacle. His rise to fame coincided with the birth of the food truck movement in Toronto, and also with the explosive rise of an equally theater-savvy politician, Mayor Rob Ford. Toronto’s food trucks found themselves center stage in Ford’s often incoherent, Haussmann-esque vision of urban grandeur for Toronto’s streets. “Subways, subways, subways!” was Ford’s rallying cry (Huffington Post Canada 2013), as bicycle lanes were torn out and food trucks were essentially removed from the downtown core and prohibited from parking on city streets. Yet the food truck scene thrived. In chapter 9, Lemon illuminated the disparity of mobility and sociospatial practices between working class taco trucks and middle-class foodie trucks in Columbus, Ohio. He employs, in part, the concept of performance to articulate how trucks not only hail their customers, but also how they

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perform themselves and their food in relation to middle-class tastes and concepts of authenticity. The central case study—Lisa, Luis, and the Dos Hermanos taco truck—proves a poignant example of Erving Goffman’s concept of “passing” (Goffman 1986) the performance of another class or cultural identity proficiently enough to be accepted by the dominant culture. The stigma of otherness is suppressed by carefully self-monitoring for behaviors or signs that might give a person away and thus cause him or her to “fail” the performance. The kinds of everyday performances that stationary trucks embody blend into the surface of everyday life; they are meant to be invisible. Indeed, as Lemon shows, heightened visibility can be dangerous to the illegal immigrants who work the taco trucks; passing blends them into the urban landscape. However, some performances are quite visible and are meant to be received as temporary performative interventions in urban spaces. Like Basile’s pop-ups, these performances can transform everyday spaces into theater spaces, even if only for a moment. Space and place have long been considered to shape meaning making in performance (McAuley 2000; Hill and Paris 2006). The relationship between performance and cities has demonstrated the value of performance practices in intervening in and tracing urban life (Hopkins, Orr, and Solga 2011; Whybrow 2010). Equally, urban environments have been shown to have a material relationship with theater sites and performance practices (Knowles 2004; McKinnie 2007). Crucially, as performance theorist Jen Harvie adds, “performance practices test boundaries between public and private space. They often make visible the unremarked private control of space by apparently provoking that control to assert itself. They explicitly critique the privatization of space and its collusions in preserving inequalities of wealth and opportunity” (Harvie 2013, 109). The question this chapter asks is how performance might help us understand why food trucks present such a challenge to official narratives of urban development in Toronto and how this understanding might help question one of the predominant themes running through Toronto’s urban discourse: Who has the right to the city? David Harvey suggests that the right to the city is “one of our most precious yet neglected of our human rights” (Harvey 2008, 23). This right “is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (23). Harvey’s framing of this right is not easy to quantify or analyze, because urban life involves constant and shifting tension between acts of performative agency and restrictive policy. Jen Harvie argues that employing a performative analysis, which would focus on how people move through space, commune in

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groups, react, socialize, and disperse, “tends to be optimistic” (Harvie 2011, 205) of social liberation. Material analysis, a focus on how the conditions of production and reception make us do what we do, “tends to be skeptical” (205) of the individual’s ability to enact agency. Harvie advocates a hybrid analysis, a materialist performative analysis, that can potentially capture the ambivilance of current social conditions (205). This chapter employs a materialist performative analysis in order to place embodied, performative acts of imagination and agency in context with policy restrictions and the desire for what Lemon referred to in chapter 9 as the American Dream. In his oft-cited essay “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau (1984) develops the concepts of “strategies” and “tactics” to form a dialectic between the cultural logics of urban planning and business (and here I mean business that is located relative to a place, a building), and the everyday activities of walkers who, according to Nigel Thrift’s reading of de Certeau, use invention (diversion, shortcuts, trespassing, etc.) “as a means of opening out sites to other agendas, so producing some degree of play in apparently rigid social systems, and thereby foreshadowing the current demonstrative emphasis on performance” (Thrift 2008, 77). It is this emphasis on performance that I wish to elaborate by comparing food trucks’ performances to three kinds of urban performance—site-specific performance, radical street performance, and the pop-up—in order to argue that regardless of whether the politics of food trucks are visible or not, food truck vendors and their customers make critical spatial interventions by colluding to form temporary communities in off-spaces and transitional areas, thus redefining both themselves and the spaces they occupy. Eating in the city provides an outlet for public action to resist the ongoing tightening of urban public space through surveillance and the assertion of private rights over the public domain. Food Trucks and the Theater of the Urban Politics The street food movement in Toronto is accompanied by strict regulation, borne out in complex licensing and movement restrictions, like the circumstances that food truck vendors face in other cities. This is a common theme in this book: The cities of Atlanta; Vancouver; Durham, North Carolina; New York; and New Orleans are examined for the relationship between food truck policy and social justice. Toronto is similar in that food truck regulations are at the forefront of the discourse, casting food trucks and their customers against the municipal government’s bureaucracy and landed (tax-paying) interests in a battle over who has the right to the city’s

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streets. Restrictive policies governing parking and proximity to restaurants reflect the fractious debate surrounding the the “war on cars” (Kalinowski and Rider 2010) that former Mayor Rob Ford and his neoliberal government railed against during his divisive mandate. This conflict, however, was not the anomaly in an otherwise fluid urban discourse. Rather, it was one among many. Upon election, Ford scrapped a sixty-dollar vehicle registration tax. Bike lanes, streetcars and their obstructive tracks, and the reconstruction of the aging, elevated Gardiner Expressway became wedges in an urban politics designed to pit suburban drivers against downtown cyclists and walkers in a war to define the uses of city streets. Ford’s vision, and the vision of his supporters, was of a city street the purposes of which were to allow residents to pass through quickly by car and to support the businesses that lined the streets by allowing for more street parking. Toronto was to be a city of cars. Food trucks arrived into this environment literally overnight. Anecdotally, the food truck movement in Toronto emerged from itinerant cooks like Basile and Zane Caplansky, who started smoking his own brisket in the rental kitchen of a downtown pub and selling sandwiches to its patrons. Seeing the food truck scene emerging in other cities, Caplansky simply bought a truck and drove it onto the streets of Toronto in order to expand his already growing delicatessen. His plan was to build a franchise of food trucks, an idea he pitched unsuccessully to the entrepreneurial reality show The Dragon’s Den.1 The investors, known as the Dragons, loved the food, but could not get behind a concept that did not have bricks and mortar. This, in fact, was the argument used against food trucks at the municipal level: they would clog the streets and take business away from property tax–paying brick-and-mortar restaurants. Thus, bylaws were established that restricted food trucks from parking in city streets within fifty meters of an existing restaurant and prohibited them from parking more than three hours in any one spot (Cross 2014). Finally, the number of permits would be controlled and their cost would be an exorbitant $5,066 plus tax, five times the amount charged in Vancouver. The restrictions are few in number but nonetheless literally eliminated the entire downtown core as a food truck vending location. The irony in all of this is that one of the more vocal critics of these restrictive bylaws was Rob Ford, citing his desires to allow capitalism to work freely and for consumers to make uninhibited market choices. This is no comfort, though; it simply perpetuates the conviction that market logics should dominate urban policy decisions. Food trucks are in fact incompatible with Ford’s vision of urban mobility, which focused

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primarily on burying transit in order to open streets for more cars (Alcoba and Warnica 2014). However, the popularity of the trucks proved too powerful, and pilot projects were initiated to allow food trucks to operate in city parks and in private parking lots, called food truck alleys. However, the parks project failed miserably for both vendors and park users, resulting in a lawsuit launched by the city against the project’s organizers that drags on today. Vendors claimed that people who used the parks were more interested in walking their dogs, sex, and panhandling than they were in food. Park users complained about the smells that the food trucks created (Slaughter 2014a). Food truck alleys (Slaughter 2014b) were moderately successful. It seemed that though food trucks can convert a parking lot into a wonderful-smelling commensal gathering point, they can also turn a city park into a greasy back alley, possibly because they create what Jim Drobnick (2002) has called “dialectical odour,” which “contest[s] the ‘dream odours’ (or non-odours) of a sanitized and neutral space. They contradict the conventional assumptions of place and space, render them more openly schizophrenic, introduce complexes of competing meanings, draw out the implicit political dynamics which construct spatiality” (41). For Basile, food truck alleys do not allow a truck to capitalize on its strength, which is its mobility, and thus on the ways food trucks momentarily invigorate local populations. Food trucks are too easily passed by if they are not allowed to stand out from the normal flow of city life or are buried off the streets on private lots. To paraphrase David Harvey, the right to the city is contained in our ability to transform ourselves and our cities. As several chapters in this book have demonstrated, food truck policies regulate who is allowed access to urban resources, which is central to social justice in cities (see, e.g., chapters 5 and 9). How do we articulate transformation? Performance offers a rich critical history from which to begin thinking about how food trucks model ways to transform ourselves and our cities. Certainly, the first theorist to explicitly link performance to urban spatial politics was Michel de Certeau. Strategies, Tactics, and the Street Theater of Food Trucks The strategies and tactics of de Certeau offer a frame for understanding how the street theater of food trucks might be understood within larger urban narratives. De Certeau defines strategies as “actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate

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theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed” (1984, 36). He denotes some effects of strategies, such as the “triumph of place over time” (36), that allow the strategist to capitalize on their position relative to the consumer. Also, strategies offer a “mastery of places through sight” (36). De Certeau famously begins his essay on top of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, where the “gigantic mass” of the city below was “immobilized before the eyes” (de Certeau 1984, 91) as a giant text to be read. De Certeau’s view was a tourist’s view. It was the view of the wealthy and powerful, whose offices occupied the higher floors of the buildings; its scopic power arrested the nervous, unpredictable energy of the streets below. “When one goes up there,” he writes, “he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators” (92). Toronto boasts a similar view of the city from the CN Tower. Like the World Trade Center’s “Windows on the World,” the peak of the CN Tower is host to 360, a restaurant perched over 350 meters above the city streets. Tables are lined along the floor-to-ceiling windows that circle the dining room’s interior, and the restaurant’s floor slowly revolves, offering diners stunning vistas of the city that fade into the distant countryside to the north and Lake Ontario to the south. One full rotation takes seventy-two minutes, which, unsurprisingly, is roughly the amount of time service cues and kitchen timing subtly guide diners through their lunch or dinner. The view makes manifest the perforation of “the traditional divide between city and countryside” that characterizes the late-modern city (Amin and Thrift 2002, 1), and this porousness is reflected in the menu. It boasts “regional cuisine” with items like “Ontario Living Lettuce Salad with King Cole Duck Confit” and “Local Ricotta and Sour Cream Torte.” But with a view so powerful and distant, regional is afforded new boundaries with “Bay of Fundy Maplewood-Smoked Atlantic Salmon” and an heirloom tomato salad featuring “local” feta cheese and Vancouver Island sea salt. It is a grand, sweeping narrative of nation, and all roads lead to Toronto. It takes little intuitive force to draw the connections between 360 and de Certeau’s strategies. The menu at 360 flattens out place into a graphic rendering of nation and region. The temporality of place is reduced to menu line items that trace connections between Vancouver Island sea salt and local heirloom tomatoes as though they were grown with each other in sight, and to a seventy-two minute panorama of the city. These trajectories are dominated and essentialized by the panoptic force of the view that

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extends from coast to coast, sea to land. Toronto is Canada, and Canada is consumable from this perch in the clouds. Unlike a strategy, a tactic, de Certeau offers, is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (1984, 37). The tactic lacks the ability to claim its own place and thus manage movement and create consumers. It must take advantage of opportunities in the cracks of spatial and temporal systems of power. For instance, de Certeau points to simple activities like walking, talking, cooking, and eating as everyday tactics that create distraction or surprise in the surface of urban systems. Tactics are the “art of the weak” (1984, 37), he writes. While power is “bound by its very visibility,” the weak must operate in “isolated actions, blow by blow” (37). Street food trucks literalize de Certeau’s tactic. Time becomes performative in the definition of place. Rather than having permanent places to park, they only occupy a space for a few hours, relying “on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power” (de Certeau 1984, 39). Basinski, Shapiro, and Morales, in chapter 5 on the New York City food truck wars, illustrate in great detail the legal battle to define the proper usage of parking spots in New York City. Food trucks turn parking spaces into gathering places for people who are neither shopping in local stores nor, especially, eating in local restaurants. Stepping outside the logic of the market in defining these spaces, it becomes clear that the spaces food trucks occupy are momentarily transformed, turned into a temporary social space where everyday life expands and contracts before allowing the space to resume its normative function. Food trucks also depend greatly on social media, namely Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, as well as a proprietary Toronto Street Food app, to announce their locations for the day. Rather than using these social media platforms to reinforce their visibility as restaurants do, food trucks use them to generate mobility. They call for brief gatherings of people in ways that will temporarily disrupt normative spatial narratives. A street corner will become a commensal site, forcing pedestrians to walk around, or perhaps to temporarily divert themselves to stand in line. Chapter 5 makes abundantly clear that the inability to communicate location via social media can mean death for a food truck. However, food trucks present an interesting departure from de Certeau’s conception. For de Certeau, tactics and their uses are the tools of the consumer to escape the control of place imposed by the forces of production— an unseen, ever expanding web. In the case of street food, both consumers

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and producers employ tactics to escape the imposition of power over space and also over taste, smell, and the body (Wickstrom 2006; Howes 2005). This collusion between producer and consumer brings street food more in line with performance and can best be critiqued by comparison to sitespecific performance and the guerrilla place-making of the pop-up. Jen Harvie describes the pop-up as a space that is temporarily out of use, like a factory or empty storefront (Harvie 2013, 120), where people gather to hear live music or watch performances. Basile imagined food as a natural extension to the gatherings and began to cook for them. His cooking was framed as a performative event, rather than a backdrop or a social lubricant in the manner that catering might function at an upper-class social function. Using social media, he began to develop a following; in April 2013, he realized that he had hit a turning point when he had twenty-eight events booked for the month. He left his job at an ad agency and began producing cooking events. He traded his labor in a friend’s butcher shop during the day for free access to the shop’s kitchen at night. Left exhausted and with only marginal profits, Basile attempted to open a restaurant but was turned down for funding by banks when he was unable to sell them the idea that his business was structured more around his ability to create an environment than it was on a proven demand for his cuisine in any one community. How was he going to get roving partygoers to come to one site more than once? He finally settled on a food truck because it was all he could afford on his own. In her book Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism, Jen Harvie argues that the pop-up “holds out a socially micro-utopian potential, making creative interventions that are temporary, tactical, multiple, and dispersed— and often deliberately social—in ways that might intervene politically in how people see and experience the world” (2013, 123). One of the popups that Basile frequented was the Toronto Underground Market, a now defunct series of food events that were staged at the Evergreen Brickworks, a former brick factory and quarry in the Don River Valley east of the downtown core. The buildings and the quarry lands around the factory have been converted into a socially progressive cultural space though private/ public partnerships with the intent of focusing citizens on the relationship between urban culture and the environment. The food events introduced public commensality to the space and allowed diners to mingle closely with local produce farmers and young, diverse groups of cooks, many of whom, like Basile, did not have restaurants of their own. Eating and gathering in these spaces offer unique social opportunities that can become performative interventions into configurations of

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socialized behavior that certain spaces enforce either through explicit regulation or subtle directional cues, like paths, benches, or walls. Or, in the case of the Underground Market, these events can embody idealized changes in social structure and meaning that urban activists are attempting to articulate. “Pop-ups,” Harvie explains, “potentially contribute to a liveable, creative and socially progressive city for the many, not the few” (2013, 124). In this view, a similar contribution might be made by the food truck’s mobile, temporary intervention in the city’s streets. Food trucks also engage in the aesthetics of site-specific performance. A site-specific performance is not only about the thing being performed, but about the site of the performance as well. For Mike Pearson, site-specific performance is an “itinterant practice, it momentarily occupies non-descript or indistinct sites, or places overlooked through familiarity” (Pearson 2010, 41). Pearson productively marshalls Bruno Latour’s oligopticon to describe the effect of site-specificity on how we see and imagine urban spaces. For Latour, the oligopticon is a site that sees “much too little to feed the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia of the inspected, but what they see, they see it well” (Latour, quoted in Pearson 2010, 41). Latour holds the oligopticon in distinct opposition to the panopticon embodied so perfectly by the restaurant 360. The oligopticon limits our vision of the whole, forcing us encounter the details and nuances of a particular space. In downtown Toronto, 141 Queen Street East is “occupied” by a public parking lot and a Tiresource tire store. A small, yellow building is snuggled up to a larger building, and the lot is generally half empty but for a few cars and a billboard standard. It is an otherwise nondescript urban space that invites neither attention nor curiosity the way a park or building lobby might. However, it is also known as a food truck alley. Here, most weekdays, the northern section of the parking lot closest to the sidewalk on the south side of Queen Street East is occupied by two or three food trucks and is converted, for a few hours, into a food destination. Food trucks do not simply bring attention to themselves, but also change the way the lot is seen and used. Patrons can be seen lingering around the lot, eating their food. It provides something of an open space off the sidewalk and out of the way for temporary stillness, lingering that might be seen as abnormal without the food trucks. The oligopticon of the food truck alley brings the material force of the parking lot into relief. Entering the site, spending time there, allows us to dwell on the surfaces and textures of the lot that we might otherwise never explore as we pass by. These tactics of pop-up and site-specific performance are not unproblematic, as Harvie points out. Although gatherings such as a group of people

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in a parking lot buying food from food trucks may produce new forms of social relations and contest spatial narratives, their very containment by the exchange of money for food—it is, after all, just lunch—can too easily be unrecognizable as critique. Many people simply buy food and move on elsewhere, finding a quiet spot to eat alone or returning to their places of work. However, not all transactions are the same. I suggest that there is a class difference between a transparent, open exchange of money for food and the quiet billfold discreetly presented at the end of a meal at a restaurant like 360. Rebecca Spang’s excellent historiography of the restaurant reveals exactly how this difference came to life at the table d’hôte, a public buffet frequented by the working class in France, where diners had to bargain with the owner over amounts eaten, a practice that the rising class of bourgeois business travelers found distasteful. Equally, the table d’hôte forced patrons into direct contact with one another, sharing smells and jostling for space, something the restaurant remedied with private tables and discreet airflow systems. Finally, the restaurant created time as a marker of social status. Different classes ate at different times, and having a table waiting at a certain time was also a marker of class (see Spang 2000, 69–79). Street food clearly shares more in common with the table d’hôte than it does the restaurant; this, I argue, creates potential for equality of access in city streets. Not all bodies are welcome in all restaurants. Whether by price, speed of service, subtle cues of décor and greeting, or the mere ability to get a table, downtown restaurants discreetly enforce who can and cannot get lunch in ways food trucks do not. In this sense, food trucks’ combination of “foodie” intrigue, speed of service, moderate pricing, and lack of gatekeeping invites a larger cross-section of class, gender, and race to gather. The pop-up, as Harvie offers, is also dangerously placed to leverage gentrification and the displacement of the poor from certain neighborhoods (2013, 113). Pop-ups can too easily wield a certain cachet; only “insiders” can find out about them, and thus they counter their promise of social inclusion. This aspect, argues Harvie, has come to be engaged by powerful commercial interests that use the pop-up to attract exclusive clientele to sample new products in temporary spaces, using the allure of the temporary to “dress-down” or make “authentic” their consumer goods. Food trucks themselves are following a similar road. For Basile, private engagement makes up the majority of his bookings now, and he has a fulltime chef working the truck. However, he often goes along at the request of his clients, trading on his local celebrity status to generate business. Large

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chains and corporate food manufacturers are also using food trucks to engage their clients in the street by associating their brand with a currently popular form of eating. The reach of power to capture the tactic was clearly not in de Certeau’s vision either as he stood on the observation deck of the now long-gone towers or walked the streets of pre-9/11 New York City. Although site-specificity can illuminate and redefine little-used or derelict spaces, it also can struggle against overdetermined public spaces, such as parks and city streets. Clearly, disrupting politically neutral or transitory places is acceptable, but challenging the pastoral, bourgeois, and sometimesloose space of the park—as the failed parks project demonstrated—and possibly then the politically volatile city streets themselves can be quite undesirable. However, the streets themselves present a different problem than parks or derelict factories; indeed, as this book demonstrates, streets have been the main battleground between food trucks and their detractors. Lemon’s example of Columbus’ street food pavilion, the Dinin’ Hall, demonstrates how food trucks are being curbed by being made to respond to white middle-class dining habits (see chapter 9). Rather than critiquing this kind of arrangement by comparing it to a difficult-to-determine authentic or original street food experience, I suggest that the idea of radical street performance is an apt comparison. Radical street theater is a concept generally attributed to theater groups creating performance interventions in public areas for the purpose of disrupting or protesting social and spatial order. Although it is difficult to imagine gourmet food trucks as radical by any stretch, Cohen-Cruz chooses to define radical acts more generously as “acts that question or re-envision ingrained social arrangements of power” (Cohen-Cruz 1998, 1). I would argue that the Patty’s Tacos truck, the hero of chapter 5, engaged in a food truck version of radical street performance every time Patricia parked despite the threat of removal. Echoing Lemon’s discomfort with the Dinin’ Hall, Cohen-Cruz further differentiates between theater (performances that are made in designated theatrical spaces) and radical street performance by suggesting that “theatre transports the audience to a reality apart from the everyday; radical street performance strives to transport everyday reality into something more ideal” (Cohen-Cruz 1998, 1). Again, this “ideal” is complicated. Although food truck owners and their patrons indeed embody a new ideal for city streets, they still do so within the confines of making money, running a business, and acquiescing to dictates of public behavior and order. This very difference creates the room for certain inequalities to appear even as food trucks seek to intervene in dominant urban narratives.

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As Fidel Gastro’s case suggests, the role of food trucks is ambivalent at best, caught between the poles of urban interventionism, the complex allure of entrepreneurialism, and the overwhelming forces of urban development that are rapidly making the city less affordable for even the middle-class people to whom foodie trucks must appeal. For Basile, this meant leaving his food truck and television days behind to open a restaurant, a pursuit his media success had now brought within reach. His position as the face of street food in Toronto has allowed him to keep his food truck on the road as a marketing tool for his “street food” restaurant and for what he calls market research—that is, trips to the suburbs. However, it is on one such trip that another important question becomes apparent: what exactly is street food if it is not served in the city streets, and what does eating it have to do with the right to the city? Street Food and the Right to the City With Rob Ford no longer in power, a new vision has settled over Toronto that is aligned more generally with the creative cities doctrine, as espoused by one of Ford’s more vocal critics and author of several books on the doctrine, Richard Florida (2013). In their critique of the City of Toronto’s “The Creative City: A Workprint” (2001), Laura Levin and Kim Solga underscore the emphasis that the creative cities doctrine places on the “physical renovation of [the city’s] most important cultural institutions, with dollars not only for bricks and mortar but also for a glimpse of the world’s most visible ‘starchitects’ and the performance of creative allure and cultural fashionability they trail in their wake [...] These architectural projects resonate with [a] hyper awareness of ‘spectacle and theatricality’” (Levin and Solga 2009, 39). This also rings true of the internationally renowned star artists and performers whose work graces these structures; it is equally true of celebrity chefs whose signature restaurants occupy the new buildings. Indeed, these projects and the cachet that they offer support Harvey’s assertion that “quality of life has become a commodity” (2008, 31). The purpose of culture, under creative cities, is to attract “creative” workers by offering an exciting city, one in which, Harvey suggests, surplus capital can be absorbed and demand renewed. Food trucks certainly have a role to play in this and have seen a marginal relaxation of their regulatory structure (Bateman 2014), if not a reduction in permit cost. Matt Basile describes the current climate as “the best it has been in a long time,” yet he still neither owns a permit nor makes use of the streets

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as a primary venue. Neither does he make use of food truck alleys. In fact Basile, having now opened a restaurant, sees the policy restricting parking near restaurants as absurd. Echoing Ford, he argues that if restaurants cannot compete with the quality that food trucks offer, they should perish; having bricks and mortar should neither offer competitive advantage or a protected market. But in the same breath, he argues that food trucks and restaurants should become a cooperative economy. Food trucks should not, in his opinion, park near restaurants that serve similar fare, a rule in Vancouver that supersedes distance regulations. Moreover, he argues that they should engage in group advertising and cross-promotional activity, working together to attract customers to an area in order to expand interest in and knowledge of a particular geography of the city and its gastronomy. As it is, Basile focuses his attention on special events in the city in order to maintain his brand and to drive customers to his restaurant, where he offers a “street food experience.”2 Still, he sends his truck into the distant suburbs, where people who cannot afford the city have flocked into new, expansive developments. Recently, he tells me, he went to Pickering, perhaps the furthest suburb of Toronto, and had one of the best lunch services he had yet experienced. Pickering is a largely new exurb built on the large tracts of farmland that once surrounded the city. For David Harvey, this displacement is the logical pursuit of capital within the urbanization process, a process that has left the city “to a small political and economic elite who are in position to shape cities more after their own desires” (2008, 38). Why did the people of Pickering swarm Basile’s truck? What is it about the street food experience that is so desirable? Street food, Basile admits, does not come “from the street.”3 For him, street food is a “food of the people.” It should be fun and not intimidating. Basile emphasizes that it must be a reimagining of family fare, something passed down from tradition. He uses a dish his grandfather taught him called sugo and bread, a simple red sauce that is cooked all day and served on tranches of sliced, homemade bread. Basile changes this to make a sandwich that can be eaten standing up, but its roots come from his home and his childhood. Perhaps it can be thought of as a kind of regional cuisine. However, a regional cuisine does not simply imply the locality of ingredients, but also, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson points out, “the possibilities of practice” (2004, 25). Distinct from the haute cuisine subsumed under the rhetoric of regionalism so present at 360, true regional cuisine offers itself up as a

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series of improvisations with both ingredients and techniques, a “making do” (Trubek 2008, 38; see also endnote 1) with what one has and knows. So it is with street food. It is not so much that food trucks produce something that resembles haute cuisine but that they do so from trucks equipped, for the most part, with the tools of fast food—namely, the plancha grill and the deep fryer. Dishes of snow crab pogos or chipotle butter oxtail and potatoes (Basile and Zanardi 2014) offer the veneer of improvisational genius when presented on a foam plate and consumed in a parking lot without the dramaturgy of a restaurant and the technological showmanship of a professional kitchen to signify their legitimacy. It is like magician David Blaine levitating during a street performance;4 no one assumes there are any hidden wires lurking in a nearby tree as there might be in the wings of a theater. Although Basile expresses his interest in the further reaches of Toronto as “market research,” he was equally compelled to tell me that he wants to bring his food to areas and to people for whom the geography of the city, and the life of its streets, is inaccessible. It is more than food that Basile brings with him, it is a social experience; it is, I suggest, an imaginative way of being in the city. For Basile, street food cannot be a passive transaction, like in a fast food restaurant. He creates an environment in which music is blaring and the truck crew shouts Basile’s signature “olé” with every order called out. Basile engages with the customers as they approach, trying to remember them from previous visits, telling jokes. He is a natural performer, and his audience loves it. He brings the performative energy of the city streets to suburban driveways and parkettes. Much discourse of food trucks’ potential to alleviate food deserts might also think to connect to the social desert that surrounds fast food restaurants. If food is a “total social phenomenon,” (Ferguson 2004, 16), then street food’s value to democratizing the right to city lies in its ability to overcome “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” (Harvey 2008, 32) that Harvey argues currently governs our social ecologies. Basile, I suggest, allowed the suburban denizens of Pickering not only to imagine the city’s streets but to embody them through taste as well. Karine Vigneault refers to the imaginative layering of space that is implied in terroir foods as “ongoing and interrelated constructions—that is, as relational spaces” (Vigneault 2009). Terroir foods impel the subject to care for “distant others,” she writes, “considering that this impact pertains to multiple spatial identities (individual, family, local, global, etc.).” Eating street food in the suburbs thus becomes a call to care for the city, to imagine

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its streets and public spaces as playful and accessible and its social formations as inviting and inclusive. Perhaps it is also anchored by nostalgia for a city that is no longer available, a street life that has been replaced by malls and cars. Perhaps, in these imaginings, the street food truck in the suburbs is also a protest against that which has been lost, and the formation of a political ideal of what it might be again. Regardless of how we think of it, the formation of a temporary community around a transitory event opens us up to the social relationships that we desire to have with each other, our built environment, the food we eat, and the city it beckons us to ingest and transform. Because, radically unlike de Certeau’s assumption of passive spectators and active authors, we do not passively consume food; like performance and like the city itself, food transforms us as much as we transform it.5 Conclusion Food trucks’ popularity has bloomed in Toronto, driving diners to attend large food truck events and celebrate the very publicity that most food truck regulation seeks, it seems, to mitigate. In this chapter, I combined performative and material analysis of the street food scene in Toronto to suggest that street food is caught in an ambivalent position in relation to concepts of social justice and the rights of private property and commerce. In Matt Basile and his alter ego, Fidel Gastro, we find a complex blend of performance and branding, intervention and compliance with flows of capital, bodies, and food mobility in and out of the city. As I point out in the introduction, Jen Harvie refers to this as an “ambivalence” (2011, 205), but I wonder if it might more productively be referred to as a balancing act, a way of living creatively between the strategies employed by power and the playfulness that tactics afford our everyday navigations of urban life. The presence of food trucks and their performances nevertheless offer opportunities to imagine what kind of city we want to live in and what kind of people we aspire to become. In this, we can assert our right to the city. We can almost taste it. Notes 1. See http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/caplanskys-deli. 2. See http://www.fidelgastros.com/. 3.  Matt Basile in conversation with the author, August 2015.

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4. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvFRRDsa7yo. 5. Here I am thinking of Fisher-Lichte 2008 and Bennett 2010. Both argue for the transformative agency of performance and food and against models of passive consumption.

References Alcoba, Natalie, and Richard Warnica. 2014. “Rob Ford’s ‘Subway Fantasies’ Blasted by Rival Mayoral Candidates.” National Post, September 3. http://news.nationalpost .com/toronto/rob-ford-battles-his-way-through-transit-speech-avoids-explaining -how-toronto-could-pay-for-9-billion-subway-proposal. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity. Basile, Matt, and Kyla Zanardi. 2014. Street Food Diaries: Irresistible Recipes Inspired by the Street. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Bateman, Chris. 2014. “Rules Finally Loosened for Toronto Food Trucks.” blogTO, April 3. http://www.blogto.com/food_trucks/2014/04/rules_finally_loosened_for _toronto_food_trucks/. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. City of Toronto. 2001. “The Creative City: A Workprint.” Official Website of the City of Toronto. Toronto Culture Division. https://www1.toronto.ca/city_of _toronto/economic_development__culture/cultural_services/cultural_affairs/ initiatives/files/pdf/brochure_culture_workprint.pdf. Cohen-Cruz, Jan, ed. 1988. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. New York: Routledge. Cross, Jessica Smith. 2014. “Mapping Where Food Trucks May Roam, 50 Metres from Every Restaurant in Toronto’s Core.” Metro, April 1. http://www.metronews.ca/ news/toronto/2014/04/01/mapping-where-food-trucks-may-roam-50-metres-from -every-restaurant-in-torontos-core.html. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Drobnick, Jim. 2002. “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality.” Angelaki 7 (1): 31–47. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2004. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.

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Florida, Richard. 2013. “Beyond the Rob Ford Embarrassment Is a Broken Toronto.” Globe and Mail, May 19. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/beyond-the -rob-ford-embarrassment-is-a-broken-toronto/article12016032/. Goffman, Erving. 1986. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Shuster, Inc. Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53:23–53. Harvie, Jen. 2011. “Agency and Complicity in ‘A Special Civic Room’: London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall.” In Performance and the City, edited by D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and and Kim Solga, 204–221. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvie, Jen. 2013. Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, L., and H. Paris. 2006. Performance and Place. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, D. J., Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga. 2011. Performance and the City. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howes, David. 2005. “HYPERESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes., 281–303. Oxford: Berg. Huffington Post Canada. 2013. “Rob Ford’s ‘Subways, Subways, Subways’ Answer Is More Bizarre than Funny (AUDIO).” Huffington Post Canada, October 8. http:// www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/10/08/rob-fords-subways-subways_n_4065408.html. Kalinowski, Tess, and David Rider. 2010. “‘War on the Car Is Over’: Ford Moves Transit Underground.” Toronto Star, December 2. https://www.thestar.com/news/ city_hall/2010/12/02/war_on_the_car_is_over_ford_moves_transit_underground .html. Knowles, Richard Paul. 2004. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, Laura, and Kim Solga. 2009. “Building Utopia: Performance and the Fantasy of Urban Renewal in Contemporary Toronto.” Drama Review 53 (3): 37–53. McAuley, Gay. 2000. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McKinnie, M. 2007. City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pearson, Mike. 2010. Site-Specific Performance. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Slaughter, Graham. 2014a. “Remember Food Trucks in Parks Last Summer? One Man Is Still Paying $36,000 for the Failed Project.” Toronto Star, September 3. https:// www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/09/03/remember_food_trucks_in_parks_last _summer_one_man_is_still_paying_36000_for_the_failed_project.html. Slaughter, Graham. 2014b. “Toronto’s New Food Truck Alley Aspires to Be a Permanent Hub.” Toronto Star, July 8. https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2014/07/08/ torontos_new_food_truck_alley_aspires_to_be_a_permanent_hub.html. Spang, Rebecca L. 2000. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thrift, N. J. 2008. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Trubek, Amy B. 2008. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vigneault, Karine. 2009. “Terroirs as Spaces of Intergenerational Justice: Building Communities for the ‘Food Citizen.’” Politics and Culture, no. 2. http:// politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/terroirs-as-spaces-of-intergenerational-justice -building-communities-for-the-food-citizen/. Whybrow, Nicolas. 2010. Performance and the Contemporary City. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wickstrom, Maurya. 2006. Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions. New York: Routledge.

11  Why Local Regulations May Matter Less Than We Think: Street Vending in Chicago and in Durham, North Carolina Nina Martin

Gourmet food trucks roaming the streets of US cities have become a common sight over the last ten years and are an essential part of the food scene in places as diverse as New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Durham, North Carolina. Some city governments have responded by writing and adapting local ordinances to support the proliferation of street vending, while others have sought to rein it in (Hernández-López 2011; Dunn 2013; Martin 2014). Regulations vary in how trucks are inspected, where they are allowed to locate, and licensing fees. This paper compares the food truck industries in Chicago and Durham. These cities exemplify opposing approaches to regulating food trucks. The City of Durham was an early adopter of liberal policies (Moriarty 2011), whereas the City of Chicago was a latecomer with restrictive rules. Do these regulatory differences affect the way food trucks operate and the structure of the industry? What do the regulations of food trucks tell us about the geographic and social dynamics in each city? The research questions driving this chapter are these: How do regulations matter? Can regulation create greater equality among subsets of vendors or do inequalities get replicated in spite of regulatory variation? In most cities, the vending industry demonstrates a structure bifurcated between immigrant pushcart vendors and gourmet food trucks (see chapter 3). Scholars have demonstrated how the regulatory environment impacts the daily lives and economic practices of the two segments of street vendors (Crawford 1995; Eastwood 1988; Bromley 2000; Morales 2000; Bhowmik 2003; Hernández-López 2011; Dunn 2013). A common finding is that regulation matters a great deal, resulting in different local “ecologies” of food trucks. Much scholarship advocates for relaxing regulations in order to create better opportunities for immigrant street vendors. However, in examining Durham, a city that has permissive regulations, I find that loosening regulations is inadequate to create equal opportunity among different segments

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of vendors. My findings show more complexity in the impact of regulation, prompting an examination of the political economy of each city. Comparative research on the case study cities shows the limits of policy in shaping operating practices of vendors. In crucial respects, Chicago and Durham have a similar (but not identical) ecology of street vendors, in spite of regulatory differences. Both cities have a bifurcated industry structure, in which the two groups divide along lines of ethnic and racial relations, immigration status, neighborhood geography, use of technology, products sold, and discursive representations of the culture of food (see Burnett and Newman 2013). The Chicago case illustrates de jure bifurcation, in which the legal regulations governing the types of vending create many of the divisions between the groups. The Durham case is de facto bifurcation driven by the social and geographic divisions within the city. I begin this chapter by describing the political economy of each city. I then compare the regulatory environment governing food trucks, analyzing how it impacts the similarities and differences found in the industries. I conclude by exploring the bifurcated industry in both Chicago and Durham. The paper concludes with a consideration of the right to the city for populations divided by race, ethnicity, and immigration status. Durham, North Carolina: The Making of the Most “Creative” City in the United States Heralded as the “tastiest town in the South” (Disbrowe 2013) and the nation’s “most creative” city (Florida 2002), the recent accolades accrued by Durham, North Carolina, have put the city on foodies’ radars. Durham is best known as the home to Duke University and the Research Triangle Park (RTP) and as the deindustrializing backdrop of the film Bull Durham. But long before this, the industrialization of the “bull city” was driven by the tobacco and textile industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fervent entrepreneurialism of the Duke family, the Carr family, and (notable for the time period) an African American business class made Durham into a leading city in the South, drawing economic migrants from all over the region (Brown 2008). However, Durham’s undiversified economy left it vulnerable. Textiles lost out to global competition. Changing tastes and health concerns over the wisdom of smoking meant that factories were closing by the 1970s. The last tobacco operation closed in the 1990s, sparking the downward spiral of deindustrialization (Bluestone and Harrison 1982). Factories were abandoned, shops closed, and a significant percent of the population dispersed to the suburbs. Durham’s downtown

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felt abandoned, derelict, and dangerous. Until the 2000s, the sweet smell of tobacco still wafted through the streets of Durham, reminding residents of the economic prosperity that had once created a strong middle class. The decline of the central city and its economic base left a city in shambles, but adjacent neighborhoods and suburbs were not tied to the tobacco industry. Regional economic growth in industries such as education, health care, and technology had developed since at least the 1950s. The North Carolina state government sponsored the creation of the RTP in suburban Durham, just a ten-minute drive from the central city. The RTP now clusters employers such as IBM and Glaxo Smith Kline in a suburban office park environment. With a firm foothold in the global economy, the city and region are known for research and intellectual capital. This medium-sized city of 240,000 people has evolved into an underground darling of sorts. Lauded for its grit as much as its global capacity for innovation, the city’s praises are being sung in increasingly elite cultural arenas, such as theater, music, arts, dining, and nightlife. Durham’s rebranding is driven by the discourse of a city pulled back from the brink by strategic investment. Entrepreneurship is represented as the driving force behind the city’s growth, particularly among the new downtown businesses, including technology start-ups, restaurants, and bars (see American Underground, n.d.; Downtown Durham, Inc., n.d.). A creative class of residents and entrepreneurs has been attracted to the city by a palpable sense of pride in the city’s gritty character, renovated industrial architecture, and its DIY spirit. Along with inexpensive real estate, minimal business competition, and a cooperative environment, the city’s cultural industries have blossomed. However, not everyone has participated equally. Income and wage inequality are among the highest in the nation, and gentrification is displacing residents from central neighborhoods. Once known as the “capital of the Black middle class” (Frazier [1925] 1999, 333), African Americans and Latinos have struggled to find a place in the new Durham. An illustration of this issue can be seen in the transformation of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. This company was founded in 1898 in Durham by three African Americans to meet the insurance needs of the African American community. The company employed an all-black workforce. The building that once housed the employee cafeteria is now occupied by a café/lunch spot that serves inventive and relatively expensive food to an edgy, affluent clientele. The regeneration of Durham and growth of its food service sector provide the backdrop to explain the rise of food trucks in the city. In the wake

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of Durham’s deindustrialization, the city was a strong supporter of entrepreneurship and was willing to experiment with creative policies. It had little to lose. Lenient food truck regulations are one example. Food trucks started hitting Durham’s streets in the last years of the 2000s. Durham has seen an explosion of food trucks, selling all varieties of cuisine at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night dining. A Raleigh-based (adjacent to Durham) food truck, Phonomenal Dumplings, won the sixth season of The Great Food Truck Race, a show that airs on Food Network. The food truck industry is divided into two primary types of vendors. The first includes the gourmet food trucks, operating in the downtown, affluent neighborhoods and the RTP. The second includes the immigrant street vendors, who ply their trade in the low-income neighborhoods on the east side of the city. The differences are further discussed ahead. The Durham case study is based on an analysis of data collected from public databases, interviews with street vendors, GIS analysis of social media data, and a qualitative analysis of a series of in-depth interviews conducted with people working in the food services industry. Chicago: Gourmet Food Trucks vs. Pushcart Vendors Chicago and Durham have experienced similar trajectories of deindustrialization, job loss, and selective neighborhood decline, followed by economic growth in technology, education, finance, and the arts and by gentrification. Until the 1970s, Chicago’s economic strongholds were in steel, food processing, and manufacturing. The decimation of these industries, resulting from globalization, offshoring, and outsourcing, seemed to spell the end of Chicago’s economic strength, because only a slice of these industries remained globally competitive. Deindustrialization occasioned job losses, neighborhood neglect, and family conflict (Ranney 2002). Like many midwestern cities, Chicago was not given good odds of a rebound. A diversified economic base in Chicago, unlike in Durham, worked in the city’s favor. Some industries continued to flourish, such as commodity trading, which has a long history in the city. Universities, medical facilities, technology, and the success of entrepreneurs kept the city afloat, and a skilled labor force helped job growth at the high end of the wage scale. In addition, a ready immigrant workforce was also available for jobs in hotels, warehousing, construction, and cleaning. Postindustrial Chicago has followed the path of many global cities, with unequal wage growth (see, e.g., Doussard, Peck, and Theodore 2009; Massey 2007; Sassen 1991).

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Chicago’s central city and adjacent neighborhoods have rebounded in job creation and a (selectively) increasing real estate market. The real estate boom of the 2000s took hold of the city. Gentrification of formerly lowrent areas, such as Wicker Park, accompanied the development of entirely new neighborhoods, such as University Village. Commercial buildings were converted into residential condominiums because of the high demand in downtown areas. Further, central redevelopment projects have been numerous, epitomized by Millennium Park, which includes a Frank Gehry– designed band shell, sculptural pieces, and a winter ice rink. The benefits of urban growth have not been distributed equally, however, with continued economic and housing precarity for many. Social services formerly in the downtown have been decentralized, gentrification in many neighborhoods has displaced residents, and workers continue to struggle to find stable and quality employment (Theodore 2003; DeFilippis et al. 2009; Bernhardt et al., 2009; Doussard, Peck, and Theodore 2009; Theodore et al. 2010). Life in Chicago is increasingly a story of unequal development patterns, building on and extending existing patterns of racial and ethnic inequality. The ecology of street vending in Chicago is divided into two segments of vendors (Martin 2014). For decades, immigrant (mostly Mexican) street vendors in Chicago have operated in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods and markets, but the city government’s restrictive and punitive ordinance has criminalized their work. The ordinance prohibits the sale of prepared foods (only permitting the sale of merchandise and uncut fruits and vegetables) and limits the locations of carts, with several aldermen banning vending in their wards. Despite efforts at organizing vendors into a union, media campaigns, and political lobbying, immigrant vendors have been unable to gain traction with the city council, and proposals to rewrite the “peddler license” rules have always fallen flat. Vendors have had carts confiscated by police and been issued costly tickets (Brown 2012). The failure of the immigrant street vendors stands in marked contrast to the successful efforts of food truck entrepreneurs, who within only two years have done what the other vendors could not: The Chicago City Council passed a new ordinance in the summer of 2012 (updated in summer of 2013) allowing food trucks to sell food prepared in the trucks and in commissary kitchens (City of Chicago Mayor’s Press Office 2012; Crain’s Business Chicago 2012; Eng 2012; Guy, Fitzpatrick, and Morris 2012). Why was one group of vendors successful while the other failed? What can this case study tell us about the trajectory of urban development in Chicago? Although conflicts remain over the appropriate regulation of the different

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vendors, the creative contribution of one group is valued highly while the other is largely dismissed (Martin 2014). In contrast to the experience of immigrant street vendors, the gourmet food truck movement—led by a group of largely white, native-born (or second-generation), culinary school–trained chefs—has been met with excitement and openness on the part of many aldermen,1 who changed the ordinance to meet their needs. Food trucks are presented as hip and cool, contributing to the consumption practices of young professionals. They represent a vision of a creative (Florida 2002) and gentrified city. The related discourses and policy initiatives construct a particular vision of Chicago’s standing compared to its competitor cities in the United States and around the world. In order to be “creative,” Chicago must have the same food trucks that comparable cities have. The Chicago case study is based on research conducted between 2005 and 2013. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with street vendors, food truck operators, two street vendors’ organizations, a local chamber of commerce, and an alderman. Newspaper articles (from 1990 to 2012), websites, press releases, and blogs related to street vending, food trucks, and the debates over the ordinances were also analyzed for their discursive representation of the people, places, and practices of street vending. I now turn to a comparison of the regulations in each city and the resulting discursive representation and business practices. Food Truck Regulations in the Two Cities: Opposing Approaches Durham and Chicago are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to regulatory permissiveness toward street vending. Table 11.1 summarizes the main stipulations of the ordinances in each city. In addition to the regulations facing food truck operators in Chicago, there are separate regulations for street vendors selling from carts. Most notable are the location and time limits imposed on Chicago food trucks compared to the laissez-faire Durham regulations. Durham food trucks can operate on any city street at any time, so long as they are not in violation of the posted parking regulations. The Chicago ordinance, by contrast, encourages food trucks to locate within one of the thirty-five designated food truck stands (City of Chicago 2015). The strong restaurant lobby in Chicago went to battle with food trucks and aldermen over the competition that food trucks were thought to create for brick-and-mortar restaurants. They reached a compromise: Food trucks cannot operate within two hundred feet of the entrance to a restaurant. Trucks must have a GPS

Table 11.1 Comparison of ordinances in Durham, NC, and Chicago, IL

Ordinance stipulation

Durham County food trucks

City of Chicago food trucks

City of Chicago street peddler (does not include street vendors operating without license)

Permit required

Yes

Yes

Yes

Where vending is allowed

Allowed anywhere in the right-ofway and on private commercially zoned property.

Not permitted to park or stand within 200 feet of a restaurant, except from 12:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. Not allowed on privately owned vacant lots or a lot of a vacant building. Encouraged to use designated mobile food vehicle stands.

Varies by neighborhood. Not allowed in city parks.

Parking regulations

No restrictions other than normal parking rules. No designated stands where food trucks must locate.

Must move from place to place upon the public ways and shall not be operated at a fixed location. Two hours or the maximum permitted period for parking, whichever is lesser, in any one block.

N/A

Hours of operation

Not specified

Hours of operation are from 5:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., unless otherwise allowed from a mobile food vehicle stand.

Not specified

Permitting fees

Twenty-five-dollar application fee + seventy-five-dollar business licensing fee.

$1,000; two-year term.

One hundred dollars; two-year term. Fifty dollars for certain categories of vendors (e.g., veterans).

GPS tracking

No

Yes

No

On-site food preparation

Yes

Yes

No

Source: Adapted from the following: City of Chicago, n.d.; City of Chicago 2015; NC Department of Health and Human Services 2012; Durham County Department of Public Health 2015; and Suarez 2012.

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device, which creates a record of their movements to ensure compliance with the law. The cost of permits is insignificant in Durham at just twentyfive dollars. In Chicago, these permits are $1,000 for a two-year license, which might present a barrier to entry for potential entrepreneurs. Chicago’s de jure bifurcated street food industry is clearly reflected in the licensing of pushcart vendors. The key aspect of the legislation governing peddlers is that these vendors are not allowed to sell food that they have prepared in any way. Selling a whole watermelon, for instance, complies with the ordinance, whereas cutting the melon into small pieces and selling it in a bowl is a violation. In a society as racialized as that in the United States, we should not be surprised that the work of Latino street vendors would be criminalized (see Martin 2014). Visible on the streets, dressed modestly, and pushing carts that are often quite ramshackle, this group of people is told it does not belong on the streets of global Chicago, because it imports practices from the third world. The Latino vendors embody economic and social marginality that is not cool, hip, or creative. Without ever mentioning race, ethnicity, or immigration status directly, the following quote reveals the thinking that immigrants are dirty: “God forbid, somebody gets sick and dies of this [eating food bought from a vendor], I’m going to be the guy who everyone says, ‘He let this happen in my community’” (Deb Mell, quoted in Bach 1999). This is in line with the finding of Fiske and Lee (Lee and Fiske 2006; Fiske 2012), who have demonstrated in their work on stereotypes of different groups that undocumented immigrants are rated the lowest in terms of competence and warmth compared to all other immigrant groups. The primary reason for writing a new ordinance allowing food trucks was fear that Chicago would be left behind in the global race to be a foodie city. Scott Waguespack, alderman of the Thirty-Second Ward (quoted in Vettel 2012), stressed how those outside the city view the situation: “There is great excitement out there [for food trucks] and around the U.S. People who visit here, and kind of look at Chicago as the culinary mecca and saying, ‘Hey, this is that one piece of culinary culture that they’re missing, and they are finally putting the last piece in.’” Alderman Tom Tunney also emphasized innovation: “Food trucks are a promising trend nationwide. I am proud ... to support this innovative industry alongside our city’s worldrenown restaurants” (quoted in City of Chicago Mayor’s Press Office 2012). Global status, creativity, and entrepreneurship are the buzzwords surrounding food trucks—in stark contrast to how pushcart vendors are described. Ironically, the immigrant vendors, drawn from every corner of the world, are a more obvious example of Chicago’s global reach.

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In summary, Durham’s ordinance allows for relatively easy entrance with minimal regulations and does not distinguish between different kinds of vendors (Moriarty 2011). Chicago’s ordinances, however, apply different sets of rules to food trucks and pushcarts, and pushcart vendors find it difficult to comply with the strict ordinance. The local government has supported food truck operators, writing a new ordinance to meet their objectives. However, it should be noted that the ordinance governing food trucks is still restrictive compared to those of Durham and many other cities. Culture of Food and Discursive Representations of the Gourmet and the Traditional The bifurcated industry structure in Durham and Chicago is, in part, created by the idea that cultural differences exist between native-born, affluent residents and immigrant residents. Affluent customers are constructed as wanting creative and cosmopolitan cuisine, whereas immigrant customers are constructed as wanting traditional cuisine. This plays into the larger construction of immigrants as backward, maintaining thirdworld customs, and unable to assimilate into American society (see Martin 2014). Tradition is static, whereas cosmopolitan is dynamic (Massey 2007). Affluent customers are represented as cutting-edge and pushing boundaries. The discursive representation of different consumers having different tastes limits the literal boundaries of vendors, segregating vendors to the neighborhoods where these contrasting cultural groups reside, as I demonstrate ahead. Food is an essential aspect of cultural identity, and as such all food trucks reflect a particular cultural identity at work in a visible setting (see chapter 1). However, consumption practices are about more than culture—and about more than simply producing and consuming goods. Production and consumption practices in urban space are also about the ability of different segments of the population to participate in the material and discursive meaning of urban space. In the words of Sharon Zukin (2004, 284): “The debate about which kinds of goods and stores belong on the street is also a debate about who belongs in the city.” Applied to street vending, Zukin’s concept shows how similar economic practices of different groups of vendors are given differential treatment by local states. Further, promotion of cultural strategies has worrying consequences for the rights of different groups of citizens to participate in the life of the city, sometimes resulting in revanchist urbanism (Smith 1996). The neoliberal

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city is not only about promoting certain kinds of culture and creativity but also about repressing others (Zukin 1995; Atkinson 2003; Catungal, Leslie, and Hii 2009; Leslie and Catungal 2012). Processes of exclusion are at work in the same cultural strategies that promote diversity, sharing, and tolerance. Consumption practices are then not simply about producing and consuming goods but about the ability of different segments of the population to participate in this creation of the material and symbolic meanings of urban space and to assert their right to the city. Business Practices in a Bifurcated Industry Within the universe of people selling food on the streets, there is considerable variation in business practices, type of food sold, and in the characteristics of people selling food. Despite differences in regulatory frameworks in Chicago and Durham, there are similar outcomes among the segments of vendors in each city, in terms of use of technology, products sold, and neighborhood locations. Policy partly shapes local outcomes, but the similarly bifurcated structure points to the importance of factors other than policy in shaping industry structure. Products Sold: Traditional vs. Gourmet  One category of food trucks can be labeled gourmet, selling food that appeals to foodies. These food trucks use high-quality ingredients and often bring together unlikely combinations of cuisines. Menu items may be adapted from the current trends in high-priced restaurants. For example, a Korean truck in Durham draws on Mexican flavors: a filling of Korean bulgogi beef on a tortilla, with common Mexican toppings like onions and cilantro and with a dash of hot sauce and a smattering of kimchi. Immigrant food trucks in Durham and pushcart vendors in Chicago tend to sell food that is more authentic to their home country. This food has little deviation from the kind of food sold on the streets or in restaurants of the home country; therefore, authentic may be both celebrated and simultaneously represented as static. For example, in the case of authentic Mexican street food, a vendor would sell tacos filled with only meat and garnished with cilantro and onion. However, there is creativity among immigrant vendors. They work to please their regular customers, sometimes deviating from traditional recipes to meet the tastes of their clientele. The products sold raise questions of cultural appropriation. There are differing opinions on whether some food trucks are selectively using the cuisines of other groups for economic gain without respecting how this food reflects cultural identity. Or, some ask, are food truck chefs creatively

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reinventing food for curious and tolerant customers who wish to expand their knowledge of cultural identities? Geography: City Center and Gentrified Neighborhoods vs. Immigrant Neighborhoods  Durham’s gourmet food trucks cluster in two key locations.2 The first is the suburban office park RTP, serving the lunch trade. The second is in neighborhoods adjacent to the city center, primarily for dinner and late-night customers—in particular, the North Durham neighborhood, nicknamed the DIY district. This name celebrates the committed and entrepreneurial nature of the residents (many of them new) who created a retail nexus of bars, restaurants, a coffee shop, and a microbrewery, as well as renovating homes. Durham and its environs (i.e., the college towns Chapel Hill and Raleigh) also have numerous food truck rodeos (in which several food trucks gather in a designated area), and food trucks are often invited to arts festivals and other festival gatherings. A new trend is food trucks located at bars, as several bars have parking lots and outdoor seating areas that can accommodate a food truck. Bars use food trucks as a competitive advantage, drawing in thirsty and hungry customers. The immigrant food trucks in Durham occupy the mixed immigrant and African American neighborhoods on the east and northeast sides of the city. These locations are driven by access to the target market of immigrants, mostly Mexican, who enjoy a taste of home. Some of this population has been displaced from Durham’s DIY and central neighborhoods as processes of development and gentrification have raised rents. Like the issue of gentrification, the locations of the immigrant food trucks raise questions about the distribution of the benefits of a redeveloping city. Immigrant entrepreneurs have not gained access to the potentially lucrative market of the central neighborhoods. Ahead, I consider why this is and the potential benefits of equality of opportunity in the city. In Chicago, there is also a clear spatial division of street vendors. Immigrant vendors are clustered in immigrant neighborhoods, reflecting Chicago’s long-standing division of neighborhoods along racial/ethnic/ immigration status lines. Their work is somewhat tolerated by police and government officials, and they are less likely to face a crackdown in these areas. The food truck stands are all in downtown and gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods. Government policy, therefore, replicates the city’s existing neighborhood divisions, promoting gourmet food trucks in affluent areas and limiting pushcart vendors to low-income neighborhoods.

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Use of Technology and Locational Marketing: Twitter vs. Word of Mouth and Happenstance  By definition, food trucks and street vendors are mobile, which presents a challenge not faced by brick-and-mortar businesses: How will our customers find us? Social media presents one solution. In particular, Facebook and Twitter allow vendors to freely communicate with their customers about their locations and menu offerings. Twitter in particular is a favored tool of vendors because of the ease of instant communication and ability to alert those who subscribe to the Twitter feeds of their favorite trucks. Although the benefit of social media for vendors is clear (see Wessel 2012), I find that only a selection of vendors use these valuable tools. In Durham, the differential use of technology is split along lines of language, which can be inferred (to some degree) to correspond to immigration status. There were 102 licensed food trucks in Durham County in 2015. From the list of licensed vendors, we conducted searches for all of them to find their Internet presence, in the form of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and/or their own websites. The finding for Twitter represents a clear trend among the use of social media. We found that forty-eight of 102 vendors have no Twitter accounts at all, whereas fifty-four use Twitter regularly. Thirty-two of the forty-eight without Twitter have Spanish-language names. Of the fifty-four that use Twitter, only three have Spanish-language names. Admittedly, this is a limited measure, but it does reflect the bifurcated industry structure. Similarly, in Chicago, almost all food trucks use social media, whereas social media use is nonexistent among pushcart vendors. Do Policy Differences Matter for Equity? Food trucks and street vending practices provide a lens into patterns of urban development and broader questions related to equity among social groups. How does this use of urban space both reflect and create the structural inequalities around race, ethnicity, immigration status, and class that have long characterized urban life in the United States? I have shown how local ordinances influence, or fail to influence, the operational decisions of food truck owners and pushcart vendors. The main finding of this chapter is that a similarly bifurcated street food industry exists in both Chicago and Durham, despite notable differences in the cities’ regulatory environments. What does this tell us about how we should evaluate the regulations in each city? The most obvious injustice that stems from the ordinances is the harsh regulation of Chicago’s pushcart vendors. Change in Chicago’s policy is

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a must to bring the immigrant street vendors into legal status and allow them to operate without fear of police harassment and excessive fines. The selling practices of pushcart vendors are not significantly different from those of gourmet food trucks, and yet these immigrant vendors are discursively represented as a health threat, creating traffic accidents, and importing practices from the third world (see Martin 2014). Chicago elites market the city as creative and global, and local leaders have embraced food trucks as contributing to the city’s appeal as a hip destination with a strong food culture. This narrative of Chicago holds no place for the immigrant vendors who, ironically, are a powerful symbol of Chicago’s global connections. On a practical note, legalizing pushcarts would benefit the public, because they would then be subject to health inspection and enforcement. There is an active movement of street vendors demanding change, and they recently gained some notice with the city council. They submitted a proposed ordinance and were promised debate by the city council, though as of the time of writing (2017) it has not come up for debate or vote. Legalization of Chicago’s pushcarts would be a huge victory for these entrepreneurs, reducing their fear and vulnerability and giving recognition to their contributions to neighborhood character. However, the Durham case reveals that policy change alone does not lead to similar business practices among vendors and equality of opportunity. For example, we would be unlikely to see pushcart vendors move out of immigrant neighborhoods into the central city or affluent neighborhoods. They would likely not be able to embrace the social media that aid in the success of food trucks. Street vendors have not had access to the training or restaurant experience that gourmet vendors have had. The structural inequalities of the food service industry, in which immigrants are relegated to preparation, dishwashing, and bussing, limit opportunities for immigrant vendors to gain the experience and knowledge to compete with gourmet food trucks. Policy regulating street vending will have no impact on this issue that contributes to inequality. The replication of existing neighborhood inequalities is reflected in the practices of these small-scale entrepreneurs (Burnett and Newman 2013). Not everyone gets to enjoy the renaissance of the cities; the right to participate in economic revitalization is unequally distributed among groups of people, largely defined by racial, ethnic, and neighborhood group membership. The benefits of economic growth are not infused into all neighborhoods. Pushcart vendors in Chicago and immigrant food trucks in Durham are limited to neighborhoods that have not participated in the

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cities’ growth. In addition, the discourse describing each city’s regeneration does not include such street vendors. There is a black spot in the recognition of these producers and their contribution to the city. Policy change can be effective (see Vallianatos 2014), but it is also a limited means to create greater social justice among vendors. Understanding the limits of policy can push our discussion of street vending into different arenas. Although local regulation of street vendors is crucial for equity, it is only one component. We must still struggle with racial and cultural stereotypes, going so far as to challenge cultural constructions of traditional associated with immigrants and cosmopolitanism associated with the affluent. We must find ways to bridge the barriers between low-income neighborhoods and affluent neighborhoods and central cities. We must continue to support national-level policies that bolster immigrants’ rights. Of course, these are enormous issues. However, even a relatively small and local economic practice, such as street vending, is intimately linked to these policy concerns. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Harper Ragin for valuable research assistance and deep local knowledge of Durham and its food services industry. Sarah Stephens diligently and patiently collected data and created maps and also shared local knowledge of food deserts and food retail establishments. Notes 1.  The City of Chicago is a mayoral system, with the city divided into fifty wards, each represented in the city council by a single alderman elected by the residents of the ward to a four-year term. 2.  We use the tweets regarding time and location sent by food trucks in Durham to map where food trucks located. We chose the week of May 27 to June 3, 2015, to track all tweets and put them into a geographic information system. This week was assumed to be representative of a week in the summer, when food trucks are at their busiest. The weather was sunny and warm all week, and there were no special festivals that, although interesting to study, would have meant that the week was not representative of regular work practices. To locate food trucks without twitter or a website, we had to pursue different methods. We drove around the main commercial streets in downtown and adjacent neighborhoods and known immigrant neighborhoods looking for the trucks. We also mapped the commissary locations of where food trucks prepare their food,

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which is a stipulation of the regulations that all food be prepared in a certified commissary.

References American Underground. n.d. http://americanunderground.com/. Atkinson, R. 2003. “Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Space.” Urban Studies 40:1829–1843. Bach, A. 1999. “Mell Seeks Rules for Pushcarts.” Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1. Bernhardt, A., Ruth Milkman, Nik Theodore, Douglas Heckathorn, Mirabai Auer, James DeFilippis, Ana Luz Gonzalez, Victor Narro, Jason Perelshteyn, Diana Polson, and Michael Spiller. 2009. “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violation of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities.” http://web.archive.org/web/ 20141102153212/http://www.nelp.org/page/-/brokenlaws/BrokenLawsReport2009 .pdf?nocdn=1. Bhowmik, S. K. 2003. “National Policy for Street Vendors.” Economic and Political Weekly 38 (16): 1543–1546. Bluestone, B., and B. Harrison. 1982. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books. Bromley, R. 2000. “Street Vending and Public Policy: A Global Review.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20:1–29. Brown, L. 2008. Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Brown, M. 2012. “Where Have All the Food Trucks Gone? Vendors Say Chicago Police Cracking Down.” Chicago Sun-Times, April 9. Burnett, L. L., and K. Newman. 2013. “Street Food and Vibrant Urban Spaces.” Local Environment 18 (2): 233–248. Catungal, J. P., D. Leslie, and Y. Hii. 2009. “Geographies of Displacement in the Creative City: The Case of Liberty Village, Toronto.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) 46 (5–6): 1095–1114. City of Chicago. 2015. “Food Truck Stands Map: Mobile Food Vehicle Stand Locations in Chicago for Licensed Operators.” https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/ dam/city/depts/bacp/general/Mobile_Food_Truck_Stand_Map-V_04_28_2015.pdf. City of Chicago. n.d. “Mobile Food Vendor Licenses.” https://www.cityofchicago.org/ city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/mobile_food_vendorlicenses.html.

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City of Chicago Mayor’s Press Office. 2012. “City Council Approves Mobile Food Ordinance to Expand Food Truck Industry across Chicago.” Press release, Chicago Office of the Mayor, Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. Crain’s Business Chicago. 2012. “City Council Passes Food Truck Law.” Crain’s Chicago Business, July 25. http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120725/BLOGS08/ 120729853/citycouncil-passes-food-truck-law#. Crawford, M. 1995. “Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over Public Space in Los Angeles.” Journal of Architectural Education 49 (1): 4–9. DeFilippis, J., Nina Martin, Annette Bernhardt, and Siobhán McGrath. 2009. “On the Character and Organization of Unregulated Work in the Cities of the United States.” Urban Geography 30 (1): 63–90. Disbrowe, P. 2013. “The South’s Tastiest Town: Durham, NC.” Southern Living. http://www.southernliving.com/travel/tastiest-town-durham-north-carolina. Doussard, M., J. Peck, and N. Theodore. 2009. “After Deindustrialization: Uneven Growth and Economic Inequality in ‘Postindustrial’ Chicago.” Economic Geography 85 (2): 183–207. Downtown Durham, Inc. n.d. http://downtowndurham.com/. Dunn, K. 2013. “Hucksters and Trucksters: Criminalization and gentrification in New York City’s street vending industry.” PhD diss., City University of New York, Department of Sociology. Durham County Department of Public Health. 2015. “Plan Review Application for Mobile Food Units and Pushcarts.” http://dconc.gov/home/showdocument?id=4384. Eastwood, C. 1988 “A Study of the Regulation of Chicago’s Street Vendors.” PhD diss., Public Policy Analysis, University of Illinois at Chicago. Eng, M. 2012. “Food Truck Ordinance Savory to Some, Sour to Others.” Chicago Tribune, July 9. Fiske, S. T. 2012. “Managing Ambivalent Prejudices: Smart-but-Cold and Warm-butDumb Stereotypes.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 639:33–48. Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Frazier, E. F. [1925] 1999. “Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class.” In The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, 333–340. New York: Touchstone. Guy, S., L. Fitzpatrick, and E. Morris. 2012. “Emanuel’s Food Truck Ordinance Tasty to Some, Sour for Others.” Chicago Sun-Times, June 26.

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Hernández-López, E. 2011. “L.A.’s Taco Truck Wars: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests.” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 43 (1): 233–268. Lee, T. L., and S. T. Fiske. 2006. “Not an Outgroup, Not Yet an Ingroup: Immigrants in the Stereotype Content Model.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 30:751–768. Leslie, D., and J. P. Catungal. 2012. “Social Justice and the Creative City: Class, Gender and Racial Inequalities.” Geography Compass 6 (3): 111–122. Martin, N. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks, and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” IJURR 38 (5): 1867–1883. Massey, D. 2007. World City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morales, A. 2000. “Peddling Policy: Street Vending in Historical and Contemporary Context.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20:76–98. Moriarty, L. 2011. “An Empirical Study of Emergence and Policy Implications of the Food Truck Industry in the Research Triangle Region.” Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of City and Regional Planning. NC Department of Health and Human Services. 2012. “Environmental Health Section.” http://ehs.ncpublichealth.com. Ranney, D. 2002. Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sassen, S. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Suarez, J. 2012. “Food Truck Regulations: A Breakdown.” Raleigh Public Record, July 20. http://raleighpublicrecord.org/news/2012/07/20/food-truck-regulations-a -breakdown/. Theodore, N. 2003. “Political Economies of Day Labour: Regulation and Restructuring of Chicago’s Contingent Labor Markets.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) 40 (9): 1811–1828. Theodore, N., M. Auer, R. Hollon, and S. Morales-Mirque. 2010. Unregulated Work in Chicago: The Breakdown of Workplace Protections in the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago. Vallianatos, M. 2014. “A More Delicious City: How to Legalize Street Foods.” In The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor, edited by Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 209–226. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Vettel, P. 2012. “Chicago’s Food-truck Ordinance Introduced.” Chicago Tribune, July 28. Wessel, G. 2012. “From Place to Nonplace: A Case Study of Social Media and Contemporary Food Trucks.” Journal of Urban Design 17 (4): 511–531. Zukin, S. 1995. The Culture of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Zukin, S. 2004. Points of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York: Routledge.

12  Breach, Bridgehead, or Trojan Horse? An Exploration of the Role of Food Trucks in Montreal’s Changing Foodscape Alan Nash

After a ban on food trucks that lasted almost seventy years, in 2013 the Canadian city of Montreal inaugurated a two-year pilot program that permitted approximately thirty trucks back onto its streets (the exact number being determined by how many trucks successfully gained the approval of the city’s permit process). Long criticized by many of its citizens who had regarded the ban as out of step with the city’s view of itself as a culinary destination in North America, critics were delighted to hear that trucks were to be licensed by a city planning committee partly based on their contribution to Montreal’s “gastronomic landscape.” Beyond keeping up with other cities, there are many reasons that food trucks might be a valuable addition. Scholars have argued from an economic perspective that, as unsightly as such trucks can be, as a part of an informal urban economy they can provide many newcomers to the city with much needed sources of employment. An alternative view, and one particularly germane to Montreal’s pilot scheme, is that because the latest fashion among food trucks in North American cities has been to highlight the gastronomic experience of urban life, this has reduced the trucks’ role as both a source of cheap street food and inexpensive opportunities for entry-level entrepreneurship; such fashions tend to require more expensive menus, while at the same time city regulations limit their number and thus employment potential. The removal of such controls, a third and more neoliberal approach argues, would allow market forces to be the only factors determining a food truck’s success and, through competition between food trucks and other types of catering establishments, the quality and cost of almost all restaurant meals served throughout the city. For Montrealers, the pilot provides an opportunity to judge the various merits of these viewpoints and the material this chapter uses to evaluate that experience. Thus, after a survey of the scholarly literature on the achievements and challenges posed by food trucks in North American cities,

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this chapter will consider the Montreal pilot through an examination of its press coverage, the stated intentions of the truck operators themselves, and an analysis of the reactions of a group of their customers. The chapter concludes by suggesting that, from the perspective of the mayor’s office, the introduction of food trucks onto Montreal’s streets could be considered a qualified success because it has augmented the city’s gastronomic landscape. Certainly, it is clear from the way the city has designed the program that its achievements will most likely benefit only those we might describe as foodies in the short term, whereas in the long term its success ultimately lies in the reinforcement of the city as a center of consumption, rather than in directly meeting the economic needs of those who have traditionally depended on food trucks—either as a source of employment or a source of cheaper food. As the chapters in this text indicate, the study of food trucks requires a multidisciplinary perspective. In this regard, my own theoretical framework and methodological approach has been aided by my formal training as a geographer and by a research career that has taken me from the study of entrepreneur immigration and public policy to a specific interest in restaurants as important sites of changing patterns of social activity. Thus, for example, when defining the concept of social justice for the purposes of this study, I recognize its core as “the distribution of valued goods and necessary burdens” according to a range of goals of public policy, such as equity, equality, or fairness (Schmidt 2001, 14,338). However, I also recognize, following David Harvey’s classic Social Justice and the City (1973), that such ideas of justice are contingent on space (Harvey 1973; Smith 1994; Proctor 1998). In other words, the economic experience of food trucks will vary according to where they are located in the city, their freedom to move, and their access to types of places (public or private). Not only are they affected by their locations, food trucks may in turn affect their locations (e.g., as “magical urbanism on four wheels,” creators of new community spaces, or through gentrification, as Vallianatos [chapter 4], Wood, Clark, and French [chapter 14], and Agyeman, Matthews, and Sobel [chapter 16] have shown). Certainly, research reported by Lemon (chapter 9) and Wessel (chapter 2) elsewhere in this collection amply illustrates that a spatial perspective can make a useful contribution to the study of food trucks. Moreover, as this study of Montreal shows, when allied with empirical insights from more applied fields—such as immigrant entrepreneurship and restaurant studies—a sensitivity for place may yield a more rounded

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concern for social justice in the future crafting of food truck policies and regulations. Literature Review The existing academic literature on the role of food trucks in North America has organized itself around three main hypotheses. The first, a “traditional” view that sees food trucks as part of an informal economy, has been recently challenged by two alternative hypotheses that suggest food trucks have now either “breached” such traditions by catering only to a limited group of “foodies,” or alternatively act in what this chapter calls a “bridgehead” capacity to introduce new cuisines to everyone on the street. In this debate, it is important to note that the first, or “traditional,” view has focused on the part food trucks (defined here as mobile street vendors selling food from trucks) have played as a means for new immigrants to find employment. It is suggested that food trucks serve as an important part of an often-informal economy that may act as a stepladder for the recruitment of newcomers into the wider urban economy (Raijman and Tienda 2000; Lucan et al. 2013). These developments are not all one-way, and work has shown how food trucks have served to change the city through the introduction of new cuisines; the provision of cheaper meal alternatives for its working population; or by taking food “out on the streets,” challenging the anonymity of the city with the public performance of eating. This first and more traditional approach has viewed food trucks as agents of economic and cultural accommodation (Bhimji 2010; Hernández-López 2011). Of the cities discussed in this text, perhaps central Portland—at least insofar as the city’s planners themselves report—most exemplifies the perceived benefits of “food cartology” (see chapter 15). An alternative view, in which food trucks are essentially a divisive force, has been gaining traction in the most recent literature on the topic (Martin 2014). Of course, food trucks have often promoted opposition—from restaurant owners and city regulators—but a breach with the more traditional approach is becoming obvious in how food trucks are now viewed. In part a response to a trend toward more haute cuisine menus among young urban professionals, in part an outcome of social networking technologies (such as Twitter), a new breed of food trucks serving expensive meals to a hip, affluent clientele has appeared in cities as various as Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (Wessel 2012; Martin 2014; Brindley 2015). In this view, food trucks do not serve the interests of poor, working-class immigrants (who may not even be able to afford the high entry cost to run the

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trucks); rather, they are part of a “hospitable city” agenda that promotes economic consumption within the city to counteract its long-term loss as a base of manufacturing (Bell 2007). The city is no longer a site of production but of consumption, and to the extent that gentrification, “bring your own wine” restaurants, or hip food trucks can commodify that urban experience, so much the better (Gottlieb 2015). In this book, Hanser’s (chapter 7) analysis of Vancouver’s recent experiences with food trucks captures much of the optimism of this approach. Certainly, the fact that traditional food trucks tend to be overlooked as an example of the type of cultural entrepreneurship that Richard Florida’s notion of the creative city thrives upon in favor of the gourmet truck points to the distinction that has now developed in expectations between the approaches—a difference endorsed by those cities such as Chicago that have long shunned food trucks but now permit their gourmet-style alternative. However, this newer generation of food trucks may be less of a breach with tradition than it appears. This is because the ability of such trucks to bring the latest food ideas to the street offers—in one scholar’s eyes, at least—the potential to democratize the city’s habits by making gourmetinspired food available to all (Caldwell 2012). Although we might feel inhibited to enter an exclusive restaurant to try haute cuisine, the street is a great leveler, and though some have complained that the average prices of gourmet food trucks are higher than those of traditional hot dog stands, no one is excluded from sampling such fare. The role of the public place in introducing new foods and preparations to a wider audience has long been known (Ozersky 2008), and in this sense we may view food trucks as a bridgehead though which different cuisines can establish themselves in the urban milieu. To what extent these ideas we call here the “bridgehead thesis” provides a viable alternative explanation for the impact of food trucks—especially the new generation of gourmet trucks more at ease in the virtual realms of social media—is an issue that needs to be investigated. The city of Montreal, the largest city in the Canadian province of Quebec, is a useful example for study in this respect. Its combination of a large immigrant population and well-developed metropolitan economy (Germain and Rose 2000), with tastes drawn from many parts of the world in a francophone setting, has given rise to a city that prides itself on its vibrant food scene (Nash 2009; Détolle, Jennings, and Nash 2016). The latest research on food trucks reaches beyond the three broad hypotheses discussed here (the “traditional,” the “breach,” and the “bridgehead” hypotheses) to draw on the latest debates about the benefits of a

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neoliberal approach to the regulation of activities in cities, a discussion nicely framed by Newman and Newman’s (chapter 13) examination of Vancouver’s recent use of food trucks to aid its “place-branding” strategies. In this model, public spaces are open to all, and the only sanction is the ultimate one of any free marketplace—competition—while the filter of the marketplace would determine the fate of the less successful. Food trucks would find their niche in such an economy—either by providing cheap food quickly or more gourmet-style meals in street festival settings—while established restaurants, because they cater to a different market, would not be threatened. Neoliberal ideas, especially those concerning the removal of regulation, can be seen in the press coverage around Montreal’s experiment with food trucks (Charlebois 2013; Hamilton 2013). According to one commentator, uncontrolled access to the street would save red tape and money, and because Montreal’s reputation for cuisine has been achieved with “a mainly free-market supply of restaurants,” there is no reason to think that this same process would not “show up in the street” (Watson 2013). One recent report from the Montreal Economic Institute makes the argument that “according to one study, the removal of burdensome regulations in Chicago would lead to job creation and increased economic activity” and attempts to estimate the effects of such liberalization on Montreal. The analysis, reported in the Montreal Gazette, claims that “a lighter regulatory touch here” toward food trucks “could lead to some 2,000 jobs created, an increase of from $12 million to $50 million in total annual sales, and a corresponding increase of from $700,000 to $2.5 million in new local sales tax revenues” (Geloso and Guénette 2016). Lost in such discussion is the fact that to remain competitive in such a landscape, food truck operators would be unable to charge more than minimal prices; because of this, such an approach to food trucks is one that ultimately has far more to do with the concerns of a wider economy than with meeting individual operators’ hope of social justice. Montreal’s experiment offers an opportunity to examine the validity of these different views. The lack of traditional food trucks for over seventy years means the impact of gourmet-style trucks is neither obscured by previous truck activities nor influenced by the past, and thus its role as a catalyst can be examined. In the words of the literature reviewed previously, are the trucks creating a complete breach with the city’s existing foodscape, are they serving to create a bridgehead to a newer gastronomic landscape, or are they simply pawns in a wider economic strategy?

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Historical Background The demise of the traditional food truck in Montreal dates to 1947. From then on, the City of Montreal began to heavily regulate its chip wagons, hot dog stands, and even mobile ice cream vendors on the grounds that they unfairly competed with small businesses (Montreal Gazette 2012; Peritz 2013a; Woods 2013). Its drive against food trucks was spearheaded by Jean Drapeau, who became mayor in 1954 and who found them to be both undignified and unsanitary (Sparks 2013). By the 1960s, trucks were completely banned as Drapeau readied the city for Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics. For the next fifty years or so, “the city refused to reconsider that decision to the harm of would-be entrepreneurs and consumers,” despite efforts in 1997 and 2002 by opposition parties to lift the ban (Geloso 2012; Bruemmer 2013a; Sparks 2013). Two reflections on the city’s ban are in order here. First, Drapeau’s actions have since been criticized, but it should be noted that Montreal was not the only North American city to ban street vending. For example, as discussed in more detail elsewhere in this text (see chapters 2, 3, and 5), New York City has long wrestled with removing pushcarts from its streets. Perhaps the key result of such action was that, since “peddling was no longer a viable alternative to welfare or unemployment” (Wasserman 2009, 163), New York could no longer provide the economic opportunities—however individually precarious—that this type of mobile food vending had once offered. Second, given what has been said about the opportunities that traditional trucks offer newcomers, immigrants, and those on low incomes—the first of the hypotheses advanced in the earlier literature review—it is also instructive to consider how Drapeau’s 1947 ban might have affected the ability of these groups to support both themselves and their families. Interestingly, the pertinent research on this topic clearly indicates that a range of viable alternatives to mobile street vending existed in Montreal and that these alternatives have continued to provide access to employment for lowincome groups. Thus, in her account of Montreal’s many petits restaurants (counters selling essential food items and cigarettes), Sylvie Taschereau recently described how their reliance on unpaid family labor has meant that “until quite late in the twentieth century, opening a food counter required very little capital.” She concludes that “for many newcomers [to Montreal], the retail store remains a means of entry into the labor market” (Taschereau 2005, 236, 254). In a similar vein, other work has pointed to the city’s large restaurant sector as one several avenues by which many

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immigrants and newcomers to the city find opportunities either to create their own businesses (Nash 1987, 2009) or quickly to gain access to often underpaid and unregulated employment that does not require a knowledge of English or French (Hiebert and Pendukar 2003, Piché et al. 2002). By August 2012, Montreal’s official antipathy toward food trucks was shifting. Aware that cities such as New York had now authorized curbside food trucks, Montreal’s Commission on Economic Development and Housing began to yield to public pressure for change. Many councilors were already in favor of an end to the ban, “to bring Montreal to the same level as the other greatest cities of the world that all have street food” (Bruemmer 2013a), and the vice-chair of the commission was reported in favor of a positive experiment in what he called “street meat,” despite continued opposition from the Association des Restaurateurs du Québec (ARQ, the provincial restaurant owners’ association of 4,400 members), which feared increased competition (Cardwell 2012; Woods 2013). In April 2013, the mayor announced not only an end to the city’s ban on street food but the goal “to carve out a niche for unique street food à la montrealaise,” adding that “it was time Montreal joined the ranks of great cities worldwide that allow the sale of street food” (Bruemmer 2013b). In the wake of this announcement, a pilot project was inaugurated to last until November 3, 2013, and a total of twenty-seven food trucks were allowed to set up at nine specified locations across the city over the course of three shifts per day (Chesterman 2013a; Sparks 2013). Renewed in 2014, when thirty trucks were licensed for fourteen locations across the city (Montreal Gazette 2014), the project was made permanent in early 2015, when thirtythree trucks were licensed for the summer (Ville de Montréal 2015). A food truck licensed under the terms of this experiment had to meet certain basic conditions: To reduce the threat of competition, the truck had to be at least 60 meters from existing restaurants; to meet hygiene regulations, most of its food preparation had to be handled offsite in a production kitchen; and to meet food safety standards, the truck could not use prepackaged or factory-produced foodstuffs (Bruemmer 2013b; Charlebois 2013; Chesterman 2013b; Peritz 2013b; Shingler 2013). More interestingly, the city also required that trucks approved for the project be approved by a city committee (comprised of a nutritionist, a chef, a wine critic, two bureaucrats, and two representatives of local development agencies) on the basis of their “added value to the city’s gastronomic landscape”—a quality to be determined by the creativity and originality of the truck’s proposed menu and its ability to stand out from the fast food already on offer downtown (Hamilton 2013).

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In view of the main hypotheses set out earlier, it is instructive to note that the city’s regulations governing the licensing of food trucks are not at all conducive to new immigrants or newcomers finding their own opportunities (one of the attractions of the traditional food truck). In addition to the obvious costs of establishing a food truck business (an issue discussed in more detail ahead), the city’s requirement that the trucks be paired with an existing restaurant has—in its implementation— been taken to mean owned by, a requirement that effectively prohibits the low entry cost for newcomers who cannot afford to first start a brick-and-mortar restaurant before starting a food truck. The small scale of the project is also clearly indicative of its intentions. With a limited number of permitted locations, Montreal’s new food trucks cannot offer major new opportunities for the city to provide greater social justice in employment terms. Instead, the small number of spaces and their locations (away from existing restaurants and mostly in tourist spots) is a manifestation of the city’s intention to include food trucks in its wider campaign to leverage Montreal’s gastronomic attraction as a means of economic development. In these ways, Montreal’s new food trucks clearly make a breach with more traditional types of mobile street food vending. The extent to which this innovation is one that enriches the city’s culinary traditions for all its citizens (our bridgehead thesis) or is a boutique-type attraction for tourists and foodies (as the literature review has suggested as an alternative) will be examined ahead. “There Are Still Issues to Consider”: Media’s Analysis of the Project In view of the hypotheses raised in the literature about food trucks, the most telling press comments were raised by the Montreal Gazette’s food critics. On the day the pilot was launched, Sarah Musgrave remarked that “there are still issues to consider” (Musgrave 2013). By asking “if the permit process supports the really deserving grassroots entrepreneurs,” Musgrave raised some fundamental questions about the purpose of the program itself that were then addressed in more detail later in the year by Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at the University of Guelph’s College of Management and Economics. In the provocative conclusion to his December 2013 opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen, he suggests “the entire project’s underlying objective involves not increasing competition for current restaurants,” because its “licensing strategy was obviously instituted to serve a pre-existing business environment” (Charlebois 2013). Agreeing that “normally” food trucks are a business model that “offers a more

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accessible path to business ownership for aspiring restaurateurs who are often unable to find enough capital to finance a brick-and-mortar storefront,” Charlebois finds that “the program in Montreal is anything but open to the ambitious entrepreneur” because “granting licenses to trucks who intend to only partner with well-established restaurants is a form of capitalist discrimination” that only competition can prevent. Charlebois concludes, “Understandably, restaurants don’t like competition, but our economy needs it, and consumers want it for better variety and prices” (Charlebois 2013). Media reports show that many consumers complained that the prices charged by Montreal’s new generation of food trucks were simply too high (Chesterman 2013a, 2013b)—an issue that clearly disadvantages most of the population that might otherwise enjoy the new food trucks’ innovative fare at the expense of the wealthier foodie consumers and tourists. However, the issue was not only an outcome of the licensing process, as Chesterman discovered. For example, despite over $1 million in sales in 2012 and working sixteen hours every day, the owners of Grumman ’78 were $20,000 in the red, and it was impossible to charge less for their food. This runs contrary to the popular notion that “opening a ‘street shop’ is easy” and “a low-cost entrepreneurial activity” (Geloso 2012; Geloso and Guénette 2016). Indeed, per Chesterman’s calculations, the economics were simply not that easy. With trucks costing between $30,000 to $150,000 to buy, separate production kitchens between $500 and $3,000 a month to rent, and the costs of insurance, gas, parking, permits, staff, and, of course, the ingredients, she estimated that the total costs of running a food truck in Montreal lay between $900 and $1,900 per day of operation (Chesterman 2013b). Clearly, these costs are prohibitive for the microentrepreneur and can only be supported by a limited range of consumers able to afford more expensive haute cuisine menus. As one of Vancouver’s food truck pioneers, Jason Apple (of Roaming Dragon), told Chesterman, one of the contradictions of what he called the “whole street-food movement” was that “people expect our food to look sexy, be cutting edge,” but are unprepared to pay the real costs this entails (Chesterman 2013b). In such circumstances, the enhanced gourmet attraction of Montreal’s new food trucks cannot be expected to diffuse more widely into the city’s wider foodscape as the bridgehead thesis would suggest; rather, such costs limit their appeal—an observation that, as we will now discuss, truck owners themselves have made.

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“An Unforgettable Culinary Getaway”: The Goals of Food Truck Operators Analysis of the press coverage of Montreal’s food truck pilot has highlighted contradictions between the consumer’s expectations and the trucks’ actual performance. These discrepancies sound a note of caution for any would-be food truck operator intending to get into the business, especially because start-up costs are, as we have noted, prohibitive; the city’s gourmet expectations are not always those that can be met by inexperienced entrepreneurs with limited resources. A deeper insight into these issues can be gained from a survey of the 2015 website of the Association des Restaurateurs de Rue du Québec (ARRQ 2015), from which we may discern the specific importance each truck operator attaches to concerns about the city’s regulations. The first conclusion of such an analysis is the extent to which Montreal’s food trucks are compliant with the regulations. Approximately half of the thirty-three trucks listed in 2015 portray themselves as closely adhering to the conditions, which, as noted previously, are that the that the food sold adds “value to the city’s gastronomic landscape” through its creativity or originality; that it uses local products that are transformed on-site; and that the truck should serve meals that are the antithesis of existing fast food found in the downtown area. One quotation from many similar entries on the ARRQ website provides a useful illustration of the food truck operators’ stated intentions in this regard: “For an unforgettable culinary getaway, in a colourful world, come visit our delicious dishes with tempting flavours served in our truck, with a Bollywood décor and a sitar sound” (Traiteur Guru, quoted in ARRQ 2015; emphasis added). In other words, Montreal’s new food trucks are aiming their sights at the foodie audience—one that values gourmet presentations while seeking out new tastes. In the same way that Buettner (2008) has shown how the fashion for thali (a traditional street food) has altered old-fashioned London’s traditional curry houses, so Montreal’s new food trucks, with their perceived aura of an authenticity earned on the street, provide exactly the type of experience foodies seek. In this context, it is no accident that Grumman ’78—the city’s most popular truck with 12,116 “likes” on Facebook in August 2015 (ARRQ 2015)—guarantees authenticity through a narrative in which they detail their 2010 trip to Cabo San Lucas, where they discovered a cuisine that was unlike anything they had expected. Other food trucks, using phrases such as “a rustic cuisine” (Ta Pie), aim to reinforce the foodies’ notion, to quote Phoenix 1, that “street food is a lifestyle” (Phoenix 1, quoted in

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ARRQ 2015). It is a lifestyle that Montreal, with its large and varied immigrant population, is well-suited to enhance. For the “two epicureans” who run Alexis le Gourmand and “who love the culinary diversity offered in Montreal,” it is the reason they “couldn’t miss the opportunity to join the street movement.” Before turning to address that movement, it is important that we do not miss the ironies present in both the regulations and many of these stated intentions to meet them. As we have seen, many operators have adopted a measure of cultural appropriation to develop cuisines that appear international in order to contribute to the city’s gastronomic landscape—a landscape the city itself has chosen to enhance by adopting a food truck policy that has high entry costs. Yet the city already has an enormously varied restaurant scene and a pool of immigrants and newcomers (many with an authentic grounding in international cuisines) who—at far less cost to the customer and themselves than the current pilot allows—could, if circumstances permitted, far more easily and economically augment the city’s gastronomic landscape. “I Just Wish the Price Point Wasn’t So High”: Customer Reactions At this stage of the analysis, it is useful to turn to the trucks’ customers to examine the extent to which these criticisms are realized in their reactions. Such a task is made more straightforward than it might otherwise be, because foodies—the principal people we have suggested are the intended consumers of Montreal’s street food—form a self-identified group that can be accessed via publicly available, crowd-sourced social media. Studies reported elsewhere in this text have shown the value of sources such as Twitter and Facebook, especially since they allow direct connection with the more hip food trucks’ mobile and tech-savvy community of users (see chapters 11 and 14). Other recent work by Gottlieb (2015) has shown the value of Yelp, a site on which users share their opinions by posting restaurant reviews. Thus, in the analysis that follows, we discuss an examination of 245 reviews posted on Yelp from 2012 to 2015 for twenty-seven of the trucks involved in Montreal’s food truck project during that period (Yelp 2015). Thus, to consider the issue of authenticity first, several reviewers comment on the veracity of some truck’s claims. Kim M. notes that she has eaten waffles in Belgium and that those at Gaufrabec are “just as delicious” (Aug. 1, 2014). Authenticity is, of course, a slippery concept, and, as many reviewers opined, the new street food did not always meet expectations

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in this regard. For example, Diena M. said that the tacos at Grumman ’78 “[weren’t] the tastiest food and [did] not [have that] authentic feeling” (April 12, 2015), while Katya P. felt that Tuk Tuk’s menu was “almost Thai ... but didn’t bring me back to what I was used to” (May 21, 2014). As we have discussed, prices are a problem of particular concern among those interested in Montreal’s food trucks, and twenty-nine Yelp reviews (out of a total of 245) offer opinions on price. Of this figure, eleven reviews express that prices are inexpensive or that portions are generous. The majority (eighteen), however, indicate that prices are too high. Anastasiya R. comments that the ten-dollar sandwiches at Phoenix are “a bit expensive” (June 20, 2015), and Maria D. writes, “I just wish the price-point [at Grumman ’78] wasn’t so high. As someone on a very low income, it’s a once or twice a year treat” (July 28, 2013). Others are clear that the high prices are not an acceptable part of the food truck experience. Writing about Grumman ’78, O2T comments that the food is “incredibly overrated and overpriced. ... Get over it. You’re a food truck with mediocre portions” (Oct. 14, 2013), while Jason M. notes of the same operators that “they’re just exaggerating their prices and they need to be called out for it. ... There’s just no sense paying $7 for a taco. Hipster or not” (July 3, 2015). Such comments indicate a lack of support for the pilot’s main goal. Food trucks contribute to the city’s gastronomic landscape” by focusing only on foodies and not the needs of either customers for cheap food or individuals seeking employment. The comments also suggest that the city’s promotion of an alternative approach to trucks is seen by some reviewers as a clear break with the earlier traditions of street food—an “ecology,” to use the deft phrase coined by Martin (chapter 11), well-illustrated by New Orleans’s self-regulation (see chapter 6). In such a moral economy, cheap food is an informal bargain between customer and vendor sustained by a lack of regulation—perhaps the only scenario in which entry-level entrepreneurs could make a living running a food truck in Montreal. “A Bureaucratic Immensity”: Concluding Thoughts During the final week of a major exhibition of the sculptures of Rodin in October 2015, Montreal’s prestigious Musée des Beaux Arts encouraged its visitors to enjoy an evening snack at one of the four food trucks parked immediately outside the gallery on one of the city’s more exclusive streets. “Don’t miss this chance,” the museum’s Facebook page noted as it announced “Rodin on the Street.” Such a surprising conjunction of the world of the gallery and the street encapsulates in its novelty and

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contradictions the challenges that Montreal’s revival of food trucks has raised—a range of opportunities that this paper has been able to explore in greater depth through an investigation of press coverage, truck operator intentions, and the opinions of restaurant reviewers. Overall, the good news from a city planning perspective is that a new and demanding regulatory framework for food trucks can be shown to work; the bad news from a social justice perspective is that such a scheme cannot fulfill the objectives of job creation or inexpensive food. Although reports in the city’s newspapers convey the public’s overwhelming support for an end to the banning of food trucks on Montreal’s streets, there is also a clear realization that issues of profitability and high costs of licensing mean that the new generation of food trucks cannot offer prices high enough to provide a livelihood to new entrepreneurs or low enough that a family could afford to buy their meals. The requirement that trucks be paired with existing restaurants in particular is a policy that critics have suggested simply prohibits the entry of those without existing funds or connections into what otherwise has been a traditional source of self-employment, especially for immigrants and newcomers to Montreal. In the context of the general hypotheses explored in the literature review earlier in the chapter, this means that there is a recognition that the traditional food truck (with its various benefits in terms of low-cost business start-ups and inexpensive food) has been bypassed by a new brand of mobile street food vending that clearly marks a break with this tradition. Although the possibility exists that these new trucks could act as a bridgehead by introducing new cuisines into Montreal’s existing gastronomic landscape, their numbers are too few to have such an impact and therefore suggest that that the city’s food truck experiment marks a distinct breach with older traditions found across North America. Remarking on this situation, Charlebois has noted that although the city’s plan clearly intended to “showcase Montreal’s gastronomic excellence,” its eventual value is far less clear and could be questioned on two main grounds: the socioeconomic value of the pilot and “the bureaucratic immensity behind the whole approach” (Charlebois 2013). At eight dollars for a grilled cheese sandwich, he estimates that a family of four could easily pay up to fifty dollars for a meal. “These prices are prohibitive for the common [person] but affordable for the elitist foodies,” he remarks, concluding that “for consumers with less means, this option doesn’t do much to address urban food security concerns faced by many in a city like Montreal” (Charlebois 2013).

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Our analysis of food truck operator intentions shows a broad willingness to comply not only with the city’s regulations but also with the council’s desire that the trucks contribute to the city’s gastronomic landscape through the provision of street food that is either original or creative. Thus, it is possible to argue that Montreal’s food truck program is one that celebrates the city’s considerable ethnic diversity and, by raising issues of inclusivity, addresses some concerns of social justice in a much broader way. As one Vancouver food truck operator remarked: “To me, the purpose of food trucks is to bring multiculturalism to the streets. I think a truck like mine showcases diversity. And food trucks bring diversity to the streets” (Vikram Vij, quoted in Chesterman 2013b). However, this approach comes at some cost. Concerns about cultural appropriation and authenticity are very much part of this debate, and lost from this landscape are notions of providing food economically from trucks that provide low-wage employment for immigrant labor. Interestingly, when we turn to the opinions of the group most likely to appreciate the city’s new focus on gastronomy, the self-styled foodies who place their reviews on Yelp, we find mixed reviews of the city’s program. Although a considerable number support the pilot project and its trucks, there are many who find prices to be too high. This criticism is itself highly nuanced, with as many reluctantly agreeing that expensive meals are an expected part of an occasional outdoor treat as those who vehemently regret this departure from the moral economy of more traditional, unregulated food trucks. Be that as it may, such a lukewarm reception from the group most likely to be supportive of the city’s pilot obviously raises questions about the value of the program’s basic goals and how the city set out to achieve them. To put it another way, if the city wanted to end the ban on food trucks in a way that advanced the interests of new entrepreneurs and street customers alike, why did it choose a regulatory process that denied operators of profitability and a gastronomic goal that resulted in a need for higher prices that may have ultimately limited the wider appeal of street food? This examination of Montreal’s recent pilot program to reintroduce food trucks onto its streets and the fundamental questions that this experiment has raised clearly need to be considered from the perspective of our initial hypotheses concerning the development of food truck programs in North America. Thus, in terms of the three broad theories set out earlier, Montreal’s experience suggests that its food trucks are not capable of meeting the employment or food security requirements of many of its population,

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the types of requirement often addressed by more traditional food trucks found elsewhere in North America. Although the program’s clear gastronomic goals qualify the pilot to meet the broad description of the breach hypothesis (in which a new generation of trucks engage more affluent markets, often through the use of social media), its inability either to enthuse that niche or to diffuse an appreciation of its varied repertoire of street foods across the entire population means it is not acting in a bridgehead capacity. However, as a number of critics have observed, if the program’s underlying intentions are not to advance the interests of food truck operators or consumers themselves but to protect established restaurants from competition from a newer generation of food trucks introduced to enhance the city’s reputation as a gastronomic destination, than it is possible to see the role of Montreal’s food trucks as that of a Trojan horse, introduced as part of a strategy to promote a much wider economic development agenda. References Association des Restaurateurs de Rue du Québec (ARRQ). 2015. “Food Trucks.” http://cuisinederue.org/en/food-trucks-2/. Bell, D. 2007. “The Hospitable City: Social Relations in Commercial Space.” Progress in Human Geography 31 (1): 7–22. Bhimji, Fazila. 2010. “Struggles, Urban Citizenship, and Belonging: The Experience of Undocumented Street Vendors and Food Truck Owners in Los Angeles.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 39 (4): 455–492. Brindley, David. 2015. “On a Roll: How a Los Angeles Chef Took a Crazy Idea and Helped Launch a Food Movement on Wheels.” National Geographic, July, 60–75. Bruemmer, Ren. 2013a. “City Gives a Cautious Nod to Return of Street Food Vendors.” Montreal Gazette, March 20. Bruemmer, Ren. 2013b. “City Set to OK Street Food Project: Full-time Truck Fare Expected to Be Available by Summer 2015.” Montreal Gazette, April 10. Buettner, Elizabeth. 2008. “‘Going for an Indian’: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain.” Journal of Modern History 80 (4): 865–901. Caldwell, Alison. 2012. “Will Tweet for Food: Microblogging Mobile Food Trucks— Online, Offline and In Line.” In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan, 306–321. London: Routledge.

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Cardwell, Mark. 2012. “‘Street Meat’ Public Hearings Likely to Be Held in Fall: City Has ‘Favourite Prejudice’ for Trucks, but Restaurant Association Not Supportive.” Montreal Gazette, August 11. Charlebois, Sylvain. 2013. “Bureaucracy Undermines Montreal’s Food Trucks.” Ottawa Citizen, August 20. Chesterman, Lesley. 2013a. “Tastemakers: The People and Things Making a Mark on the Food Scene, and What’s to Come Next Year.” Montreal Gazette, December 28. Chesterman, Lesley. 2013b. “Truck Stop Challenges: Wildly Popular Grumman 78 was $20,000 in the Red Last Year; in Vancouver, Acclaimed Chef Vikram Vij Has Yet to Make a Penny.” Montreal Gazette, June 22. Détolle, Anaïs, Robert Jennings, and Alan Nash. 2016. “The Bottle at the Centre of a Changing Foodscape: ‘Bring Your Own Wine’ in the Plateau-Mont-Royal.” In Conversations in Food Studies: Transgressing Boundaries through Critical Inquiry, edited by C. Anderson, J. Brady, and C. Levkoe, 148–167. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Geloso, Vincent. 2012. “Let Freedom Reign for Street-food Vendors: Street Eats Are Not Only a Treat for Consumers, but They’re Also a Low-cost Entry Point for Entrepreneurs with a Good Idea.” Montreal Gazette, July 14. Geloso, Vincent, and Jasmin Guénette. 2016. “Montreal Should Let Food Trucks Satisfy Consumer Appetites.” Montreal Gazette, May 18. Germain, Annick, and Damaris Rose. 2000. Montréal: The Quest for a Metropolis. New York: Wiley. Gottlieb, Dylan. 2015. “‘Dirty, Authentic ... Delicious’: Yelp, Mexican Restaurants, and the Appetites of Philadelphia’s New Middle Class.” Gastronomica 15 (2): 39–48. Hamilton, Graeme. 2013. “Out to Lunch: The Food Truck Experiment Is Being Held Back by Old Laws, Stifling Bureaucracy and Entrenched Interests. Meanwhile the Lines of Patrons Continue to Grow.” National Post, August 3. Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell. Hernández-López, Ernesto. 2011. “LA’s Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests.” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 43 (1): 233–268. Hiebert, Daniel, and R. Pendukar. 2003. “Whose Cooking? The Changing Ethnic Division of Labour in Canada, 1971–1996.” Working Paper Series 03-09, Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Vancouver. Lucan, S. C., M. Varona, A. R. Maroko, J. Bumol, L. Torrens, and J. Wylie-Rosett. 2013. “Assessing Mobile Food Vendors (a.k.a. Street Food Vendors): Methods,

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Challenges, and Lessons for Future Food Environment Research.” Public Health 127:766–776. Martin, Nina. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883. Montreal Gazette. 2012. “It Is Time to Open Up Our City to Mobile Food vendors.” Montreal Gazette, June 15. Montreal Gazette. 2014. “The Food Trucks Are Back! The Official Food-Truck Season Has Started, and the City of Montreal Has Released Its List of 30 Operators Participating in the City’s Program.” Montreal Gazette, May 2. Musgrave, Sarah. 2013. “Delicious Fare—but Be Prepared to Wait: A Lunchtime Tour of Day 1 of Pilot Project.” Montreal Gazette, June 22. Nash, Alan. 1987. “The Economic Impact of the Entrepreneur Immigrant Program.” Discussion Paper 87 B.1, Institute for Research on Public Policy, Ottawa. Nash, Alan. 2009. “‘From Spaghetti to Sushi’: An Investigation of the Growth of Ethnic Restaurants in Montreal, 1951–2001.” Food, Culture, & Society 12 (1): 5–24. Ozersky, Josh. 2008. The Hamburger: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Peritz, Ingrid. 2013a. “Montreal Finally Gets Street Eats.” Globe and Mail, April 10. Peritz, Ingrid. 2013b. “What to Do This Summer in ... Montreal. Globe and Mail, May 28. Piché, Victor, Jean Renaud, Lucie Gingras, and David Shapiro. 2002. “Economic Integration of New Immigrants in the Montreal Labour Market: A Longitudinal Approach.” Population 57 (1): 57–82. Proctor, James. 1998. “Ethics in Geography: Giving Moral Form to the Geographical Imagination.” Area 30 (1): 8–18. Raijman, R., and M. Tienda. 2000. “Immigrants’ Pathways to Business Ownership: A Comparative Ethnic Perspective.” International Migration Review 34 (3): 682–706. Schmidt, V. H. 2001. “Social Justice.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 14,338–14,341. Oxford: Elsevier. Shingler, Benjamin. 2013. “Street Eats Back in City Famous for Food.” Globe and Mail, June 21. Smith, David. 1994. Geography and Social Justice. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Sparks, Riley. 2013. “Food Trucks Make Their Big Debut Today: Au Pied Cochon among 27 Vendors Selected for Pilot Project This Summer.” Montreal Gazette, June 20. Taschereau, Sylvie. 2005. “‘Behind the Store’: Montreal Shopkeeping Families between the Wars.” In Negotiating Identities in 19th and 20th Century Montreal, edited by Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, 235–258. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Wasserman, Suzanne. 2009. “Hawkers and Gawkers: Peddling and Markets in New York City.” In Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, 153–173. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson, William. 2013. “Montreal’s Food Cart Crisis.” National Post, May 10. Wessel, Ginette. 2012. “From Place to NonPlace: A Case Study of Social Media and Contemporary Food Trucks.” Journal of Urban Design 17 (4): 511–531. Woods, Allan. 2013. “Montreal Foodies Set to Dig In: City Joining Food-truckrevolution, Ending 1947 Ban on Street Grub.” Toronto Star, April 6. Ville de Montréal. 2015. “By-Law Governing Street Food.” http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/ by-laws. Yelp. 2015. “Best Food Trucks in Montreal.” https://www.yelp.ca/c/montr %C3%A9al/foodtrucks.

13  Scripting the City: Street Food, Urban Policy, and Neoliberal Redevelopment in Vancouver, Canada Lenore Lauri Newman and Katherine Alexandra Newman

Vancouver has a carefully cultivated reputation as a livable city, in part due to its natural setting and urban green spaces, but also as the result of efforts to establish safe, walkable residential neighborhoods right in the downtown core. The suburban ideals that the city embodies are leveraged in careful place-branding strategies, yet are likewise part of the reason that Vancouver is known to be “mind-numbingly boring” (Economist 2015). Efforts to market Vancouver as a livable city with a tolerant and inclusive civic culture have built upon policies designed to reduce disorder by closely regulating the urban streetscapes (Boyle and Haggerty 2011); these policies oversaw the expulsion of “magical urbanism” from the street (see chapter 4). Street vending, along with activities such as begging and busking, was regarded as an improper use of public space (Blomley 2007), and a particularly visible one at that. Thus, as part of a larger effort to clean up the streets and reduce the disorder of urban life, street vendors and informal markets were largely eliminated in most neighborhoods of Vancouver (Bromley 2000; Burnett and Newman 2014); street food was restricted to hotdogs, chestnuts, and popcorn. The “messiness” associated with street vending was tamed through bylaws and other regulations (see chapter 6 for a discussion of this process), leaving behind sanitized streetscapes that helped lend Vancouver its reputation as the “No-Fun City” (Kataoka 2009). The reintroduction of food trucks to Vancouver streets has enjoyed widespread public support and was, in part, driven by would-be vendors and consumers. Television shows have helped to popularize and glamorize food trucks, while social media has provided platforms for entrepreneurs to establish local networks and to promote themselves directly to consumers, shaping both the online and offline landscape and effectively transforming street food into a cultural movement (Pill 2014). These networks have also helped vendors and interested consumers mobilize around urban issues, allowing them to use social media platforms to communicate about street

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food policy (Wessel 2012). In comparison to public demand, the policy response in Vancouver was relatively tentative; even when a street food pilot program was finally trialed in 2010, it allowed only an initial seventeen food truck licenses. The success of this pilot saw the street food program made permanent in 2011, with ninety-one licenses available to vendors. An additional twelve licenses were added in 2012 and fifteen more in each 2014 and 2015. However, even with the expansion of the program, competition for food truck licenses remained extremely stiff. The production of a food truck subculture has allowed for the incorporation of street food vending into creative cities policies and urban branding strategies (Martin 2014). As urban amenities are used to foster culture-led regeneration (Evans 2005; Pratt 2008), the presence of food trucks is used to bolster Vancouver’s reputation for creativity and entrepreneurialism. Evans (2009) notes that this form of creative city promotion has become a global phenomenon, as policies designed to foster urban creativity are being “adopted in cities and states seeking to claim their share of the knowledge economy and cultural city ranking” (1005). In Vancouver, the growth of creative industries has helped to foster the emergence of a “new economy” (Barnes and Hutton 2009), and the strategic use of amenities has supported patterns of consumption-based redevelopment (Ley 1996; Lorentzen 2009; Markusen and Schrock 2009). Despite efforts to leverage food trucks into creative amenities and tools of economic growth, the expansion of street food options has nevertheless helped to fulfill a public demand; the food trucks succeed in adding to the diversity of the city, contributing to the forms of urban life—and urban disorder—that had previously been driven from Vancouver streets as part of successive waves of securitization and modernization. Branding Vancouver The city of Vancouver has seen a rapid expansion of street food vending, supported both by policy initiatives to increase the availability of healthy, local food and by public interest in combatting the no-fun city reputation of Vancouver’s streetscapes. Although the licensing of street food vendors was largely sanctioned in response to public demand, street food provisioning has also been taken up as a tool of urban governance—and incorporated into methods of biopolitical regulation. Moreover, the presence of street food vendors is used to shape perceptions of the city and has been incorporated into place-branding exercises such as the Greenest City strategy.

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From its inception, the street food program in Vancouver was intended “to provide a wide range of nutritious and affordable food options that reflect the economic and cultural diversity of Vancouver” (City of Vancouver 2015). To achieve this goal, food truck licensing is highly regulated; a set number of licenses are assigned using a secret point system. The specific scoring of applications for food truck licenses is kept confidential, but licenses are awarded in a manner that is designed to increase the variety and cultural diversity of foods on offer and to contribute to the city’s multicultural image. At the same time, food trucks are supposed to offer healthy foods and to source local ingredients as much as possible. Competition for investment and increasingly mobile capital has fostered the rise of what Harvey (1989) refers to as urban entrepreneurialism, with political elites promoting policies designed to create a business-friendly milieu. As a facet of this entrepreneurial model of urban governance, and reflecting a “growth machine” approach to urban politics (Molotch 1976), place-branding strategies have been adopted to market cities to the world (Kavaratzis 2004; McCann 2004). A strong city brand and a positive urban image can increase the value of property holdings and drive new investment in cities (Brenner and Theodore 2002; McCann 2013). However, Eshuis and Edwards (2013) argue that urban branding has also become a mode of democratic legitimation. The use of place-branding strategies to create public support for governing regimes also can be tied to the rise of policy boosterism, as local political actors promote their cities’ policy models as best practices in global networks of urban policymaking (McCann and Ward 2011; McCann 2013). Political actors who successfully take credit for a positive urban brand or for adopting policies that are regarded as international best practices can leverage this recognition for democratic support and legitimation for governing regimes, yet this neoliberal model of urban policymaking can move power from citizens and toward planners and technocrats (Eshuis and Edwards 2013; MacLeod 2011). The 2010 Winter Olympics Games provided clear insight into the urban brand image of Vancouver: The city has a carefully cultivated image as a safe, tolerant, and inclusive city known for its cultural diversity (Edelson 2011). Multiculturalism has become a local watchword; local histories and cultural identities of have been leveraged as branding strategies for specific neighborhoods, and the city as a whole has a carefully scripted multicultural identity. Moreover, the Greenest City initiative, a project to make Vancouver “the greenest city in the world by 2020” (City of Vancouver 2012, 1), has made environmental sustainability into another element of urban competitiveness; the Greenest City Action Plan promotes Vancouver as a

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leader while positioning environmentalism as a competition that requires active citizen participation to win. Vancouver food trucks have become incorporated into both branding strategies; given how competitive the licensing process is in Vancouver, would-be vendors must position their applications in ways that illustrate how they support multiculturalism and advance the Greenest City agenda. To win a license, would-be vendors must ensure that their applications reflect the strategic and ideological goals of the street food program. Because new licensees are expected to add diversity to the street food scene in Vancouver, it is necessary for an applicant to position his or her project as unique; applicants must highlight the culinary traditions, preparation techniques, or cultural origins that distinguish their street food projects. Successful applicants advertise that their food trucks serve “traditional” ethnic foods (including traditional Belgian waffles, authentic Salvadoran pupusas and pasteles, traditional Korean bulgogi and bibimbap, authentic Japanese gyozas, classic Aussie pies, and traditional UK tandoori) or that they serve modern “fusion” cuisine (along the lines of kimchi tacos, butter chicken schnitzel, Filipino sliders, pizza perogies, yam tempura burritos, and, of course, Japadog’s famed hot dogs topped with pickled ginger and wasabi mayonnaise). Because of the requirement to feature local ingredients to the greatest extent possible, vendors either use locally grown ingredients in traditional recipes or create dishes around these ingredients. The ever-changing menu of Vij’s Railway Express, for example, has featured numerous different curries using kale, a ubiquitous staple of Vancouver farmers’ markets, as well as a blueberry lassi. Other food trucks highlight their use of locally sourced vegetables, while Kaboom Box features local seafood in dishes like smoked salmon sandwiches and oyster po’boys. The provision of local food is the organizing principle of the menu for such food trucks, and is central to their marketing campaigns; as such, food trucks that aim to present culinary styles not local to the West Coast of British Columbia nevertheless must ensure that they can find ways to work in locally produced ingredients. In addition, menus must be submitted for review; applicants must explain their menu concepts, seasonal changes, and why their fare is street appropriate. Through the strategic licensing of food trucks, the cultural diversity of Vancouver is carefully put on display—and, by advertising food trucks in ways that also help to brand and to market Vancouver, the city is presented as a cosmopolitan destination where multiculturalism is deeply embedded in the local.

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In the competition for food truck licenses, smaller businesses are preferred, as are businesses that can demonstrate collaboration with local artists, urban farmers, or community groups, or that can otherwise lay claims to being embedded in the local community. The competition for licenses also favors food trucks that offer vegetarian and vegan dishes or that offer dishes that cater to other dietary restrictions (e.g., one food truck specializes in Israeli cuisine and serves only kosher foods). These food trucks help to increase the accessibility of street foods, including for individuals and groups often excluded from enjoying street foods because of ethical or religious commitments. Organic and unprocessed (raw) items are also encouraged, and certification is rewarded; license applications are given bonus points for serving certified organic foods, Rainforest Alliance–certified products, Fair Trade–certified ingredients, Ocean Wise–certified seafood, and so on. These forms of certification provide useful information for consumers while also offering the equivalent of recognizable brand names, signaling social and environmental responsibility. As well as positioning their fare as unique, applicants for food truck licenses must explain their sustainable waste practices. The City of Vancouver has made its drive to be the Greenest City a central part of its urban image and city branding strategy. The Greenest City initiative was among the different projects prompted by the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, representing an effort to increase not only Vancouver’s environmental sustainability but also the centrality of discourses of sustainability in a continued effort to engage in aggressive social leveraging in the post-Olympics context (VanWynsberghe, Derom, and Maurer 2012). Among other goals, the Greenest City Action Plan calls for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and fostering a “lighter footprint,” supporting local food production and increasing its availability in public spaces, and decreasing waste; the Zero Waste goal aims to divert solid waste away from landfills by fostering recycling and composting and to nurture a “Zero Waste culture”’ (City of Vancouver 2012). The “competitive, extrospective, boosterist agenda” (McCann 2013, 10) of transforming Vancouver into the Greenest City in the world has made the Zero Waste strategy part of the larger branding of Vancouver; food trucks are expected not only to adopt waste-management practices that incorporate composting, recycling, and the use of decomposable packaging but also to visibly highlight them. Food trucks are incorporated into this urban competition, expected to simultaneously comply with and promote the Greenest City agenda. Nevertheless, the Zero Waste initiative also supports the environmental sustainability of food trucks, providing both

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infrastructure and institutional support that facilitate sustainable waste management. Biopolitics in the Greenest City Urban cultural policies and branding strategies can be understood as a form of neoliberal governmentality; projects to tailor the local image, shape place identity, or otherwise influence urban culture compel the adoption of strategies that both regulate the actions of individuals and engender specific patterns of self-government. Support for cultural industries and the creative economy do not merely seek to produce marketable cultural artifacts but also aim to produce individuals that embody the aspirations of these strategies (Varga 2013). The image of a multicultural city is not only promoted through cultural events or the provision of ethnic cuisines but also produced through forms of education aimed at inculcating in citizens what Mitchell (2003) terms the multicultural self. As Schinkel and van Houdt (2010) have observed in the Netherlands, the image of a tolerant and inclusive civic culture that Vancouver promotes at once mobilizes the idea of community and simultaneously individualizes the responsibility to attain membership in this culture of ostensible inclusivity. Further, the use of cultural diversity as a form of competitive advantage and as a branding strategy in contemporary patterns of neoliberal global urbanism reflect a form of strategic cosmopolitanism, itself a form of individuation within multicultural education (Mitchell 2003). Environmentalism is also leveraged as a form of governmentality in Vancouver; the Greenest City Action Plan specifically aims to incorporate urban residents into the strategy as active participants in an international urban competition and to nurture a culture in which city residents actively participate in the agenda—for example, by recycling and by learning how to compost their food scraps. However, green governmentality does not end there; environmentalism extends seamlessly into promotion of the health—and healthy lifestyles—of Vancouver residents. The licensing of food trucks as a biopolitical strategy takes multiple forms but is particularly evident in both the requirement that food trucks serve healthy meals and the deliberate placement of food trucks on pedestrian walkways and bike routes. Street food vendors are required to submit sample menus for review by nutritionists; licensing is contingent upon the food trucks serving healthy food. Although food trucks are expected to reflect the cultural diversity of the city, the assessment of the nutritional merits of menus is firmly rooted

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in dominant conceptions of healthy eating. Only once vetted by a nutritionist can a menu be approved, reflecting what Foucault (2009) refers to as biopolitics, or the application of political power to all aspects of human life. Biopolitical regulation increasingly has been applied to health, operating at both the individual and the collective levels. Crawshaw (2012) argues that the social marketing of healthy choices “operates with ‘consumers’ as its starting point” (201), acting upon the entrepreneurial individuals that have the freedom to make their own choices about health. Moreover, the achievement of health is positioned as one of the most important and laudable goals of the entrepreneurial, disciplined, and self-governing individual (Ayo 2012). Although the regulation of food trucks address Vancouver residents as consumers, they also aim to restrict choices by ensuring that food trucks offer only healthy fare. However, the food trucks themselves are merely an addition to Vancouver’s landscape. While vendor licensing aims to increase the availability of and access to healthy foods, Vancouver food trucks can also be understood as technologies of social marketing, working to shape the self-identities of consumers as healthy, active, and cosmopolitan urbanites. In addition to encouraging healthy eating, the City of Vancouver has chosen to strategically place food trucks in locations from which they increase neighborhood walkability and connectivity. New licenses are currently being granted for bike routes and pedestrian corridors to encourage walking and cycling. The Greenest City Action Plan calls for the expansion of “green transportation,” aiming to reduce the average distance driven by each Vancouver resident by 20 percent from 2007 levels (City of Vancouver 2012, 29), and to make walking, cycling, and public transportation the preferred modes of travel. This goal is to be achieved through multiple actions, including improving pedestrian and cyclist safety through the construction of designated routes and walkways, increasing access to public transportation, developing a bike-share program, planning walkable neighborhoods, and building infrastructure to make walking and cycling more appealing. Quastel (2009) argues that the language of sustainability and environmentalism are increasingly used to justify patterns of gentrification by promoting new property developments and forms of urban renewal. Moreover, the sustainability-as-density discourse that underpins many current policies grouped under the banner of creating green, walkable neighborhoods is tied to rising housing prices, forms of lifestyle gentrification, and patterns of consumption-based urban redevelopment (Quastel, Moos, and Lynch 2012). This is particularly evident in efforts to use food trucks to increase

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the Walk Score of different neighborhoods, a measure that considers proximity to food and drink, retail, and other spaces of consumption (Newman and Burnett 2013). Fostering urban walkability, whether by densification or by expansion of street food vending, is also justified as a method to improve the health of individuals and communities. However, even more than urban redevelopment, food trucks have also been incorporated into the biopolitical concern with health and active lifestyles; because licenses are tied to specific locations, the municipal government can microtarget the placement of food trucks to best support travel by foot, bike, and public transportation. In the Greenest City, healthism, like environmentalism, can be understood as a rationale for urban redevelopment and a discursive justification for gentrification in Vancouver. Food on Neoliberal Streets Restaurants and cafés have emerged as important symbols of urbanity, helping to shape urban culture and contribute to the idea, or ideal, of a uniquely urban experience. As cities have been transformed into landscapes of consumption (Hannigan 2005), outdoor restaurants, street festivals, and different opportunities to shop, dine, and engage in other forms of commercial activities are increasingly “associated with a renaissance of public life” (Kärrholm 2009, 421). The increasing individuation of urban lifestyles is viewed as a tool of urban economic growth, fueling interest in different kinds of goods and services that support highly differentiated lifestylebased consumption (Zukin 1998). Different kinds of shopping and dining options also contribute to the unique identities of these neighborhoods, lending them a positive reputation for being either alternative or authentic urban spaces (Zukin 2008, 2010). Although arts and artists have long been viewed as the tools of gentrification par excellence (Cameron and Coaffee 2005), influencing the culture and raising the social capital of urban spaces (Ley 1996), Zukin (2010) argues that “food has emerged as the new ‘art’ in the urban cultural experience, with places to sample many different tastes” (29). Urban redevelopment policies already encourage the opening of new stores, restaurants and cafés, non-profit organizations, and cultural institutions (Zukin 1998); alternative and unique dining options—such as food trucks—are thus added to this list. Not only has food emerged as a tool of urban regeneration and cultureled economic growth, new food spaces are also envisioned as methods of urban government and social regulation. In a study of policies to encourage coffee shops in parks and on other public lands, Perkins (2009) illustrates

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the ability of cafés and food spaces to discipline “feral” spaces. Private corporations pay for the upkeep of public spaces but also acquire the right to regulate these spaces. Moreover, the presence of café patrons normalizes these spaces, bringing them into the fold of normative social regulation and governing parks to the benefit of those who can afford to participate in commercial activities and newly commodified spaces. The cityscapes that restaurants and cafés help to envision are thus highly differentiated yet intrinsically exclusive (Perkins 2009; Zukin 2008). By taming urban space, these cafés—like cultural organizations and retail establishments—participate in a process of rewriting neighborhoods and making them safe for capital investment (Smith 1996). Ley (2003) has considered the ways that aestheticization contributes to gentrification as artists and cultural producers occupy and valorize affordable spaces, which they ultimately transform. Changes in the retail landscape likewise shape the identities of neighborhoods, as stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues create a sense of place, both attracting capital investment and gentrifying residents (Bridge and Dowling 2001). In Vancouver, new restaurants and trendy cafés have been at the vanguard of gentrification, drawing people into marginalized neighborhoods and helping to make them trendy (Burnett 2014). Food trucks have joined in this tendency, but not in precisely the same ways. Most food trucks have been licensed to vend in the downtown core of the city, in areas already highly gentrified and in neighborhoods that are already known for their urbanity. However, in line with the Vancouver Food Strategy, new food truck licenses are being issued for neighborhoods outside of the downtown core—and, increasingly, in “untamed” urban spaces. Released in 2013, the Vancouver Food Strategy outlined a set of actions designed to “expand the geographical area in which street vendors selling food can operate” and to “increase access to affordable, nutritious food in low-income communities through the Street Vendor program” (Vancouver Food Policy Council 2013, 113). To this end, new food truck licenses have been issued for neighborhoods excluded from the initial reach of the street food program. This has expanded food options in marginalized neighborhoods, and has also helped to support spatial justice by bringing popular food trucks and a widely demanded culinary option to underserved areas and excluded populations. However, some of these new licenses have been issued for areas considered gentrification ground zero. As mobile amenities, food trucks are used to draw attention to neighborhoods and in support of wider strategies of urban redevelopment. In some cases, new condo developments in neighborhoods without either the retail infrastructure

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or the culinary prowess to make them stand out as particularly noticeable locations or desirable residences are now served by food trucks. The Street Food App, along with the robust Facebook and Twitter presence of most Vancouver food trucks, helps to transform these sites into destinations for local foodies. Meanwhile, food trucks operating in the downtown core have enjoyed the opportunity to build their reputations—and devoted consumer bases. For businesses such as Tacofino and Yolk’s, opening permanent retail establishments is a logical next step given the immense popularity of their food trucks; the relatively cheap rents of disinvested blocks on East Hastings Street made this neighborhood the site that both these vendors selected for their first brick-and-mortar restaurants. More recently still, this neighborhood has become home to several new condo developments, which have joined new businesses in driving the sudden—and rapidly progressing— revitalization of this formerly marginal urban space. Dunn (chapter 3) has noted that in New York, the owners of several “gourmet” food trucks either already own brick-and-mortar restaurants or plan to open them soon; Vancouver exhibits hints of this process, yet with so few licenses granted, the same pattern cannot yet be established. Vij’s Railway Express, among the most upscale food trucks that can be found on Vancouver streets, is run by the owners of one of the most famed establishments in the city, Vij’s Restaurant—itself already the pinnacle of a gourmet food empire. However, the relatively low barriers to entry—significantly more expensive than entry into the Portland market (see chapter 15), yet far less capital-intensive than opening a restaurant or joining the Vancouver food scene through other avenues—make for an appealing way to build the clientele and amass the capital needed to open a restaurant (as Yolk’s has done) or to expand into Vancouver (as Tacofino has done, after opening their first restaurant in the island city of Tofino). Food trucks can give entrepreneurs an entryway into one of the most difficult markets in Canada; nevertheless, when the pursuit of permanence is impossible without seeking out low commercial rents, the transition occurs in areas either with depressed land values (such as East Hastings Street) or property developers who wish to attract trendy venues to increase their own marketability. In addition to encouraging the expansion of street vending into lowincome and underserved neighborhoods, the City of Vancouver has also allowed food trucks into public parks. In 2012, three licenses were issued for strategic locations as part of a pilot project; food carts are now licensed to operate at a total of fifteen park locations. These food carts, like the food trucks on city streets, fill a demand. Their presence in Vancouver

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parks has proven popular, coinciding with the experiences of other cities in which food trucks have helped to foster vibrant streetscapes and diverse public spaces and to promote the enjoyment of urban space (Newman and Burnett 2013; Southworth 2014). In a study of the Bay Area of San Francisco, Wessel (2012) found that the presence of food trucks draws people to public parks, attracting foodies who come specifically because of the vendors, while also contributing to the park experience for those who visited for other reasons. Elsewhere in California, Vallianatos (2015) illustrates that “street food helps make streets and sidewalks in Los Angeles more ‘complete’ places” (206) and argues that the presence of street vendors contributes to social interactions and helps to promote public life. Nevertheless, food trucks and their customers can also contribute to the securitization of parks, sidewalks, and other public spaces, taming space by increasing the number of people around and displacing those who do not fit in commodified spaces. The expansion of food trucks into low-income neighborhoods, public parks, and areas underserved by food provisioning has been encouraged as a means to improve physical access to food. However, the Vancouver Food Strategy also claims that “street food vending enlivens the public realm, promotes neighborhood vitality, encourages pedestrian- and bicyclefriendly communities, and improves the sense of place” (112). Altering the culture of urban space is not merely a side effect of food trucks, but rather one of the core rationales for their presence. The initial licenses available through the street food pilot program, as well as the licenses rolled out subsequently, influenced the culture of Vancouver’s streets and were leveraged to augment and sculpt the city’s reputation. Although the earliest food trucks assisted in efforts to position Vancouver as a creative and entrepreneurial city and drew positive attention from local, national, and even international media outlets, they were more useful in fostering the reputation of the city as a whole rather than specific neighborhoods in particular. More recently, though, the presence of food trucks in neighborhoods not otherwise known as culinary destinations has helped to improve perceptions of marginalized areas and to increase interest in specific locations. Because street food vending permits are valid only for specific locations, food trucks can be placed in neighborhoods in which they act as infrastructure supporting what Lehrer and Wieditz (2009) refer to as condofication. Further, as Beriss and Sutton (2007) argue, “restaurants can define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods or even the reputation of whole cities and regions” (3); this is a specific goal of new food truck licenses, which strategically situate food trucks in urban

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neighborhoods in which they are expected to participate in defining—or redefining—the sense of place. This trend is, arguably, most pronounced at the site of the Vancouver Food Cart Fest. In the summer of 2012, the first Food Cart Fest was held outside of the Waldorf, a hotel in what was a predominantly industrial neighborhood on East Hastings Street, near warehouses and a used car dealership—and also located close to an Aboriginal Friendship Centre. However, with increasing gentrification in the Downtown Eastside, located directly west of this area, as well as in the Hastings-Sunrise neighborhood to the east, several new condo developments have been proposed for this specific location. The Food Cart Fest attracted an estimated five thousand people to this industrial neighborhood each weekend, helping to fulfill the organizers’ larger goal of reimagining the Waldorf as the center of “an arts and culture hub” of Vancouver (Arrival Agency 2015). Perhaps incidentally, the first brick-and-mortar location of Yolk’s restaurant, which began as a Gastown food cart, opened in 2014, a mere block from the site of the first Food Cart Fest. In 2013, the Vancouver Food Cart Fest moved to East First Avenue, a location near Olympic Village and adjacent to Cambie Street Bridge. Every Sunday during the summer months, over twenty food trucks congregate at the Olympic Village site, which also hosts a flea market, live music, and children’s activities. Although the organizers charge an admission fee of $2.50 per adult (waived for members of Vancity, a credit union that is one of the main sponsors of the Food Cart Fest), more than five thousand people attend every weekend (Arrival Agency 2015), and people often line up to wait for entry when the site is over capacity. Although the stated reason for moving the event to Olympic Village is the centrality and transit accessibility of the location (Jerven 2013), the Food Cart Fest now takes place on city-owned property in a site that the municipal government is actively trying to develop and promote as a residential neighborhood. As part of the Vancouver bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, this formerly industrial area in Southeast False Creek was chosen to accommodate athletes and redeveloped as a waterfront residential community. The City of Vancouver entered into an agreement with Millennium Developments Corporation for the construction over eight hundred units of market housing, as well as 252 units designated as affordable housing, a community center, and a childcare facility (Scherer 2011). The decision to host the Winter Olympics was interpreted as a form of urban boosterism (Hiller 2000, McCann 2013), and “luxury units in the Olympic Village were marketed as ‘a world address’” (VanWynsberghe, Surborg, and Wyly 2013, 2075).

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Scherer (2011) notes that the $193 billion price proposed for the developer to purchase the land after the Olympic Games “set a national record and provided an indication of the revenues that were initially projected by the developer to justify the high cost of the land” (786). However, a subsequent recession, combined with construction cost overages and low condo presales, convinced the developer to break its agreement, leaving the City of Vancouver with both the land title and responsibility for the Olympic Village development. The newly built False Creek neighborhood proved an unpopular address; although the recession had a significant impact on condo sales, the housing—which had been designed to serve as a selfcontained community for athletes—was viewed as isolated and placeless. Left with $630 million in debt from the Olympic Village, the municipal government was forced to try to salvage the project and its image, to foster a sense of place, and to create a vibrant local community integrated into the larger urban fabric. The presence of the Vancouver Food Cart Fest created an immediate urbanity at the Olympic Village, serving as a form of portable infrastructure. Having finally sold the last of its stake in the Olympic Village development in 2014, the City of Vancouver is currently engaged in a project to redevelop the surrounding land. With the LEED-certified1 Olympic Village at its core, the new Southeast False Creek project is slated to be “a leading model of sustainable development” (City of Vancouver 2014); the presence of food trucks have helped support the branding of this project. The Food Cart Fest is designated a Zero Waste event and marketed as a green initiative, a branding strategy that positions the Food Cart Fest as a natural fit for the environmentally friendly community being built around it. At the same time, food trucks help change the image of the Olympic Village, which has featured prominently in Vancouver media as a fiscal disaster and political albatross. Although food trucks have been used to support neighborhood development for both underserved communities and new luxury housing developments, the existence of forms of mobile infrastructure is even more useful for supporting megaevents. Competition to stage international megaevents has become an increasingly common method for attracting investment and restructuring urban economies (Hannigan 2005; Hiller 1998, 2006), stimulating urban redevelopment (Andranovich, Burbank, and Heying 2001; Hiller 2000; Lehrer and Laidley 2008; Scherer 2011), and both crafting and marketing urban identities (Evans 2003; Hall 2006; Hiller 2000). The Olympic Games provide arguably the most famous example of this (Gold and Gold 2008), but other sporting competitions, music festivals, and cultural

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events are leveraged in these same ways (García 2004). Hosting megaevents requires significant urban infrastructure; the exigencies of projects like the Olympic Games do not necessarily correspond with postevent needs (Leontidou et al. 2007; Panagiotopoulou 2014). Moreover, sparse food, drink, and retail near megaevents can negatively impact a city’s reputation, defeating the purpose of staging events in the first place. The presence of food trucks can support megaevents, once again acting as forms of portable infrastructure. In Vancouver, food trucks can be found at the annual Pride Parade, an event that always garners international attention, as well as at other parades and celebrations, street festivals, cultural events, and music festivals. These events, like food trucks, again help to dispel Vancouver’s no-fun city reputation, and foster the enjoyment of urban space for city residents; however, welcome as these events may be, they nevertheless support efforts to reimagine and rescript the city through megaevents. Food trucks may be a popular addition to the Vancouver landscape, but they can be coopted into strategies of urban change that have the perverse effect of contributing to gentrification in ways that risk displacing the very urban residents who want to live in a more fun city in the first place. Livable Vancouver Despite their role in scripting the city, food trucks cannot be taken to represent the top-down imposition of a specific identity or an elite-driven brand image onto Vancouver. They also represent a popular desire for a more interesting streetscape and a truly livable city, as well as the creation of policies that can perhaps best be understood in terms of compromise. Given the current global context of neoliberal urbanism, each policy change that makes city streets more interesting, lively, or fun can be leveraged into forms of urban competitiveness. Street vending had been largely removed from Vancouver streets in an attempt to modernize the streets and reduce disorder yet was brought back, in part by public demand. Despite their populist appeal, food trucks are used to build the brand that is Vancouver and to sell specific visions of both the city and its residents. Current licensing practices play into larger attempts to script Vancouver’s image as a multicultural, healthy, and green city, as well as to create the forms of mobile infrastructure that can support urban redevelopment. Rather than only provide tasty snacks and quick meals, food trucks are tasked to sell nutritious food and are deployed in the promotion of healthy lifestyles as personal virtues. Moreover, because food trucks are

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used to “tame” urban space, they can contribute to patterns of gentrification, securitization, and displacement. Despite their ostensible inclusivity, with licensing deeply embedded in the multicultural promise of Vancouver, food trucks are also used to reimagine and rescript the city. Whether as a form of portable urbanity that can be used to support megaevents or as the principle draw in street food festivals staged to attract capital investment, food trucks provide mobile infrastructure that can be leveraged to drive urban growth and foster redevelopmentled accumulation strategies. The portable urbanity conjured by food trucks certainly does help make Vancouver a more livable and more fun place for residents; nevertheless, the very same street food that helps to create a livable and inclusive city is simultaneously leveraged in strategies that drive gentrification and contribute to displacement from the urban core. Note 1.  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification is granted to buildings and neighborhood developments that comply with certain standards and industry best practices aimed at fostering environmental sustainability through the efficient use of resources.

References Andranovich, Greg, Matthew J. Burbank, and Charles H. Heying. 2001. “Olympic Cities: Lessons Learned from Mega-Event Politics.” Journal of Urban Affairs 23 (2): 113–131. Arrival Agency. 2015. http://www.arrivalagency.com/. Ayo, Nike. 2012. “Understanding Health Promotion in a Neoliberal Climate and the Making of Health Conscious Citizens.” Critical Public Health 22 (1): 99–105. Barnes, Trevor, and Thomas Hutton. 2009. “Situating the New Economy: Contingencies of Regeneration and Dislocation in Vancouver’s Inner City.” Urban Studies 46 (5–6): 1247–1269. Beriss, David, and David Sutton. 2007. The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat. Oxford: Berg. Blomley, Nicholas. 2007. “Civil Rights Meet Civil Engineering: Urban Public Space and Traffic Logic.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 22 (2): 55–72.

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Evans, Graeme. 2009. “Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy.” Urban Studies 46 (5–6): 1003–1040. Foucault, Michel. 2009. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Translated by G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. García, Beatriz. 2004. “Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration in Western European Cities: Lessons from Experience, Prospects for the Future.” Local Economy 19 (4): 312–326. Gold, John R., and Margaret M. Gold. 2008. “Olympic Cities: Regeneration, City Rebranding and Changing Urban Agendas.” Geography Compass 2 (1): 300–318. Hall, C. Michael. 2006. “Urban Entrepreneurship, Corporate Interests and Sports Mega-Events: The Thin Policies of Competitiveness within the Hard Outcomes of Neoliberalism.” Sociological Review 54 (s2): 59–70. Hannigan, John. 2005. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71 (1): 3–17. Hiller, Harry H. 1998. “Assessing the Impact of Mega-events: A Linkage Model.” Current Issues in Tourism 1 (1): 47–57. Hiller, Harry H. 2000. “Mega-Events, Urban Boosterism and Growth Strategies: An Analysis of the Objectives and Legitimations of the Cape Town 2004 Olympic Bid.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (2): 449–458. Hiller, Harry H. 2006. “Post-Event Outcomes and the Post-Modern Turn: The Olympics and Urban Transformations.” European Sport Management Quarterly 6 (4): 317–332. Jerven, Taraneh. 2013. “Vancouver Summer Food Cart Fest Returns: Tasty Eats Every Sunday June 20–Sept. 22.” Inside Vancouver, June 13. http://www.insidevancouver .ca/2013/06/13/vancouver-summer-food-cart-fest-returns-tasty-eats-every-sunday -june-23-sept-22/. Kärrholm, Mattias. 2009. “To the Rhythm of Shopping: On Synchronisation in Urban Landscapes of Consumption.” Social & Cultural Geography 10 (4): 421–440. Kataoka, Serena. 2009. “Vancouverism: Actualizing the Livable City Paradox.” Berkeley Planning Journal 22 (1): 42–57. Kavaratzis, Michalis. 2004. “From City Marketing to City Branding: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Developing City Brands.” Place Branding 1 (1): 58–73.

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Lehrer, Ute, and Jennefer Laidley. 2008. “Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (4): 786–803. Lehrer, Ute, and Thorben Wieditz. 2009. “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship between Policies, Building Activities and Socio-economic Development in Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18 (1): 140–161. Leontidou, Lila, Alex Afouxenidis, Elias Kourliouros, and Emmanuel Marmaras. 2007. “Infrastructure-Related Urban Sprawl: Mega-events and Hybrid Peri-urban Landscapes in Southern Europe.” In Urban Sprawl in Europe: Landscape, Land-Use Change and Policy, edited by Chris Couch, Lila Leontidou, and Gerhard PetschelHeld, 71–98. Oxford: Blackwell. Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. New York: Oxford University Press. Ley, David. 2003. “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40 (12): 2527–2544. Lorentzen, Anne. 2009. “Cities in the Experience Economy.” European Planning Studies 17 (6): 829–845. MacLeod, Gordon. 2011. “Urban Politics Reconsidered: Growth Machine to Postdemocratic City?” Urban Studies 48 (12): 2629–2660. Markusen, Ann, and Greg Schrock. 2009. “Consumption-Driven Urban Development.” Urban Geography 30 (4): 344–367. Martin, Nina. 2014. “Food Fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1867–1883. McCann, Eugene. 2013. “Policy Boosterism, Policy Mobilities, and the Extrospective City.” Urban Geography 34 (1): 5–29. McCann, Eugene J. 2004. “‘Best Places’: Interurban Competition, Quality of Life and Popular Media Discourse.” Urban Studies 41 (10): 1909–1929. McCann, Eugene, and Kevin Ward. 2011. Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, Katharyne. 2003. “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (4): 387–403. Molotch, Harvey. 1976. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology 82 (2): 309–332.

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Newman, Lenore Lauri, and Katherine Burnett. 2013. “Street Food and Vibrant Urban Spaces: Lessons from Portland, Oregon.” Local Environment 18 (2): 233–248. Panagiotopoulou, Roy. 2014. “The Legacies of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games: A Bitter-Sweet Burden.” Contemporary Social Science 9 (2): 173–195. Perkins, Harold A. 2009. “Turning Feral Spaces into Trendy Places: A Coffee House in Every Park?” Environment & Planning A 41 (11): 2615–2632. Pill, Alexandra. 2014. “Changing Food Landscapes.” In Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health and Governance, edited by Vieira Cardoso Ryzia de Cássia, Michèle Companion, and Stefano Roberto Marras, 119–132. New York: Routledge. Pratt, Andy C. 2008. “Creative Cities: The Cultural Industries and the Creative Class.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 90 (2): 107–117. Quastel, Noah. 2009. “Political Ecologies of Gentrification.” Urban Geography 30 (7): 694–725. Quastel, Noah, Markus Moos, and Nicholas Lynch. 2012. “Sustainability-as-Density and the Return of the Social: The Case of Vancouver, British Columbia.” Urban Geography 33 (7): 1055–1084. Scherer, Jay. 2011. “Olympic Villages and Large-Scale Urban Development: Crises of Capitalism, Deficits of Democracy?” Sociology 45 (5): 782–797. Schinkel, Willem, and Friso van Houdt. 2010. “The Double Helix of Cultural Assimilationism and Neo-liberalism: Citizenship in Contemporary Governmentality.” British Journal of Sociology 61 (4): 696–715. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Southworth, Michael. 2014. “Public Life, Public Space, and the Changing Art of City Design.” Journal of Urban Design 19 (1): 37–40. Vallianatos, Mark. 2015. “Compl(eat)ing the Streets: Legalizing Sidewalk Food Vending in Los Angeles.” In Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities, edited by Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman, 205–224. New York: Routledge. Vancouver Food Policy Council. 2013. Vancouver Food Strategy. Vancouver: City of Vancouver. VanWynsberghe, Rob, Inge Derom, and Elizabeth Maurer. 2012. “Social Leveraging of the 2010 Olympic Games: ‘Sustainability’ in a City of Vancouver Initiative.” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 4 (2): 185–205. VanWynsberghe, Rob, Björn Surborg, and Elvin Wyly. 2013. “When the Games Come to Town: Neoliberalism, Mega-events and Social Inclusion in the Vancouver

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14  Atlanta’s Food Truck Fervor: Policy Impediments and Entrepreneurial Efforts to Expand Mobile Cuisine Mackenzie Wood, Jennifer Clark, and Emma French

Atlanta’s food truck scene is thriving. The number of trucks operating in metro Atlanta grew seventeenfold over the last five years, from six trucks in 2010 to over one hundred in 2015 (Smith and Rentz Smith 2014).1 Now, every day of the week, residents and visitors can purchase an array of interesting mobile cuisine for lunch or dinner at a food truck vending location or special event somewhere in the city of Atlanta or in a surrounding suburb.2 On Monday nights between six and nine o’clock, families gather in a gravel parking lot in the center of Decatur, an in-town suburb just east of Atlanta, to enjoy an al fresco dinner at the Loaded Burger truck or the Genki Noodles and Sushi truck. In Midtown, one of Atlanta’s three business districts, office workers enjoy a novel assortment of Thursday lunch options from more than fifteen food trucks, including the Yumbii Korean taco truck and the Wow! arepas food truck. Groups of hipsters, teens, and young families descend on the all-season Atlanta Food Truck Park on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights to enjoy a live band and sample lobster mac from the Mac the Cheese truck, pulled pork sliders from the Sweet Auburn BBQ truck, or a collard greens quesadilla from the Blaxican truck. The success of local food trucks is not due to supportive governmental policies. Rather, it is due to persistent citizen participation and third-party intermediary intervention in the policy-making and industry-building process. Atlanta’s early food truck advocates and owners faced seemingly insurmountable barriers in the form of antiquated vending laws and restrictive space provisions. Their tactical, creative, and community-oriented solutions to these challenges led to the creation of what quickly became a robust industry. This chapter details the evolution of the municipal and state policy environments around vending and space regulation, the impact of these regulations on Atlanta’s food truck movement, and the ways in which metro

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Figure 14.1 Scene from Atlanta’s thriving food truck industry. Photo by Dustin Grau Photography, courtesy of Duluth Food Truck Fridays.

Atlanta’s jurisdictional mosaic facilitated the rapid diffusion of this local food truck industry, from the central city to suburban cities. The first section identifies the policy obstacles that pushed food truck entrepreneurs and advocates to develop creative alternatives to and workarounds for the existing legal barriers. The second section examines the vital role of third-party intermediaries in the evolution of the food truck movement in Atlanta. The final section considers the social implications of the food truck movement. Despite many hurdles, the expansion of food truck cuisine in Atlanta demonstrates how a determined group of individuals can build a new entrepreneurial model and a community that supports it. Through an analysis of legislative records, newspaper articles, and academic literature, we have assembled a historical account of city vending policies and traced the development of Atlanta’s food truck industry. In addition, because the food truck industry has a heavy digital presence we have added empirical detail to the narrative by conducting a systematic survey of social media accounts, which provides a snapshot of the industry in 2015. Sources include local and national food blogs, as well as websites and Facebook and Twitter pages run by key industry actors, including operating food trucks, advocacy organizations, and municipalities that host regular food truck events.

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Identifying and Removing Barriers: Urban Policies and Atlanta’s Regulation of Public Spaces and Mobile Food In 2008, the inspiration for food trucks came to Atlanta much in the same way, and around the same time, that it arrived in other US cities. A small group of food enthusiasts visited cities like Los Angeles and Portland and began asking why Atlanta didn’t have a food truck scene (Smith and Rentz Smith 2014). These early enthusiasts included Greg Smith and Maggie Rentz Smith, lawyers who would go on to found the Atlanta Street Food Coalition (ASFC), and Carson Young, a restaurateur whose Yumbii truck, started in 2004, is considered Atlanta’s first food truck (Wenk 2014). As these enthusiasts joined with others to figure out how Atlanta could develop a food truck scene, they encountered specific permitting issues at the state and local levels. Food trucks, like all businesses in Georgia, have specific regulatory requirements. Some of these proved particularly anachronistic when applied to this emerging industry. In order to operate as a business, food truck owners are required to be registered with the state as a local business and annually obtain county health department permits (Smith 2015b). They are also required to have their vehicles approved by the State Department of Community Health. Finally, they must have access to a commercial kitchen for food preparation (Smith 2015b).3 The ASFC’s first major success came with the State Department of Public Health’s designation of a Mobile Food Service Unit permit, which in 2012 distinguished food trucks from caterers, street carts, and kiosks. This statelevel policy change removed a critical barrier by creating the category of vehicle-vendor mobile food service units, allowing increased mobility of trucks between multiple vending locations in a single day (Smith 2015b; GA Department of Public Health 2012). Official, state-sanctioned food truck entrepreneurs were now able to sell their mobile cuisine anywhere in Georgia. Laboring under Outdated Vending Laws Atlanta’s history of controversial street food vending policies began long before the modern food truck movement arrived in the city. Unpacking this story is critical for understanding how and why Atlanta’s food truck industry emerged. In preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics hosted by Atlanta, the city council enacted a vending ordinance aimed at protecting the interests of sponsors and licensed merchants (Wenk 2014). The rules included restrictions on terms and renewal of vending permits, dictated categories of merchandise to be sold, outlined specifications for vending

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Figure 14.2 Viet Nomie’s displays health permits numbers for three metro Atlanta counties: Fulton, DeKalb, and Cobb. Photo by Mackenzie Wood.

carts, and limited vending locations on public property (enacting a lotterytype selection process to assign the limited spaces; City of Atlanta 2014c). These rules remained the baseline for the city’s street vending policies for the next twenty years (Thurow 1997; Wenk 2014). Also in advance of Atlanta’s Olympic Games, Mayor Bill Campbell signed a contract with a young entrepreneur and friend who predicted that he could make the city as much as $17 million from street vendors during the summer Olympic games (Smothers 1995). The contract, approved by Atlanta City Council, gave B. G. Swing Games Management exclusive vending rights in prime locations during the Olympics at a fraction of the cost that others were paying for vending rights (Smothers 1995). The city ultimately failed to realize the income anticipated in the vending contract (Smothers 1996; Thurow 1997). Mayor Campbell’s inside deal drew criticism from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Olympic sponsors like the Coca-Cola Company and Kodak, and even local officials on the city’s Vending Review Board (Smothers 1995). The contract also led to multiple lawsuits on behalf of more than two hundred vendors who claimed

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upward of $20 million in damages as a consequence of the preferential vending contract awarded to a privileged competitor (Smothers 1996; Thurow 1997). In 2009, more than a decade after Atlanta hosted the Olympics, street food vendors received another blow when Mayor Shirley Franklin outsourced the city’s Public Vending Program, which oversaw the leasing of public property designated for vending, to a subsidiary of General Growth Properties, Inc., based in Chicago (Pill 2014). This marketing contract was the first of its kind in the country and received criticism from the street vending community in Atlanta and elsewhere (Ewing 2011). The outsourcing contract created a virtual vending monopoly that forced small, independent vendors to pay up to $20,000 a year instead of the average of $3,000 per year for a spot in Downtown Atlanta, thus driving many out of the market (Institute for Justice 2015). Atlanta’s emerging food truck industry found that this cost would also apply to food truck vending within the city. After struggling for two years under this subcontract, in July 2011 two Atlanta street vendors, represented by the Institute of Justice, sued the city. In Miller v. City of Atlanta, they argued that the city unfairly monopolized the right to manage vending on public property by outsourcing the leasing process to General Growth Properties Inc. (Superior Court of Fulton County 2012). The lawsuit stretched over four years, just as the Atlanta food truck movement was taking shape. Ultimately, Fulton County Superior Court ruled in favor of the vendors. Emergence of Third-Party Intermediaries Atlanta street vendors’ partial victory in Miller v. City of Atlanta reshaped the vending landscape. It also highlighted the role of policy entrepreneurs who strategically targeted political supporters and community members to make policy changes in the long term while simultaneously finding ways to adapt to an outmoded policy environment. In 2010, Maggie and Greg Smith cofounded the ASFC, which quickly adopted the logistical role of advising and assisting new food truck entrepreneurs through the permitting process while continuing to advocate for revisions to existing regulations (Wenk 2014). With the establishment of a formal advocacy organization, private citizens who supported the evolving food truck community were able to participate in the remaking of the food truck policy design process. This phenomenon of adaptation and navigation pursued through ASFC in Atlanta aligns with what Clark describes as actors who are engaged

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in program delivery as “third sector intermediaries” that “mediate space between markets and local governments ... [and] organize access to [public] services for new and emerging populations” (Clark 2017, 59). ASFC, comprised of food truck owners and citizen advocates, became a key third sector intermediary in the Atlanta food truck movement, offering legal support, marketing advice, and workshops for aspiring food truck owners. In the years since Miller v. City of Atlanta, ASFC and other intermediary organizations have pushed to streamline the permitting process for food trucks in metro Atlanta. They have largely succeeded, making the mobile food movement more viable and vibrant. Making Space: Finessing a Space Solution Faced with the protracted court battle to resolve the vending issue, ASFC realized that building a vibrant food truck industry required immediate action beyond contesting existing laws. ASFC joined forces with several City of Atlanta council members to find a solution to the “vending space” problem. ASFC organized two test food truck lunch events, the first in March of 2011 at the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, which serves as Downtown Atlanta’s municipal market and food court. The second event was a month later at the Woodruff Arts Center, the regional arts complex located in Midtown, a dense, office-building-packed section of Atlanta. These events were designed to ascertain customer interest in food trucks and to pilot the idea of using publicly accessible private spaces for vending. By the summer of 2011, about a dozen food trucks were vending in a variety of quasi-public spaces. Every day of the week, a food truck could be found somewhere in the city—at Underground Atlanta and the Curb Market in the heart of Atlanta’s downtown commercial district; at office complexes in well-heeled in-town neighborhoods such as Inman Park; at the Woodruff Arts Center; or at Atlantic Station, Atlanta’s hip, young business district. In addition, weekly dinner vending occurred at privately owned surface parking lots in neighborhoods around metro Atlanta, including Buckhead, an affluent, uptown commercial and financial district, and Virginia Highlands, a well-to-do, residential, in-town neighborhood (Valentine 2011). In September 2011, following these events, the Atlanta City Council passed the Atlanta food truck ordinance, which was revised in November 2014 (City of Atlanta 2014a). The new law officially sanctioned food truck operations on private property in commercial areas throughout Atlanta and established the ground rules for vending in Atlanta, including an expansion to two vending locations per truck and a two-hundred-foot

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proximity ban from brick-and-mortar restaurants that sell similar products (Pill 2014). Claiming and Creating Space The new ordinance allowed private property owners that met the space criteria to host any number of food truck events, and in the summer of 2012, several private property owners, including Livable Buckhead, Atlantic Station, and Midtown Alliance, attempted to organize their own food truck events. The reality of organizing food trucks in these spaces and ensuring customers knew where to find the trucks proved challenging. In 2012, Atlantic Station, a privately owned outdoor retail and residential multiuse development built on brownfields in Midtown Atlanta, attempted to organize a series of food truck events for residents and shoppers. The management company decided to make the food trucks bid on spaces on the Monday of the week in which they wanted to vend. The company, however, failed to confirm which vendors had won the bid until midweek, causing confusion and scheduling problems. This space no longer hosts food trucks (Chopra 2012). Two years later, in the summer of 2014, both Livable Buckhead and Midtown Alliance partnered with the ASFC to produce food truck events. Buckhead Food Truck Tuesdays and Midtown Street Food Thursdays continue to be weekly events. Howard Hsu, the owner of the Sweet Auburn BBQ restaurant and food truck, was another key intermediary space maker. As a truck owner, he found his greatest challenge was ensuring predictable business for his food truck. In the spring of 2012, he and several partners opened the Atlanta Food Truck Park and Market (the AFTP) to provide a permanent space for truck vending and community building. Located on a three-acre repurposed hotel site in northwest Atlanta, the park rotates through a list of forty-two trucks among its fifteen vending spaces. The AFTP is open Thursday through Sunday year-round and caters to an average of a thousand customers daily (Guey 2013). Hsu also serves as a mentor for truck owners who vend in this space, helping them navigate the permitting process and grow their businesses (Philbrick 2013). Accessing Public Places In March 2014, the Atlanta City Council passed legislation allowing food trucks to vend on designated city streets. The public property food truck policy regulates vending on public streets and distinguishes food trucks from Atlanta’s right-of-way vending policy, which regulates cart and kiosk vending on city sidewalks and is managed by a third-party contractor.

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Currently, the public property vending program is limited to a concentrated area of downtown streets, known as Government Walk, with highdensity governmental buildings. In the first phase of the program, the city has set aside thirty-six metered parking spaces, which can accommodate up to eighteen trucks; each truck is allocated two parking spots. Truck owners pay the meter for the parking spots, but no time limits apply (City of Atlanta 2014b). This new public property vending program has been less successful than expected given the popularity of food trucks at other locations in and around the city. According to Greg Smith, the city has plans to expand into other areas, but city officials are split in their support for food trucks. As Mayor Kasim Reed pushes for stricter policies limiting street food vending, some council members are trying to make it easier for food trucks to vend on private and public property (NLC 2013). The push for policy changes governing food trucks in the city has waned as private spaces that function like public spaces have embraced the food trucks throughout metro Atlanta. Reaching across the Region The number of food trucks open for business continued to expand, from thirty-two by the end of 2011 to fifty-two by the end of 2012.4 The number of vending sites also grew, and food truck culture took on a central role in the Atlanta social scene. In a 2011 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, ASFC cofounder Greg Smith said that the food truck scene “has become a real social atmosphere. That’s not something I was really thinking about going into this, but it’s really cool.” The article notes that some customers traveled miles from their home communities to enjoy food truck fare in the middle of the city. As food truck popularity grew, so did the push to bring food trucks to outlying cities and suburbs of Atlanta. In 2012, Bettie Cagle, a native of the city of Smyrna ten miles northwest of Downtown Atlanta and owner of Redbird Events, took on the task of expanding the Atlanta food truck movement to suburban cities in the metro region. An event planner by trade, Cagle saw the potential for the food truck movement in and around Atlanta to expand. Working with a private parking lot owner, she established one of the early vending spaces in Virginia Highlands, an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood in northeast Atlanta. Her food truck–catered dinner events were a hit among the young families and twenty-somethings in the neighborhood. Building on that success, Cagle approached Smyrna’s community relations director about the possibility of establishing a weekly food truck event in her hometown.

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Figure 14.3 Kennesaw Food Truck Mondays, Community Block Party event. City of Kennesaw, Cobb County Georgia. Photo courtesy of Dinner at the Depot.

Smyrna’s Food Truck Tuesdays were the first food truck events organized outside the city of Atlanta (Chopra 2012). The event is now held on Tuesday evenings between five and nine o’clock from May through September in Taylor-Brawner Park, a ten-acre public park in south Smyrna. Redbird Events currently manages a roster of twenty-five food trucks that they help connect with local municipalities, either as a service or partnership in six northern and eastern Atlanta suburbs, including Avondale Estates, Duluth, and Dunwoody. The model for service delivery in Atlanta’s suburban cities differs considerably from the experience within the city of Atlanta. As second-stage adopters, these cities entered into the market engaging with a more mature food truck movement, with established vendors, and with a developed customer base, and thus they did not face the same challenges and uncertainties as the city of Atlanta’s first food trucks. The decision to allow food truck vending in these independent suburban municipalities was not hampered by the same legal complications that shaped Atlanta’s street food vending history. Redbird Events facilitated the diffusion of the food truck industry geographically throughout the Atlanta region by identifying potential vending locations throughout metro Atlanta. In so doing, it served as a critical intermediary in the growth of the Atlanta food truck industry. Redbird

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Events’ role in growing Atlanta’s food truck movement aligns with Clark’s definition of third-sector intermediaries, a group that includes those actors who are “provisioning new services through diffusion of new technologies ... and expand[ing] how to provide old services through diffusion of new models” (Clark 2017, 59). Although food trucks are not a new technology in the traditional sense, their current iteration as the purveyor of outdoor, place-based fusion cuisine in metro Atlanta can be considered a new service for the local market. The Role of Intermediaries With the help of intermediaries, regular food truck vending has taken hold in four major counties in metro Atlanta: Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett. The ASFC and Redbird Events play distinct but overlapping roles, and each works primarily in distinct regions. The ASFC’s emphasis is supporting food truck vendors and expanding the food truck industry as a whole through local policy and legal advocacy. ASFC is a membership-based organization campaigning for “safe, affordable, and legal access to street food in Atlanta and the surrounding metro area.” The ASFC and Redbird Events comanage food truck events with suburban cities in the Atlanta Metro area. The ASFC, however, focuses on coordinating and supporting trucks, whereas Redbird Events sees cities and communities as its customer, offering services that include event production and management (ASFC 2015; Redbird Events 2015). Due to the current dearth of public vending space, Atlanta’s food trucks vend in multiple spaces several days a week in order to remain financially viable. Within the current policy restrictions dictated by the Mobile Vending Unit permit, the only way to support the growing number of food trucks is to create additional spaces for operation. The ASFC and Redbird Events identify and manage vending sites inside and outside of the city of Atlanta to create a one-of-a-kind vending experience for food trucks owners and customers alike. Many food trucks also cater special events, working directly with local universities, movie production companies, and farmers’ markets. Now that the industry infrastructure is relatively mature, private citizens have followed Cagle’s example and begun organizing food truck events in outlying cities. In 2015, the Gwinnett Braves Minor League Baseball team hosted a summer series of food truck Sunday Suppers at its ball field in Lawrenceville, thirty miles northeast of Downtown Atlanta. Trinity Chapel School hosts a weekly food truck event called West Cobb Food Trucks in Powder Springs, twenty-two miles west of Downtown Atlanta. Some eighteen miles

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from the heart of Atlanta, the east Cobb shopping center, Paper Mill Village, hosts Food Truck Mondays with a local radio station. And local truck rental company BizServe hosts Food Truck Sunday in Mableton, fourteen miles northwest of the city center. These events are typically family-friendly and include music and games for children. Many also operate their own websites and Facebook pages. Multiple Dimensions of Space With few exceptions, food truck entrepreneurs in Atlanta operate like any other businesses, charging market prices and targeting populations that can afford their products. While some have argued that creative small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as food trucks have the potential to support social and economic justice (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006; Sobel and Agyeman 2013; Agyeman and McEntee 2014), there is little evidence that the food truck movement in Atlanta is expanding access to low-income populations, nor is it opening up the business market to aspiring minority or female entrepreneurs. What the food truck movement is doing differently that distinguishes its operations is (1) expanding access to a greater variety of fast, distinctive culinary options in densely populated urban and suburban areas; (2) fostering the development of a food truck community of owners and advocates; and (3) creating new spaces for community gatherings. The Atlanta food truck movement affects the use of public space. In the eighteen cities and four metro Atlanta counties in which food trucks currently operate, formerly neglected or underused spaces have turned into dynamic places. Food truck events are creating profitable cultural experiences in “forgotten spaces” (Haydn and Temel 2006), such as privately owned parking lots and vacant lots, publicly owned school and city hall parking lots, and public and private parks. To people attending these events, the focus of which is the food supplied by the trucks, the spaces become temporary, outdoor food courts. The spaces themselves serve as examples of temporary urbanism in which limited use requires minimal alternatives to the existing space and does not preclude other uses. Food truck events address the demand for outdoor social events across the Atlanta metro area, and Atlanta’s food truck movement benefits from this market opportunity. Atlanta’s temperate climate allows food trucks to vend for much of the year. Customers enjoy food truck meals at picnic tables, and some events feature live entertainment, including games and activities for children and families at evening events. About 60 percent of

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these sites are open from late spring to early fall, and the other 40 percent operate year-round. Social Media and New Uses of Space The ability of food trucks—with events and more regular vending—to redefine physical urban space is facilitated by social media. Exemplifying Merrifield’s claim in The New Urban Question that “twenty-first century urban spaces of the city will then be public spaces ... because they are meeting places between virtual and physical worlds, between online and offline conversations, between online and offline encounters” (2014, 83), Atlanta’s food truck industry is driven by social media and an online presence. Eighty-nine percent of food trucks (or ninety-nine trucks) have a Facebook account, and 75 percent of those that have accounts post at least once a week. Eighty-eight percent (ninety-eight trucks) have a Twitter account, and 12 percent (thirteen trucks) have an Instagram account, allowing food truck entrepreneurs to communicate directly with their customers, market daily specials, and share their locations on a minute-by-minute basis.5 Both the ASFC and Redbird Events maintain active Facebook pages, manage detailed calendars of their upcoming food truck events, and provide digital content for trucks and vending sites. In addition, Roaming Hunger has emerged on the national scene as an influential digital intermediary that facilitates food truck vending. Headquartered in Los Angeles, its online food truck directory and Food Truck Finder app tracks trucks in thirty-seven major cities, including Atlanta. Online engagement has been a key tactic for growing and maintaining the customer base necessary for a thriving food truck industry. Social media is an integral part of the food truck industry infrastructure, organically driving citizens to “a parking lot that has been transformed into an open air restaurant because of food trucks” and providing the necessary information infrastructure for this industry to exist (Merrifield 2014). Expanding Access, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity? Food truck advocates have argued that this movement has the potential to promote social justice in a variety of ways. For example, food trucks could offer a greater variety of more affordable food to low- and middle-income populations because of lower operating costs compared to standard restaurants. In Atlanta, there are nineteen weekly suburban food truck vending events, and six are in municipalities with less than 10 percent of residents living below the poverty line. Eleven events are in municipalities in which

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between 10 and 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line, and two events are in municipalities with slightly higher poverty rates (a little more than 20 percent; US Census Bureau 2010). Within the city of Atlanta, there are twelve weekly vending sites. Ten of these sites cater to the lunch crowd in business districts or office parks. These lunch events occur in a mix of neighborhoods, including higherincome neighborhoods such as Midtown and Buckhead, as well as in Downtown Atlanta, where 55.8 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, and Southwest Atlanta, where 38.4 percent of residents live below the poverty line (US Census Bureau 2010). Although food trucks may be vending in areas with lower-income residents, much of the lunch crowd in these neighborhoods consists of nonresident customers from nearby offices or academic institutions. It should be noted that the estimated number of daytime office workers in Downtown Atlanta exceeds 100,000, compared to a resident population of 26,000. The two in-town Atlanta dinner vending events operate in higher-income neighborhoods around the VirginiaHighlands and Howell Mill areas. In Atlanta, food trucks pursue strategies that vary by meal (lunch vs. dinner) and allow them to meet the market where it is. The complex regulatory environment affects their strategies and their costs. Food trucks could also provide greater access to fresh foods and vegetables for neighborhoods that lack access to full-service grocery stores— that is, neighborhoods located in food deserts. In Atlanta, mobile farmers’ market trucks do exist. However, they operate distinctly from the broader Atlanta food truck movement largely because of the complex regulatory framework that makes clear distinctions between selling prepared foods and selling fruits and vegetables. Finally, the aggregation of food trucks in vending spaces with multiple options and many choices for consumers could bring down prices simply by concentrating supply. There is no evidence of falling prices in Atlanta. In addition, recent reporting on the food truck industry suggests increased competition has led to increased market segmentation, skewing toward gourmet offerings rather than affordable food. The number of food trucks in the United States doubled between 2007 and 2012 during the economic recession (McMillan 2014). In Atlanta, food trucks tend to specialize in gourmet fusion foods—such as lobster mac and cheese—for a price close to what a consumer would pay at a mid-range restaurant. This is a variation from a narrative in which food truck cuisine is viewed as simple, familiar food served to people near their worksites for modest prices. In Atlanta, food trucks are offering novel foods and a city experience at market prices.

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Expanding Entrepreneurial Engagement It is also argued that food trucks could advance entrepreneurial diversity because of lower start-up and operating costs, resulting in lower barriers to entry. The argument is that those entrepreneurs who generally have less access to capital (women, minorities, new immigrants) can start a food truck but perhaps not a traditional restaurant. In the Atlanta area, although starting a food truck is less expensive than opening a conventional brickand-mortar restaurant, it does require a significant investment. On average, starting a food truck in Atlanta costs around $70,000 (Mah 2014).6 Purchasing a truck or trailer can cost between $40,000 and $125,000. Auto insurance, general liability, and workers’ compensation insurance run between $2,400 and $3,500. Permits, which are required for each vending location, cost $500 per location. Rent for a permitted kitchen is $1,200 per month on average. Membership to the ASFC has a price: $500 for the first year and $250 for subsequent years. All this is in addition to general operating costs, including labor, supplies, inventory, and fuel. Furthermore, due to the difficulty of valuing a food truck as collateral, traditional financing options are not commonly available to the average food truck entrepreneur, and food truck owners rely heavily on personal savings or private, third-party financing (Smith 2015b). In Atlanta, lower start-up costs are not associated with a greater diversity among food truck entrepreneurs compared to other businesses and restaurants. In fact, the entrepreneurs in the Atlanta food truck industry look like their counterparts in other industries. According to industry estimates for metro Atlanta, African Americans own around 30 percent of food trucks, and Hispanics, Asians, or Pacific Islanders own about another 10 percent (Smith 2015a). These estimates align with the 2007 business census, which found that African Americans owned approximately 30 percent of businesses in Atlanta and that Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders owned around 8 percent (US Census Bureau 2007). The rates were slightly different in Georgia as a whole, where African Americans own approximately 20 percent of businesses and Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders own around 9 percent. According to industry estimates, men own approximately 80 percent of food trucks operating in metro Atlanta, and women own around 20 percent (Smith 2015a). The 2007 census bureau estimates for female-owned businesses in Atlanta and Georgia were 33 percent and 30 percent, respectively, thus indicating that female entrepreneurs are less well represented in the food truck industry than in businesses across the state and region (US Census Bureau 2007).

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Cuisine as Cultural Identity Another way that the food truck movement could advance diversity, access, and equity is by creating the opportunity for a nontraditional group of immigrant and ethnic food entrepreneurs to expose a wide audience to cuisine from other cultures (Sobel and Agyeman 2013). Food can have powerful influences on the development of an individual and a society’s identity (Beoku-Betts 1995; Fischler 1988). The Atlanta food truck case potentially supports this argument, particularly in a region with relatively small Asian and Hispanic populations. Thirty-six percent of food trucks specialize in a specific type of ethnic cuisine or a fusion of different cuisines. Food trucks like Yumbii Korean taco truck or Wow! arepas food truck offer Asian or Hispanic foods and are among a popular group of trucks that offer ethnic food that is primarily available in Atlanta’s suburban immigrant enclaves spatially removed from central city business districts, universities, and intown neighborhoods. In one set of interviews with Atlanta food truck owners, Pill found that some started their businesses for the express purpose of sharing their culture’s cuisine with the broader community (Pill 2014). Our data confirms this general trend. However, our data does not confirm whether the owner of a food truck serving ethnic cuisine is doing so as a reflection of the owner’s (or perhaps an employee’s) personal ethnic identity and food culture. In fact, there is some evidence that the food truck movement serves to more rapidly mainstream ethnic and fusion cuisine (e.g., kimchi tacos) by delinking access to these foods from the act of traveling to immigrant neighborhoods to try them. Setting aside the question of ethnic food and ethnic identity, there is evidence in the Atlanta case that food trucks—and particularly the membership organizations that facilitate their operations and events and advocate for policy change—create a community identity among food truck operators. The Atlanta case study highlights the complexity of starting and sustaining a food truck business. Atlanta food trucks owners express a shared sense of community based on shared challenges as well as shared spaces. This feeling of solidarity can be extremely important for small enterprises, and among creative SMEs, community builds in resilience to economic downturns through greater adaptability (Andres and Round 2015). The intermediary actors in the Atlanta market serve as important partners for the food truck owners, helping them traverse the permitting process, raising awareness about food trucks to ensure a sustainable customer base, and continuing to facilitate the creation of sufficient vending spaces to meet the supply and demand for food trucks.

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The Atlanta food truck case exemplifies the problems that restrictive policies can cause by demarcating public and private space in ways that privilege entrenched interests and restrict entrepreneurship and innovation. The tangled web of permitting and space regulations across municipalities in metro Atlanta has resulted in the conversion of spaces that were once binary (public or private) into hybrid public spaces. Although this transformation has been beneficial for the operation of food trucks in Atlanta, it further blurs the differentiation between public and private space. Table 14.1 illustrates the range of rules and hybrid space constructions that currently support metro Atlanta’s food truck industry. The complexity of this picture is the result of overlapping and sometimes noncomplementary relationships that state and local governments have with the regulation of space within their respective jurisdictions. It also speaks to the need of citizens to work around a disjointed system, rather that working with it. Atlanta’s food truck case shows how strategic third-party intermediaries can “enable the expansion of public services through direct delivery or by expanding the revenue opportunities for city governments” (Clark 2017, 68). By helping food truck entrepreneurs navigate through various permitting processes, third-party intermediaries have streamlined revenue opportunities for local municipalities and supported community building and entrepreneurial innovation. The effectiveness of these groups at pursing flexibility rather than formalization underscores the argument that there is a danger that cities could destroy those spaces by trying to formalize them (Cross 2000). That said, the complexity of these informal arrangements creates its own barriers to entry in the industry and a clear distinction between insiders (members of the food truck movement) and outsiders. As the Atlanta food truck industry grows and develops, the effects of the regulatory complexity and the ambiguity between public and private spaces will become increasingly evident. In addition, the hypothesis that food trucks are facilitating the mainstreaming of ethnic cuisines or potentially contributing to greater acceptance of differences will also be tested. In the Atlanta case, the food truck industry deployed across the metro region in suburban town centers and Atlanta business districts almost simultaneously. The food truck industry engaged the Atlanta metro—spatially sprawling and economically segregated—on its own terms. In so doing, the industry has created its own specific iteration of the food truck movement.

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Table 14.1 Rules and hybrid space construction supporting metro Atlanta’s food truck industry (2015) Mobile food vending permits

Written permission from land owner (part of MFVP criteria)

City of Atlanta— vending on private land (2011– present)

✓

✓

City of Atlanta— vending on designated city land (2015– present)

✓

✓

Suburban citysponsored event

✓

✓

No restriction on public space vending—vend both in public and pseudo-private spaces. Local governments in suburban cities engage intermediaries as partners or consultants to stage large events.

Suburban city private event

✓

✓

Private land owners engage food trucks directly, open event up to the public.

Vending event type

Public property food truck policy

Notes Atlanta City Council’s food truck ordinance supports vending on private property in commercial areas, no additional permits required. Large events are managed via intermediaries; one-off engagements are negotiated directly with property owner.

✓

Newest vending legislation; thirty-six metered spaces in Downtown Atlanta for vending.

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Notes 1.  Atlanta Street Food Coalition (ASFC) members constituted the 111 Atlanta area food trucks analyzed in this study. Five ASFC member trucks that have been sold or that appear from their personal websites to no longer be in business were excluded from the analysis. Although not every food truck in metro Atlanta is member of ASFC, this sample is representative of the broader population of food trucks operating in the region. 2. A thorough analysis of Atlanta’s food truck movement revealed that vending spaces were as important as the food trucks themselves. We identified thirty-three distinct vending locations throughout metro Atlanta hosting weekly food truck events in the spring and summer of 2015. Eleven of the vending spaces are in the city of Atlanta and twenty-two in surrounding suburbs. These locations were identified via ASFC’s online calendar, the Red Bird Events online calendar, and the social media and online accounts of individual trucks. 3. There is a distinction made between food sales and food services. Food sales include sales of products that are intended to be eaten off-premises. These products, such as King of Pops popsicles, are prepackaged in the kitchen in which they are produced. Food services, on the other hand, include sale of products that are intended to be eaten on-premises. If you are engaged in food services, you must obtain a health department permit from the county in which you are vending. If you are engaged in food sales, however, you are required to obtain a permit from the Georgia Department of Agriculture instead. A small commercial kitchens industry has developed around the growth of Atlanta’s food truck movement. All trucks are required to have a fully permitted commercial kitchen for food prep; about 25 percent of trucks in operation are connected to working restaurants with commercial kitchens, but the large majority use rented space (Smith 2015a). The Food Movement and PREP are two shared commercial kitchens catering specifically to food trucks. Both are membership-based organizations that also offer support for business development, advertising and promotional support, overnight parking for trucks, and access to a generator hookup (PREP 2014; Food Movement 2013). 4.  The ages of food trucks were approximated based on the year that they opened Facebook or Twitter accounts. 5.  An individual food truck’s level of engagement on social media was determined by the frequency of posts on its Facebook or Twitter page during the last prime food truck season (April to August 2015). 6.  This number is an average of starting costs for twenty-one food truck operators in Atlanta.

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References Agyeman, Julian, and Jesse McEntee. 2014. “Moving the Field of Food Justice Forward through the Lens of Urban Political Ecology.” Geography Compass 8 (3): 211–220. Andres, Lauren, and Round, J. 2015. “The Creative Economy in a Context of Transition: A Review of the Mechanism of Micro-resilience.” Cities (London, England) 45:1–6. Atlanta Street Food Coalition (ASFC). 2015. “The Atlanta Street Food Coalition.” http://www.atlantastreetfood.com/. Beoku-Betts, Josephine. 1995. “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah.” Gender & Society 9 (5): 535–555. Chopra, Sonia. 2012. “Food Truck Tuesdays Get the Green Light in Smyrna.” Atlanta Eater, July 10. City of Atlanta. 2014a. “Article XXIII: Vending in Public Right-of-Way.” June. City of Atlanta. 2014b. “City of Atlanta Public Right of Way Vending Program.” http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=1086. City of Atlanta. 2014c. “Ordinance to Amend Section 30-1431 of Chapter 30, Article XXIII: Vending in Public Right-of-Way.” May 13. http://www.atlantaga.gov/ modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=14407. Clark, Jennifer. 2017. “Third Sector Strategies for Local Development.” In The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, edited by Gordon L. Clark, Maryann P. Feldman, Meric S. Gertler, and Dariusz Wójcik, 43–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cross, John. 2000. “Street Vendors, and Postmodernity: Conflict and Compromise in the Global Economy.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20 (1–2): 29–51. Donald, B., and A. Blay-Palmer. 2006. “The Urban Creative-Food Economy: Producing Food for the Urban Elite or Social Inclusion Opportunity?” Environment & Planning 38:1901–1920. Ewing, Bob. 2011. “The Battle to Save American Street Vending.” Foundation for Economic Education: The Freeman, October 26. https://fee.org/freeman/the-battle-to -save-american-street-vending/. Fischler, Claude. 1988. “Food, Self and Identity.” Social Sciences Information: Information Sur les Sciences Sociales 27 (2): 275–293.

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Food Movement. 2013. “The Food Movement.” The Food Movement. http:// www.food-movement.com/main.html. GA Department of Public Health. 2012. “Section U: Special Food Service Operations.” State of Georgia, Department of Public Health. http://www.foodserviceresource .com/State/GA/food_svc_rules_290-5-14.08SpecialFoodServiceOperations.pdf. Guey, Lynne. 2013. “Entrepreneur Helps Set Off Food Truck Golden Age in Atlanta.” Business Insider, June 7. http://www.businessinsider.com/atlanta-food-truck-park -feeds-thousands-2013-6#ixzz3jfVHICBp. Haydn, Florian, and Robert Temel. 2006. Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces. Basel: Birkhauser. Institute for Justice. 2015. “Atlanta Strikes Out: Challenging Atlanta, Georgia’s Unconstitutional Vending Monopoly.” Institute for Justice. http://www.ij.org/case/ atlanta-vending/#backgrounder. Mah, Evan. 2014. “Your Guide to the Atlanta Food Truck Scene.” Atlanta Magazine, July 1. http://www.atlantamagazine.com/dining-news/your-guide-to-the-atlanta -food-truck-scene/. McMillan, Bo. 2014. “A $17 Sandwich?! Why Food Trucks Are Getting Expensive.” CNBC, June 27. http://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/28/a-17-sandwich-why-food-trucks -are-getting-expensive.html. Merrifield, Andy. 2014. The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press. National League of Cities (NLC). 2013. “Food on Wheels: Mobile Vending Goes Mainstream.” Washington, DC: NCL. Philbrick, H. 2013. “Howard Hsu on Year One at the Atlanta Food Truck Park.” Atlanta Eater, April 23. http://atlanta.eater.com/2013/4/23/6445201/howard-hsu-on -year-one-at-the-atlanta-food-truck-park. Pill, Alexandra. 2014. “Changing Food Landscapes: Understanding the Food Truck Movement in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.” In Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health and Governance, edited by R. C. V. Cardoso, M. Companion, and S. R. Marras, 119–132. New York: Routledge. PREP. 2014. “PREP: Cook-Create-Connect.” PREP ATL. http://www.prepatl.com/. Redbird Events. 2015. “Redbird Events Atlanta.” http://redbirdeventsatl.com/. Smith, Greg. 2015a. “Food Truck Demographic Data,” October 7. Smith, Greg. 2015b. “Street Food 101.” PREP workshop, June 13. Smith, Greg, and Maggie Rentz Smith. 2014. The Atlanta Street Food Guidebook: For Aspiring Vendors. Atlanta, GA: Smith Group.

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Smothers, Ronald. 1995. “Atlanta Vending Contract Angers Olympic’s Sponsors.” The New York Times, November 12. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/12/us/atlanta -vending-contract-angers-olympic-s-sponsors.html?src=pm. Smothers, Ronald. 1996. “Vendors Lose Round in Suit over Sites at the Atlanta Olympics.” The New York Times, October 9. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/09/ us/vendors-lose-round-in-suit-over-sites-at-the-atlanta-olympics.html. Sobel, Hannah, and Julian Agyeman. 2013. “From Loncheras to Lobsta Love: Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice.” Julian Agyeman, June 28. http:// julianagyeman.com/2013/06/from-loncheras-to-lobsta-love-food-trucks-cultural -identity-and-social-justice/. Superior Court of Fulton County. 2012. “Miller v. City of Atlanta.” Thurow, Roger. 1997. “Vendors’ Olympic Dreams Turned to Nightmares.” The Wall Street Journal, August 10. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/576998/Vendors -Olympic-dreams-turned-to-nightmares.html?pg=all. US Census Bureau. 2007. “Georgia: State and County Quick Facts.” http://www .census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045216/13. US Census Bureau. 2010. “American Fact Finder.” http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/ nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. Valentine, Katie. 2011. “Atlanta Food Truck Schedule.” Creative Loafing, July 28. http://www.clatl.com/omnivore/archives/2011/07/28/atlanta-food-truck-schedule. Wenk, Amy. 2014. “Despite Tough Regulations, Food Truck Business Gains Momentum: Atlanta’s Food Goes Mobile.” Atlanta Business Chronicle, January 3.

15  Is It Local ... or Authentic and Exotic? Ethnic Food Carts and Gastropolitan Habitus on Portland’s Eastside Nathan McClintock, Alex Novie, and Matthew Gebhardt

Celebrated as a “mighty gastropolis” (Brooks 2012), Portland, Oregon, is home to a vibrant local food movement that links the bounty of nearby farms to the wealth of farmers’ markets, farm stands, community-supported agriculture drop-offs, grocers, farm-to-table restaurants, and food carts integral to the city’s foodscape. In this chapter, we explore how food carts on Portland’s eastside provide important cultural and food resources for ethnic communities in surrounding neighborhoods while reinterpreting dominant understandings of an “urban creative-food economy” (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006, 1902) by navigating contradictory demands for local and organic ingredients and “authentic” ethnic food. Examining how small-scale retailers such as food carts fit into the mighty gastropolis provides insights into larger questions about the uneven topography of urban food system sustainability. Similar to what Newman and Newman describe occurring in Vancouver (chapter 13), food localization is an important component of Portland’s sustainability goals and to its brand as a paradigmatic Green City. Food carts operate under a permissive regulatory structure that allows them to proliferate and spread throughout the city (Rogers and Roy 2010), but just who benefits from Portland’s cornucopia of local food is unclear. More specific to the focus of this chapter, how food carts fit into the city’s acclaimed—but arguably uneven—foodscape demands further scrutiny. A unique feature of the city’s artisanal or craft economy (Heying 2010) and a model urban economic development strategy, food carts have helped put Portland on the map (Kapell et al. 2009; Rogers and Roy 2010). In 2011, US News and World Report voted Portland first in an international ranking of street food cities (Weiner 2011). Most of the city’s estimated five hundred plus food carts are grouped into semipermanent “pods” stationed on privately owned parking lots and vacant parcels and have been surprisingly well-received by surrounding businesses and restaurants (Kapell et al. 2009;

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Flores 2010; Newman and Burnett 2013). Having spread throughout much of the city—with a 40 percent increase in the number of food carts in Portland from 2008 to 2010 alone—food carts offer myriad culinary choices to residents and gastrotourists alike (Chastain 2010; Flores 2010), each pod with its own mix of cuisines and cultures. Many also serve as gathering sites for social events beyond food, such as televising a Portland Trail Blazers basketball game or new episode of the sketch comedy show Portlandia on a big screen inside a tent warmed by space heaters and beer. Media promote Portland’s food carts as a win-win: a small business ownership opportunity for foreign-born and minority entrepreneurs that also dishes out exotic experiences for Portland’s foodies (see Ferretti 2011; Prichep 2011). Although coverage of Portland’s food carts is standard fare in local papers, media outlets worldwide—from the New York Times and Guardian to the Calgary Herald and Dubai’s Khaleej Times—have burnished Portland’s international reputation as a food cart mecca, focusing on both the innovative quirkiness of food carts and the rarefied experience they offer to foodies from near and far. Local coverage also often speaks directly to the city’s real estate crowd, noting, for example, the contribution of food carts to downtown’s commercial vibrancy (Culverwell 2013). In 2012, the Portland Business Journal noted how downtown food carts are “filling buildings as well as bellies” and that vacancy rates were significantly lower for downtown office buildings adjacent to carts. That these carts are central to Portland’s gastropolitan reputation—and thus to its economy—is not lost on municipal officials. The 2012 Portland Plan celebrates the diversity of access points to fresh and local food, and the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability offers resources for current and prospective mobile food vendors to help navigate permitting.1 Research to date, though limited, seems to back these claims. A detailed 2008 study entitled Food Cartology assessed the impact of food carts on street vitality and neighborhood livability and found that “carts provide good employment opportunities for immigrants and low-income individuals to begin their own businesses, although there are significant barriers to continued stability and success” (Kapell et al. 2009). The authors also concluded that carts located in the central business district (CBD) are more stable and profitable than carts located outside the CBD. Building upon this study, Chastain (2010) compared food carts to small fast food takeout restaurants in the downtown and inner-core neighborhoods of the city and found that food carts indeed have a lower cost of entry for culinary

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entrepreneurs, operating at approximately half the cost of small brick-andmortar establishments. However, there are several lacunae in our understanding of Portland’s food carts. First, there is a major geographic blind spot, both literal and figurative, on the map. Most studies focus on the CBD and adjacent close-in neighborhoods, leaving us with little insight into food carts operating outside of the urban core, especially those operating in Portland’s farther out eastside, the half of the city with the highest levels of racial/ethnic diversity and the lowest incomes. Second, the existing literature on Portland food carts does not explicitly examine ethnic food carts. Newman and Burnett (2013, 234) describe how Portland food carts can provision specific communities while serving as a “method of resistance” against fast food and other more conventional forms of food retail. They write: “Street food has been promoted as a mechanism for ensuring the presence of local, healthy, and ‘ethnic’ foods in urban areas; to that end, some cities have implemented rules designed to ensure that vendors sell foods that conform to such goals” (ibid., 236). The Food Cartology study found twenty-four different nationalities among the cart owners sampled, most of whom were Hispanic/Latino outside of the CBD, but the study only included three neighborhoods outside of the CBD and no carts in East Portland, the area east of 82nd Avenue (see figure 15.1). Moreover, little is known about how food cart owners source the products they use, making it difficult to make claims about how well food carts adhere to the “local” and “sustainable” values and practices held dear in the mighty gastropolis. Finally, we know little about how ethnic food cart owners themselves prioritize and understand these eco-localist values and practices. In this chapter, we begin to address some of these issues by investigating how ethnic food cart owners are situated—and situate themselves—within both Portland’s food cart phenomenon and wider paradigms of local food and sustainability as they negotiate the often contradictory gastropolitan valorization of the local, the authentic, and the exotic. To this end, we present an exploratory inventory of food carts in Portland’s eastside, which we complement with the experiences of five ethnic food cart owners and a short case study of one unique pod, the Portland Mercado. We then draw on Bourdieu (1977, 1984) to explore how the everyday practices and dispositions of ethnic food cart owners on Portland’s eastside reflect, differ from, and/or adapt to those of other food cart owners in the field, particularly in regards to local sourcing. We also address how these practices and dispositions in turn reshape the wider gastropolitan field. Central to our analysis are insights from critical urban geography regarding capital’s role in the

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Figure 15.1 Portland, Oregon, and the eastside food cart pods examined in this study. Image created by Nathan McClintock.

uneven development of the built environment. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications for policy that might better support ethnic food cart owners. Foodies and Gastropolitan Habitus At the foundation of the mighty gastropolis lies foodie culture. As defined by Johnston and Baumann (2014, 1), a foodie is someone who thinks about food “not just as a biological sustenance, but also as a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle” and for whom “food is a key part of the story they tell themselves and others about who they are” (ibid., 2). The authors explain that gourmet food is no longer solely the domain of an upperclass elite but has been redefined over the past half a century by a suite of factors: the “de-sacralization” of French cuisine beginning in the post-war period and “democratization of gourmet food” by popular magazines and

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television chefs such as Julia Child; the countercultures and environmental movements of the 1960s; the subsequent development of California cuisine and shifting immigration patterns that brought Americans into contact with a wider variety of ethnic foods in the 1970s; and the rise of conspicuous consumption in the 1980s. By the mid-2000s, a new value gained traction: local. Indeed, over the past few decades localism has become possibly the dominant ideal invoked in descriptions of “good food.” The New Oxford American Dictionary proclaimed locavore the word of the year in 2007, people challenge themselves to eat a one-hundred-mile diet, foodshed studies attempt to calculate how much food could be produced locally for urban populations, and the produce bins of supermarket chains are tagged with stickers advertising locally grown. In Portland, the question “Is it local?”—a meme mocked in the first episode of Portlandia—is ubiquitous, guiding not only the individual choices of consumers but also the sourcing practices of many local and regional chains (Heying 2010). Such valorization of the local is central to a growing eco-habitus, a set of practices and dispositions that Carfagna et al. (2014, 3) describe as “a re-articulation of the field of high-class consumption, fostered by a more general social valorization of environmental consciousness” and expressed through a variety of consumption preferences, such as buying locally grown food. With the emergence of a dominant eco-habitus, “quality, rarity, organic, hand-made, creativity, and simplicity all work to signify specific foods as a source of distinction for those with cultural and economic capital” (Johnston and Baumann 2014, 3). At the same time, an embrace of the exotic continues to shape foodie tastes. Whereas French cuisine once lorded supreme over the gourmet foodscape, the growing popularity of ethnic foods in the 1990s and 2000s “can be understood as charting new horizons of gourmet cuisine” (Johnston and Baumann 2014, 24). The spices and exotic flavors of ethnic dishes tap into foodie desires for a simultaneously authentic and rarified experience, one that is both the real deal and unique. The winners of the Oregonian’s annual top ten ranking of new food carts are usually those that offer ethnic home cooking—Belizean, Ethiopian, Georgian, Mauritian, Korean, and so on—or some fusion thereof. What actually constitutes foreign and exotic, however, is always evolving, as particular ethnic cuisines “filter down to mainstream eaters, and are then classified as bland or passé by the food avant garde” (ibid., 23). In this chapter, we use the term gastropolitan habitus to describe a disposition that integrates the values of the gourmet foodie with the predominant

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eco-habitus of “sustainable cities” such as Portland. As an analytic, it can shed light on how food carts mobilize particular discourses as cultural capital that can be converted for economic gains. With this in mind, we turn now to Portland’s eastside. Studying Food Carts on Portland’s Eastside Portland’s history of eastward urbanization is inscribed in its urban form. As the CBD rose on the western banks of the Willamette River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the residential neighborhoods on the eastern banks kept up with the pace of growth, spreading eastward along streetcar lines. Much of the city’s post–World War II construction occurred even farther east in unincorporated Multnomah County, annexed by Portland in the 1980s and 1990s. These neighborhoods are characterized by an auto-oriented suburban form, marked by cul-de-sacs, strip malls, and few curbs or sidewalks, a stark contrast to the gridded, tree-lined streets and walkable neighborhood shopping districts of Portland’s inner neighborhoods. What we refer to in this chapter as Portland’s eastside encompasses three of the seven district coalitions located east of the Willamette River, outside of the CBD and its adjacent neighborhoods.2 East Portland essentially constitutes the eastern half of the eastside, stretching from 82nd Avenue for nearly a hundred more blocks to the border with neighboring Gresham (Pein 2011). East of 82nd is sometimes referred to as “the other Portland,” not only because of its suburban form but also because of stark socioeconomic differences (Pein 2011). Originally a predominantly white, working-class suburbia, East Portland today is illustrative of the demographic changes occurring in inner-ring suburbs across the United States over the past decade or more, experiencing an increase in both poverty and diversity. The eastside accounts for 59 percent of the city’s population, for example, but is home to 68 percent of the foreign-born residents (see table 15.1), as it is increasingly a first destination for immigrants and refugees (Goodling, Green, and McClintock 2015; Hardwick and Meacham 2005).3 For this exploratory study, we used an iterative suite of methods to characterize food carts on Portland’s eastside. Following a review of literature on Portland food carts and scouting visits to pods around the city, we conducted an inventory of eastside food carts and pods. Overall, we examined the signage and menus of a total of eighty-one food carts operating in eight pods on the eastside (see figure 15.1), along with their online marketing, for discursive content indicative of Portland’s gastropolitan habitus.4

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Table 15.1 Total and foreign-born population of Portland and eastside neighborhood coalitions Neighborhood coalition district

2009 population

Total PDX population

573,865

Portland’s eastside

338,103

Foreign-born population

% Foreign-born

70,250

12%

59%

47,510

14%

46,980

8%

7,010

15%

Southeast uplift neighborhood coalition

152,239

27%

17,570

12%

East Portland neighborhood office

138,884

24%

22,930

17%

Central northeast neighbors

% total population

Data: City of Portland, Office of Neighborhood Involvement

To complement the inventory and content analysis, we conducted five in-depth, semistructured interviews with food cart owners at four eastside food cart pods to learn about their sourcing and cooking practices and the extent to which they engage with Portland’s localist paradigm.5 Three of the five interviewees were immigrants to the United States, one was an African American serving Southern food from family recipes, and one a white Portlander serving experimental ethnic fusion cuisine. Finally in this chapter, we draw from organizational documents, marketing materials, interviews with project staff, and media reports to present a short case study of the Portland Mercado. Is It Local? More than half (54 percent) of the eastside carts we inventoried served ethnic cuisine from other countries (e.g., Thai, Mexican, Salvadoran, Guamanian) or regions (e.g., Southern BBQ). These carts are largely owned and/or operated by foreign-born and minority food cart owners. Those we spoke to are aware of the city’s foodie reputation, its emphasis on localism, and its wider commitment to sustainability. Indeed, many of these food cart owners are clearly eager to attract customers from the gastropolitan crowd; however, their priority is to provide familiar, low-cost, high-quality food to members of their own ethnic communities. They indicated that

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their cooking is fairly consistent with that of their countries or regions of origin. Operating a food cart is a relatively low-cost option for members of immigrant and minority groups seeking businesses of their own—algo propio—as one food cart owner put it—within a larger food service sector that usually relegates ethnic minorities to nonownership positions in the back of the kitchen or work as day laborers (Allen 2010, 301; Liu and Apollon 2011). One interviewee (no. 4) summed up this sentiment by explaining that she simply wanted to “make something that is mine.” Another owner, a Pacific Islander, opened his cart because he was surprised that there was no restaurant in Portland selling the cuisine of his homeland, despite a significant population in the city from these islands. Opening his cart (and two sister carts) was thus a means to cater to and connect with others from his home country while introducing other Portlanders to an “exotic” new cuisine. Table 15.2 displays the frequency with which certain themes appeared at the eight eastside pods. Among eastside carts, the foodie discourse typically employed by downtown food carts—local, organic, and so on—is secondary to other, arguably more universal qualities. Only fifteen percent of carts surveyed advertised local ingredients; organic was present in only seven percent of materials. Product freshness, on the other hand, was the most frequent advertising priority, with just under 30 percent of the carts claiming some type of “fresh” cuisine. Definitions of local or regional varied among those we inventoried and interviewed. Cart owners espousing localist discourse accepted anything in the Pacific Northwest as local or regional but at times extended their definition to products from Northern California. Although several cart owners stated that customers can tell the difference between fresh products and those that have traveled long distances, one cart owner had less faith in the discerning abilities of his customers’ palates. Furthermore, he believed that other carts falsely advertise local and organic ingredients, adding that consumers have very little ability to assess the veracity of such claims. Sourcing ingredients is a daily concern for cart owners serving ethnic food, and decisions are based on a variety of factors: cost, seasonal availability, and customer demand, among others. Aside from rent, ingredients are typically the most significant operating cost. Through their purchases of staple ingredients used in their specific cuisines (e.g., bok choy, nopales) or simply a cheaper cut of meat, eastside cart owners generally rely on sources that Portland foodies might otherwise eschew. Rather than

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Table 15.2 Inventory of eastside Portland food cart marketing materials Pod #

Pod name

No. of carts

1

A La Carts

7

1

0

0

0

6

2

Cartlandia

21

7

0

0

0

10

3

5Ways

4

2

2

2

1

3

4

Rose City Food Park

8

0

1

1

1

5

5

Carts on Foster

14

4

3

3

1

7

6

A La Carts Food Pavilion

12

4

2

0

0

8

7

Good Food Here

12

3

3

0

1

3

8

No name

4

2

1

0

0

2

6 (7%)

4 (5%)

Number of carts advertising the foodie attribute listed in each column below Fresh

Total

81

23 (28%)

Local

12 (15%)

Organic

Seasonal

Ethnic

44 (54%)

purchasing from the high-end local or organic specialty grocers frequented by Portland’s gastropolitan class, the cart owners we spoke with get their supplies from wholesalers such as Cash & Carry and Restaurant Depot, big-box supermarkets such as Costco, large ethnic supermarkets such as Fubonn, and smaller Latino tiendas. Despite their prevalence in Portland, farmers’ markets, in general, are not a frequent source of ingredients for food carts. The cart owners we interviewed explained that although the majority (around 80 percent) of the ingredients for their ethnic food items could be grown in the Pacific Northwest, localism takes a back seat to other considerations. Certain ingredients are simply unavailable locally. Interviewee no. 5 noted that it’s not possible to be 100 percent local while maintaining the flavor of the ethnic cuisine, given the need for particular herbs and spices. The need for a year-round produce supply is another common concern. Interviewee no. 4, for example, only occasionally uses produce grown in the Pacific Northwest in her cooking, noting that farmers’ markets are too expensive and not open long enough each year. Farmers’ markets are therefore only a seasonal option, with a short purchasing window that is subject

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to price constraints and often contingent upon personal relationships between cart owners and market operators. Interviewee no. 1, for example, explained that he used to go to a nearby farmer’s market in East Portland but stopped because there is only a three-month period (June to August) when the produce he needs is cheaper. Otherwise, prices for tomatoes, for example, are doubled by the end of the season. In addition to seasonality, the inability to place large orders also poses a problem. Developing direct relationships with local producers is more difficult for food cart owners than for restaurant owners, who can purchase at higher volumes more consistently. When we asked if multiple cart owners ever place a group order to attain a similar economy of scale, our interviewees responded that such arrangements were not feasible for various reasons: a lack of food storage, the need for specific products, and intrapod competition. The bottom line is also a function of the purchasing power and tastes of local customers. Interviewee no. 2, who runs a Southern BBQ cart, obtains most of the products he uses from Cash & Carry or Costco, depending on what’s on sale. Given his customer base, there is no benefit to purchasing local products; he explained that “the population doesn’t demand it.” This owner briefly explored partnering with a local farmer, but lamented that he wished his clients had money. He added that he would only create a locally sourced menu when catering special events, unless he were to relocate his cart to a different, more affluent part of town. Cart owners instead invoke different values and discourse that resonates with both the ethnic communities to which they cater and foodies alike. Rather than local, interviewee no. 1 emphasized “fresh, handmade food that is not heavily processed.” He stocks his three fridges two to three times per week, primarily with ingredients sourced from Cash & Carry, noting that he doesn’t really care about using local ingredients, only that they are unprocessed. Similarly, interviewee no. 4 sources 80 percent of her supplies from Cash & Carry and Restaurant Depot, explaining that no matter where the products come from, her overarching priority is to offer the best quality food at the lowest price. Local is one option for product quality, but not one that is particularly central to her culinary practices. As Newman and Burnett (2013) note, pod locations throughout the city display unique spatial and demographic differences that often reflect the local characteristics of their surrounding neighborhoods. Carts in the CBD have their windows open to the sidewalk, for example, to cater to walk-up customers on a lunch break. On the eastside, pods tend to be larger and are designed to entice customers to sit and socialize in an enclosed pod rather than order food to go. Larger lots on the eastside—which are significantly

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cheaper to rent—have space for amenities such as bathrooms and beer gardens. Interviewee no. 2, for example, decided to set up in East Portland in large part due to the cost of downtown space and his need for additional space to fit a barbeque smoker. Pod 2 is home to a spacious, screened-in beer garden and a massive television that broadcasts sports games and popular TV shows. Interviewee no. 5 prefers the family-oriented environment of his eastside location to downtown pods that lack basic amenities such as restrooms and that present “a more cutthroat environment.” The culinary offerings of food carts—and the marshalling of foodie discourse—also follow this geographic gradient. In contrast to the foodie hotspots located downtown and on the close-in eastside, there are few “extreme locavore” carts, such as the erstwhile 100 Miles PDX cart, which claimed to source “99 percent of its foods from local farmers.” Carts advertising local or regional products were concentrated in the western part of the study area (pods 3 to 7), and of these pods, the most close-in pod to the urban core (pod 3) had the largest proportion of materials related to local and organic food. Pod 4, located in a neighborhood in the throes of redevelopment, is the newest of the eight and the most explicitly localist; the banner over its entrance proclaims, “From the Farm to the Table.” One cart advertised near the top of the menu: “I buy local fresh products and support local businesses.” Another menu read: “We only use local, Pacific Northwest proteins,” while another advertised “organic local” meat products on its banners. The carts emphasize other practices resonating with sustainability-minded consumers as well. The pod’s website, for example, claims the pod is “Portland’s first and only food cart pod to be 100 percent compostable and recyclable.” The marked gastropolitan gradient parallels other socioeconomic gradients, such as income levels and housing costs. Pod 1 is a completely “ethnic” pod; all food cart owners in this pod are people of color from the United States or abroad. At the time of our study, each spoke a native language other than English, and two of the owners spoke very little English. None of the carts had an online presence, and none displayed offerings of “fresh” or “local” ingredients on menus or cart exteriors. Only one cart in the two easternmost pods was explicit about using local or regional products. Interestingly, the pod’s website (rather than that of the cart) makes claims of local sourcing, but the individual cart materials note only “fresh” ingredients with no mention of local or regional sourcing. Indeed, such outreach through social media suggests the traction that locally sourced food may have beyond rather than within the surrounding neighborhood. Given this pod’s location along a popular bike corridor, emphasis on the

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local may also be intended to resonate with the eco-habitus of Portland’s cycling population that lives outside of East Portland. In sum, our inventory and interviews reveal that the localist discourse for which gastropolitan Portland is known is less prevalent on the eastside. Instead, food cart owners emphasize a different set of values celebrated in foodie circles: the authentic ethnic origins and freshness of ingredients used. Indeed, the gastropolitan valuation of local and organic appears to mirror the socioeconomic geography of the city, with the invocation of these values more prevalent closer to the city center and gentrifying areas. In the next section, we focus on one pod that developed with the explicit goal of capitalizing on the tension between these values. The Portland Mercado: Latinismo and the Local The Portland Mercado in southeast Portland is a colorful collection of nineteen businesses, its central feature a food cart pod of eight food carts serving a range of Latin American cuisine to customers mingling in the large outdoor plaza and seating area. The adjacent building—a repurposed car dealership—is home to a grocery, a produce stand, a butcher, a chorizo seller, a coffee roaster, a beer and wine shop, a piñata and candy store, a juice and fruit shop, and a commissary kitchen. The Mercado was developed by Hacienda Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit guided by the mission to improve the lives of Portland’s Latino residents through economic development, housing support, and educational programming (Hacienda Community Development Corporation 2015). The Mercado grew out of Hacienda’s Micro Mercantes program, a small business incubator providing training and technical support to a small group of tamaleras, women who cook tamales in their homes to sell to friends and at local farmers’ markets (Micro Mercantes 2015). Although Micro Mercantes graduates were successfully selling food at farmers’ markets and small retail outlets, many expressed an interest in a permanent, year-round location. In 2011, a Portland State University planning studio workshop helped Hacienda assess interest and demand for a potential Latino market and revealed strong community support for restaurants and fresh food vendors, as well as Latino-oriented businesses (Cermak et al. 2011). An advisory group of Latino community and business leaders called Asamblea was formed to further refine and pursue the concept. Around the same time, the Portland Development Commission (PDC) released its five-year Neighborhood Economic Development Strategy,

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which signaled a reorientation from its historic focus on strengthening and growing the city center to a new commitment to promote “economic opportunity and neighborhood vitality throughout Portland” (Portland Development Commission 2011, 1). It placed particular emphasis on supporting communities of color and “priority neighborhoods” facing a combination of lagging investment, increasing poverty, and gentrification pressure. In addition to changing the geographic focus, the strategy also endorsed stronger partnerships with community-based and culturally specific organizations (ibid.). The new strategy and objectives made PDC a strong natural ally for developing the Portland Mercado; Hacienda worked closely with them over the next three years in a partnership that helped not only realize the Mercado but also shape the outcome. In early 2012, PDC awarded Hacienda a small grant to fund a more formal feasibility study for a market with twenty small businesses selling Latino-oriented food, products, and services. The study revealed that “unique ethnic dining options” would be the primary customer draw. Given that most customers in this semisuburban area would arrive by car and that the Latino population in the study area was smaller than in similar types of markets in other cities, cultivating demand from outside the neighborhood would be crucial. To appeal to non-Latinos, the study concluded that the Mercado must offer a “friendly multi-cultural experience with multi-lingual business owners and staff” (Marketek 2012, 30). Hacienda focused on creating a strategy and development that fit this niche. Shortly after the completion of the market analysis, Hacienda and PDC agreed on a PDC-owned site in an urban renewal area in the Lents neighborhood in far southeast Portland.6 Food carts were not part of the original concept for the Portland Mercado, but they quickly became a key feature that could respond to the need to attract non-Latino customers from outside the immediate neighborhood—and one that would place the Mercado within Portland’s gastropolitan foodscape. The Mercado’s design and marketing—including its vibrant color scheme, intended to recreate the look and feel of a Latin American market— are grounded in the concept of Latinismo. As explained by the previous executive director, embracing the concept means that “everything we do, and especially in developing the Mercado, will exude the Latin culture and celebrate this with all the citizens of the Portland” (Ashton 2014). The mix of businesses at the Mercado is carefully curated to maximize Latinismo by crafting an attractive array of cuisines and products. Each food cart serves food from a different country or region of origin, such as Argentina, Columbia, Cuba, El Salvador, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Chiapas, reducing

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competition between the businesses while creating a more compelling, diverse dining experience to market to potential customers. Marketing has focused heavily on promoting the Mercado as a place “where you can experience a Portland-style replication of a trip to Latin America” and on emphasizing the wide variety of Latino foods available. The entrepreneurs and their personal stories are also highlighted. News stories linked to the Mercado website have the same focus: traditional, handmade food representing diverse, Latin American cuisines (Portland Mercado 2015). The Mercado opened in April 2015 to considerable positive media coverage. It was featured in every local newspaper, numerous local and national foodie websites, and several television and radio stories. The stories echoed the narrative constructed by Hacienda, emphasizing “the rainbow of food carts out front” (Korfhage 2015) and the “diversity of Latin American cuisines” (Templer 2015), as well as the traditional recipes and techniques, the opportunities created for immigrant entrepreneurs, and the partnership with PDC (Parks 2015; Leis 2015). Through these narratives, Hacienda is both tapping into the existing gastropolitan field and attempting to shape its future contours, creating a space that valorizes the cultural capital of Latino entrepreneurs. Thus far, the Mercado’s food carts have been highly successful. All of the carts were profitable during their first six months, and most raised their prices to take advantage of strong demand. However, although the Mercado has experienced short-term success, there are long-term challenges ahead. Its relationship with PDC, though celebrated in the initial burst of media attention, has the potential to create problems. To move forward with development after a long planning process, Hacienda chose not to try to raise the funds needed to purchase the property outright, instead agreeing to a ground lease with PDC; the organization has yet to develop a clear strategy for acquiring ownership. PDC has also tried to influence Hacienda’s management of the Mercado, pushing for rents to fully cover operating costs. Hacienda has continued to operate the Mercado as an extension of the incubator, subsidizing rents for tenants and making up the gap through fundraising. The long-term viability of this approach is yet to be seen. Cashing in on Gastropolitan Capital Observing the practices of eastside ethnic food cart owners sheds light on how the sociogeographic origins of food cart owners and Portland’s gastropolitan foodscape work together to structure their habitus, while at the same

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time their practices serve to structure—and recast—the wider gastropolitan field. Although “the homogeneity of habitus is what ... causes practices and works to be immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted” (Bourdieu 1977, 80), it is nevertheless comprised of “segmented or conflictive dispositional sets” that underpin an individual’s actions within a field (Wacquant 2008, 267). Taken-for-granted practices can thus exist in tension. Clearly, foodie tastes and values filter into the practices—such as sourcing decisions, recipes, and marketing—of eastside food cart owners as they develop menus to appeal to a broader customer base. However, the habitus of individual cart owners is also structured by the culinary tastes and norms of their communities of origin and their understandings of market capitalism, of supply and demand, of the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood and customer base. A culinary hybrid thus emerges, one that is exotic in that it ultimately blends tastes from the country or region of origin with those valued by gastropolitan palates and, when possible, from locally sourced ingredients. Moreover, its unique artisanal quality, in conjunction with its ethnic origin, is infused with symbolic capital of authenticity. As Bourdieu notes: “Cultural goods can be appropriated both materially— which presupposes economic capital—and symbolically—which presupposes cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 247). Whereas economic capital is defined in monetary or quantitative terms, cultural capital is more conceptually defined as a combination of taste and values (the embodied state), cultural goods (the objectified state), and qualifications or valorizations (the institutionalized state) that are used by individuals and groups to obtain more economic capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1986, 1998). A “symbolic logic of distinction” in turn “secures material and symbolic profits for the possessors of a large cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 245). Struggles to define the boundaries of the field are, in effect, struggles over the exchange rate of symbolic capital, over what cultural capital is worth in terms of the distinction it confers and the economic capital for which it can be exchanged. Employing foodie discourse—be it the local or the authentic and exotic—distinguishes the food cart owner as a holder of cultural capital in Portland’s gastropolitan foodscape, which translates into economic capital through increased sales. However, cart owners must navigate the changing value of varieties of cultural capital, such as local and organic versus exotic and authentic. When ingredients cannot be sourced locally, owners can highlight other values and attributes that resonate with gastropolitan consumers: that the cart is locally owned, that it is authentic and exotic,

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or perhaps that it uses compostable packaging or is otherwise ecologically conscientious. Moreover, they navigate not only the tensions among the local, authentic, and exotic but also between these gastropolitan values and the tastes cultivated in the food cart owner’s country or region of origin. They may bank on both the local and the exotic to capture a larger market that consists not only of foodies but also customers in search of the authentic flavors of a particular cuisine, whether these customers are foodies, members of a particular ethnic population looking for some home-style cooking, or both. In the case of the Mercado, the effort to capitalize on these tensions is foundational to the pod’s business strategy and success. Narratives used to market the Mercado try to balance the ethnic and the local. In one interview, after discussing the diverse food choices, the Mercado manager then explained that the vendors also sold “fresh produce, fresh fruits, some imported goods from Latin America, but also ... a lot of local products from local farms. We want to make sure we’re also helping our community here in Portland. Our farmers are hardworking people” (quoted in Seigel 2015). This double-barreled strategy also shows up in the food cart menus that highlight both the traditional, exotic ingredients that make the food authentically Latin American and the local farms from which the ingredients are sourced. One striking example promises the diner “an indigenous experience” and includes a dish “with our traditional Mole Oaxaqueño ... wrapped in a banana leaf” followed by one made with “Oregon grown tomatillos” (Mixteca 2015). Even the logo of the Portland Mercado reflects the attempt to balance this tension. Using the same bright colors as the Mercado building and food carts, the logo includes images of traditional Latino ingredients, including corn, chilies, and citrus, as well as a rose to represent Portland, the City of Roses. Many food carts closer to the urban core follow a similar tactic. Bourdieu further reminds us that habitus not only is structured, but also is structuring. The day-to-day operations of these food cart owners, from their purchasing decisions to the language they use in their marketing to the type of customers they attract, all help to shape the contours of Portland’s gastropolitan foodscape. The cart owner serving Pacific Islander food with a Portland locavore spin, for example, is creating a new culinary hybrid that is simultaneously exotic and local in both form and function. Gastropolitan tastes and values clearly inform his practice, which is unsurprising given his location in the eastside pod most firmly committed to local food. However, his recipes and the flavors they bring together are unique and innovative; his culinary practices, the food he produces, the language he

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uses in his advertising—cultural capital in embodied and symbolic forms— set him apart as someone both local and exotic. Moreover, this food, by virtue of who is preparing it, is valorized for its authenticity. Given their privileged position as bearers of multiple forms of cultural capital, these cart owners are, to a certain extent, able to unsettle the ecocentric values that have heretofore defined the boundaries of the gastropolitan field. In such cases, the exotic and authentic trump the local, thus recasting the symbolic value of each within the field. With this shift, ethnic food carts gain ground within foodie Portlandia, illustrating how a foodscape—and the food cart field more specifically—is a “mutually constitutive, imperfect, political process in which the local and the global make each other on an everyday basis” (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, 369). A Bourdieusian lens shows how cart owners both consciously and unconsciously contest and renegotiate the boundaries of the foodie field, influenced both from internal relations and external political economic forces—but Bourdieu can only take us so far. As urban political ecologists studying foodscapes have argued, these structured and structuring processes—as well as the spatial contours of gastropolitian habitus more broadly—are mediated by the uneven geography of the city itself (McClintock 2011; Heynen 2014; Agyeman and McEntee 2014; Miewald and McCann 2014). Indeed, as Lemon (chapter 9), Martin (chapter 11), and others in this text demonstrate, the presence and function of food trucks is often fundamentally a spatial question. It is crucial therefore first to recognize that the decision to source locally or to employ certain foodie practices is geographically uneven and, second, to understand why. Although a thorough analysis of Portland’s uneven development is outside the scope of this chapter, it is nevertheless important to briefly reflect on how historical and contemporary ebbs and flows of capital and policy decisions have shaped East Portland’s urban form and sociodemographic characteristics. Portland’s gastropolitan landscape maps neatly onto largerscale patterns of reinvestment in the urban core and related displacement of poverty to the periphery. Saddled with debt and a dwindling tax base in the wake of postwar suburbanization and deindustrialization, municipal governments and boosters struggled to attract investment (Hackworth 2007; Harvey 1989). A growing “rent gap” (Smith 1996) between actual market prices and unrealized market potential in the inner core has attracted reinvestment in the core over the past couple of decades, mediated in part by the delineation of Urban Renewal Areas. New infrastructure, residential construction, and businesses have attracted a relatively affluent, mostly white population.

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At the same time, much of inner northeast Portland’s African American population has been displaced to East Portland and other suburbs (Gibson 2007; Goodling, Green, and McClintock 2015); the lack of rent control and affordable housing requirements has exacerbated the situation to the point that Portland has earned the shameful title of the “fastest gentrifying city in America” (Smith 2015). Displacement of lower-income residents has followed at a rapid pace for reasons that are both direct (e.g., reinvestment is leading to rising housing costs) and indirect (e.g., the loss of culturally relevant stores, minority-owned businesses, churches, and homes, along with other transformations of the sociocultural landscape, have undermined the cohesive strength of place, belonging, and feeling welcome; Bates 2013; Sullivan and Shaw 2011). Portland’s gastropolitan foodscape has arisen in these hip, walkable, livable neighborhoods, some newly gentrified, others arising during previous waves of neighborhood change. Several foodie hotspots lie on Portland’s eastside, but they tend to be closer to downtown and in recently gentrified neighborhoods. Similarly, supermarkets such as Whole Foods and New Seasons, which specialize in the kind of local, organic ingredients so valued in the mighty gastropolis, tend to be more expensive and are geographically limited to these same areas. Although the socioeconomic gradient is more patchwork than smooth, poverty and ethnic diversity tend to increase moving east past 82nd Avenue toward and beyond the border with neighboring Gresham. As several recent studies have shown (e.g., Burnett 2014; Anguelovski 2016), the relationship between restaurants; high-end, eco-conscious groceries; and gentrification is not unique to Portland. Although the habitus of food cart owners further east may be less shaped by eco-localist values and more by the tastes of their customers and the culinary values of their home cultures, cart owners can nevertheless capitalize on their position within both the gastropolitan field and the built environment. Indeed, it is their distance from the urban core, from the geographic heart of the mighty gastropolis, that ratchets up the value of the symbolic cultural capital they do embody, that which is associated with authenticity and exoticism. As Portland foodies venture out to East Portland and neighboring Gresham to eat a “real” Vietnamese bánh mì or Salvadoran pupusa, the distinction of the food cart owner and foodie alike are augmented due to the “scarcity value” of the form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986, 247).7 The gastropolitan value of particular forms of capital—local, authentic, exotic—therefore depends not only on the physical agglomeration of food carts espousing foodie values but also on their spatial position within the foodscape, a position very much tied to the economic processes of gentrification and displacement.

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Conclusion Exploring the habitus of cart owners serving ethnic food at locations on the eastside reveals the sociospatial tensions inherent to what we refer to as a gastropolitan taste. The foodie palate values not only the local—especially in self-proclaimed sustainable cities such as Portland—but also foods that are authentic and exotic. Although it provides only a snapshot in time of a small slice of the food cart phenomenon, our exploratory study nevertheless sheds light on how ethnic food cart owners gain a foothold in Portland’s food scene while navigating these tensions in their day-to-day practices. Incommensurate demands for the local and the exotic are particularly challenging when it comes to sourcing. Certain products central to ethnic cuisines are not grown in the Pacific Northwest, are only available at particular times of year, or are simply too costly. Cost, in turn, guides decisions in eastside neighborhoods in which purchasing power is limited, and it plays a key role when the primary goal of the cart owner is to provide culturally specific cuisine at low cost. It becomes clear, then, that political economic processes of investment, disinvestment, gentrification, and displacement hew the contours of Portland’s foodscape unevenly, in a way that differentially structures the everyday practices of the cart owner along a gradient running from Portlandia’s gastropolitan core to its foodie hinterlands. Whether through hybrid cuisine that blends the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest with the recipes of other countries or regions to create a unique culinary hybrid or conventional recipes made with ingredients sourced from a box store or restaurant wholesaler, the success of ethnic food carts in the mighty gastropolis depends not so much on the extent to which cart owners dish up locally sourced food (and how well they advertise as much) but on how well they present what they serve as authentic ethnic food. However, just as geography plays a central role in structuring the habitus that guides sourcing decisions and food preparation, it also helps determine the value of symbolic forms of cultural capital—local, authentic, exotic—in terms of the distinction it provides. As Bourdieu (1986) tells us, cultural capital provides distinction only when there is scarcity. The distance to the gastropolitan core, then, might “code” a food truck as even more authentic and more exotic, whereas closer to the core locavore cuisine alone may not convert into sufficient economic capital. In other chapters, Agyeman, Matthews, and Sobel (chapter 1), Basinski, Morales, and Shapiro (chapter 5), Lemon (chapter 9), and others suggest that food carts can serve as important ways to provide ethnic and minority entrepreneurs with the means of production within urban food systems.

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However, as Nash (chapter 12) alludes to in his discussion of Montreal, it is yet to be seen what types of policies or other interventions can best help ethnic food cart owners navigate the tensions between contradictory gastropolitan values and the processes of uneven development that determine where food carts emerge and who they serve. One possible area of support would simply be in providing cart owners with more information. Many minority and immigrant food cart entrepreneurs are well-versed in foodie discourse but might benefit from more information about Portland’s foodscape translated into variety of languages (e.g., Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Russian) to help them tap into broader advertising efforts and culinary events that boost the city’s foodscape as a whole. In addition, cart owners would benefit from more information about—and greater access to—suppliers offering local/regional ingredients so that their choice to source locally is not restricted by a single supplier’s price point. The city maintains online resources for prospective cart owners related to regulatory compliance, but it is mute on sourcing, a missed opportunity given the city’s commitment to a more robust local food system. Other challenges are more difficult to overcome, however. Food carts are by nature impermanent, no matter how entrenched a food cart pod might seem in Portland’s foodscape. Carts move between pods and even within pods. They lose customers during the cold and rainy Pacific Northwest winters and sometimes must shut down operations entirely for the season. They also are temporary in the eyes of the law. If on a public sidewalk, they must move every night from midnight to 6:00 a.m.; on private property, carts must have wheels if their owners want them to operate free from zoning and building codes. In addition, many are also temporary because of the nature of land values themselves. Any lots currently used for food cart pods can be developed for the right price. As a result, many cart owners are on month-to-month leases that could be terminated on short notice. As the case of the Mercado illustrates, a community development corporation or other entity can help mitigate some of the pressures imposed by the market by supporting ethnic food cart vendors with subsidies for land, business plans, marketing, and infrastructure and with access to networks of suppliers, outlets, and support services, such as insurance agents. These entities can also provide the training, language, and endorsements necessary for vendors to navigate the world of business and to take advantage of the cultural capital they possess. Local governments or economic development agencies can provide additional support directly to food cart operators, such as through a conducive regulatory environment or through partnerships with outside organizations. Such support can help insulate

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ethnic food cart owners from the processes of uneven development currently underway, helping them live up to their transformative potential—to gain a secure footing in the local food economy, to offer culturally significant food, and to push the boundaries of foodie habitus in the mighty gastropolis. Notes 1. See http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/52798. 2.  Portland’s district coalitions provide support and services to individual neighborhood associations organized by the city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement. It is important to note that our study area is slightly larger than what is often called East Portland, which essentially comprises NE and SE Portland east of 82nd Avenue. 3.  Because communities of color are often undercounted, these foreign-born figures are likely to be higher than noted. 4.  This count only includes carts selling food. One of the carts, a hair salon, is not included. 5.  We selected cart owners to participate via a combination of purposive sampling (with the goal of incorporating a diverse set of ethnic origins and foods from the larger area inventoried for marketing materials) and convenience sampling (those who agreed to talk and be recorded). The five interviews, conducted in English and Spanish, took place between November 2013 and March 2014. Interviewees are identified with a number for confidentiality. 6.  Urban Renewal Area is the name used for a tax increment financing (TIF) district in Oregon. The name is a vestige of the origins of TIF in Oregon in the 1950s as a means of raising local matching funds to secure federal urban renewal money. 7.  For Bourdieu, values-based consumption “reflect[s] and reinscribe[s] social status” (Elliott 2013, 301); that is, it distinguishes the foodie from those with less taste, because “any given cultural competence (e.g., being able to read in a world of illiterates) derives a scarcity value from its position in the distribution of cultural capital and yields profits of distinction to its owner” (Bourdieu 1986, 245).

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Portland Mercado. 2015. About the Portland Mercado. http://www.portlandmercado .org/background-information/. Portland Development Commission. 2011. City of Portland Neighborhood Economic Development Strategy: A 5-Year Plan to Support Neighborhood Vitality & Business Success. Portland, OR. http://www.pdc.us/Libraries/Neighborhood_Economic_Development/ Neighborhood_Economic_Development_NED_Strategy_pdf.sflb.ashx. Prichep, D. 2011. “Living the Dream: The Truth about Life inside Food Carts.” National Public Radio, July 8. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId =137716312. Rogers, Kelly, and Kelley Roy. 2010. Portland Food Carts: Catering to the Pedestrian. Washington, DC: American Planning Association, Transportation Division. Seigel, Chris. 2015. “Podcast: A Grand Opening with Manuel Foucher.” Underground Airwaves, April 14. http://edibleportland.com/podcast-a-grand-opening-with-manuel -foucher/. Smith, Darby Minow. 2015. “The 10 U.S. Cities That Are Gentrifying the Fastest.” Grist, February 6. http://grist.org/cities/the-10-u-s-cities-that-are-gentrifying-the -fastest/. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Ravanchist City. London: Routledge. Sullivan, Daniel Monroe, and Samuel C. Shaw. 2011. “Retail Gentrification and Race: The Case of Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon.” Urban Affairs Review 47 (3): 413–432. doi:10.1177/1078087410393472. Templer, Benjamin. 2015. “The Long-Awaited Portland Mercado Debuts with Homegrown Latin American Cuisine.” Portland Monthly Magazine, May 4. http:// www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2015/5/4/portland-mercado-debuts-may-2015. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. “Pierre Bourdieu.” In Key Sociological Thinkers, edited by Rob Stones, 261–277. New York: Macmillan. Weiner, M. B. 2011. “World’s Best Street Food.” U.S. News & World Report, January 11. http://travel.usnews.com/features/Worlds_Best_Street_Food/.

Reflections Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel

We entered into the idea for this book by wondering primarily about municipal street food vending and food truck regulations and their implications for cultural identity formation and ultimately the broader goal of increasing social justice. Specifically, we asked our contributing authors the following questions: What are the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion of mobile food vending? How might these motivations connect to the broad goals of social justice? In practice, we wanted to know how the adoption of community economic development and/or an entrepreneurialempowerment framework for mobile food vending could be a vehicle for making visible marginalized cultural and ethnic communities and ultimately increasing social justice. We thought that one of our target audiences—urban planners and policymakers—would favor this approach, as it operates on the same best practices level that lends itself to clear recommendations. However, we now need to reflect on our initial idea as we see the situation is far less clear-cut than we thought; it is certainly not reducible to two questions, however reasonable. Even so, we found utility in asking these questions, because when we read the chapters, they fell naturally into two themes that became parts I and II of the book. The first part, “Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices,” focused on politics and policy behind street food vending and food truck operations. The second part, “Spatial-Cultural Practices,” relied on the authors’ use of semiotic frameworks to discuss the spatial and cultural effects of how, where, and what food is served by and for whom. Nevertheless, in this text, the discussion of power supersedes the division of chapters. Two main threads of conversation about power surfaced throughout the collection: power and cultural identity, and power and criminalization.

312 Reflections

Power and Cultural Identity Food trucks in Portland, Oregon, illustrate this point well. Food trucks are a flourishing industry in Portland, and their success can be attributed in no small part to the city’s easy permitting and regulation systems. Measuring the regulatory side of this picture, the laissez-faire attitude that allows food truck businesses to open and operate freely promotes community economy development because it levels the playing field for entrepreneurs who may be marginalized in other business niches. However, no discussion of social justice is complete without a discussion of race, and race is a key factor in Portland’s food truck scene as well. McClintock, Novie, and Gebhardt (chapter 15), employing a Bourdieusian framework, expand racial considerations to a more general discussion of how “ethnic food cart owners navigate the tensions between contradictory gastropolitan values” in a city in which food is praised for being either authentic and ethnic/exotic, or local/ organic. Therefore, even in more relaxed regulatory environments, power relations still have a profound effect on food trucks. Although not all cities have as distinct and established a food truck culture as Portland does, it is apparent that food as cultural commodity is an emerging urban trope. Nash’s (chapter 12) study of Montreal illustrates, for example, that food trucks have utilitarian value; they are permitted expressly because of their unique contributions to the city’s cultural capital, reinforcing Montreal’s identity as a gourmet food destination. Hanser (chapter 7) shows how Vancouver’s food trucks have similar motivations, despite a longer and more complicated history with permitting. Newman and Newman (chapter 13) further illustrate how Vancouver’s policies ensure that food trucks perpetuate the “Greenest City 2020” image and vision of being healthy and environmentally sustainable. Lemon (chapter 9), utilizing de Certeau’s ideas of spatial practice, details how taco and gourmet food trucks in Columbus, Ohio, with their differing mobilities navigate consumer demands differentiated by the city’s sociocultural geographies. Lemon underscores the power of food trucks to shift their identities to take advantage of their cultural capital. Throughout the other chapters as well, the trendiness and cultural cache of food trucks reveals tacit relationships of identity and power, depending on the status of the owner. Power and Criminalization Another important theme to emerge is the bifurcated and discriminatory ways in which street vendor and food truck regulations are implemented.

Reflections 313

Institutional and individual biases, which pervade implementation and enforcement, are perhaps more discriminatory than the regulations themselves. Enforcement can have serious consequences, including fines, arrest, and questions about nativity. New York’s food truck industry provides an excellent example of this point. Dunn (chapter 3) and Basinski, Shapiro, and Morales (chapter 5) argue that the city’s police enforcement of parking bans and other policies that regulate food trucks are in turn reinforcements of racial and cultural biases: They are racial projects. As it stands, not all of New York’s food trucks are inherently equal; their ownership determines how they experience and interact with policy enforcement. The city’s “gourmet” trucks typically serve affluent New Yorkers, and their owners are usually white, male, and middle class. In contrast, loncheras, often immigrant- and/or women-owned, serve traditional foods to immigrant or first-generation populations on the edges of the city. The former group experiences enforcement through fines and tickets, whereas the latter receives threats to close, confiscation of their trucks, and arrest. In this case, it is not just the policies themselves that shape the social justice implications for street food vending and food trucks; more critical are the systemic racial biases that criminalize and perpetuate social and spatial inequities. At a cursory glance, these examples illustrate two different types of urban food truck environments: street food vending and food trucks either supported by or at odds with local politics, power structures, and interests. It soon becomes clear, however, that race and citizenship issues influence street food vending and food trucks everywhere. Basinski, Morales, and Shapiro also detail the “rights” aspects of such operations: the right to entrepreneurship and rights to active citizenship, livelihood, and community well-being. Street food vendors and food truck operators are pulled by many forces, from wanting to expand their business to fearing arrest, and from serving authentic cuisine to adopting gourmet trends and signifiers. Street food vending and food truck power struggles are fought on the highly charged terrain of criminalization and identity. Areas for Future Research As street food vending and food truck policies mature and the number of trucks in cities increase, several research questions will arise. First and foremost, although many of the cases reported here make a connection between street food vending, food trucks, and social justice on the one hand and street food vending, food trucks, and cultural identity formation

314 Reflections

on the other, a direct connection between identity formation and social justice merits further discussion. This is especially important given the popularity of fusion cuisines among many of today’s food trucks, which represent the blending and creation of new, hybrid identities in our increasingly different, intercultural cities. The question is who gets to define these new identities: Is it the immigrant and working-class vendors themselves, or is it the privileged foodies who are, perhaps unwittingly, participants in cultural appropriation? Other areas for future research pertain to following up on certain points alluded to by our authors. For example, measuring the impact of street food vending and food truck incubator organizations on a broader scale will be a useful discussion not only for the incubators themselves, but also for reflecting on the different ways that street food vending and food trucks navigate policy and planning systems. By providing legal aid and other licensing support, incubators gain insight into the state of regulatory frameworks and how they are enforced. Similarly, organizing strategies by the vendors themselves in Los Angeles, a license bill aimed at sidewalk vending on Chicago’s South Side, and the growing campaign to lift permit caps in New York are likely to grow. Last but not least, street food vending, food trucks, and gentrification is an emerging and critically important issue. Because food trucks are mobile, they are not subject to the same chicken-and-egg quandaries that normally surround questions of gentrification. Unlike the brick-and-mortar restaurant world, in which the presence or absence of certain types of restaurant can be a signifier of gentrification, food trucks’ mobility makes determining these signals more difficult. The industry’s duality—gourmet and trendy versus traditional home cooking—adds another layer of interest to the question of gentrification. Considering gentrification, we can look at food trucks in two ways: (1) food trucks as gentrifier or (2) food trucks as gentrified. In the first sense, food trucks can be an indicator or harbinger of gentrification underway. Food trucks both attract and respond to the creative class (often white and college educated) in a neighborhood. As we have seen in various chapters in this collection, including notably in chapters 7, 12, and 13 on Vancouver and Montreal, food trucks have capital not only as a culinary experience but also as a postmodern, trendy brand indicative of a hip, progressive lifestyle. Cuisine-wise, both food (Tam 2015), and food trucks have been culturally appropriated by and for the dominant class. In the second sense, food trucks and food truck operation itself can be and has been gentrified. We see more young, white, college-educated food truck operators, as well

Reflections 315

as restaurateurs starting food trucks rather than having brick-and-mortar businesses. These food truck operators are not bad in and of themselves, but when food trucks are formalized and regulated in such a way that they are only accessible business ventures for wealthier operators, as in Montreal, the result is privilege, discrimination, and lack of equity and social justice. Moreover, food trucks may be gentrifying not only on the side of operators, but also on the side of consumers. With the popularity and gourmetification of food trucks, meal prices may increase. Food truck fare—once renowned as an economical and delicious choice—may become too expensive for many people to enjoy. Final Thoughts With the varied chapters of new scholarship on food trucks showcased here, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice has confirmed that current urban policies and planning tools, such as permitting, licensing, zoning, and taxation, while still significant factors, paint only part of the picture. The other part is comprised of a complex web of intersecting factors beyond yet entangled with the jurisdiction of municipal politics—the most important being race, citizenship, socioeconomic status, and cultural food preferences. The potential and limitations of mobile food vending to positively affect social justice can therefore only be assessed fully by considering wider intersectionalities of regulation, enforcement, political agency, power, and cultural identities. References Tam, R. 2015. “How It Feels When White People Shame Your Culture’s Food—Then Make It Trendy.” Washington Post, August 31, 17–18.

Contributors C C

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© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Julian Agyeman is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Sean Basinski is the founder and Director of the Street Vendor Project, part of the Urban Justice Center, in New York City. Jennifer Clark is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ana Croegaert is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of New Orleans. Kathleen Dunn is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Renia Ehrenfeucht is Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning and Director of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Emma French is the Sustainability Project Manager for the Center for Urban Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Matthew Gebhardt is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. Phoebe Godfrey is Associate Professor in Residence of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Amy Hanser is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Robert Lemon is an independent scholar in urban geography. A former lecturer at UC Berkeley, he now teaches as a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and at the University of Navarra in Spain.

318 Contributors

Nina Martin is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Curriculum in Global Studies and Jordan Family Fellow in International Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Caitlin Matthews holds a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and a Master of Science in Agriculture, Food, and Environment from Tufts University. Nathan McClintock is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. Alfonso Morales is Professor of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alan Nash is Professor of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal. Katherine Alexandra Newman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Lenore Lauri Newman is Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Food Security and the Environment. She teaches in the Department of Geography and is Director of the Agriburban Research Centre at the University of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. Alex Novie holds a Master of Urban Studies from the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University and is currently senior project manager at Energy Trust of Oregon. Matthew Shapiro is the Senior Attorney at the Street Vendor Project, part of the Urban Justice Center, in New York City. Hannah Sobel holds a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and a Master of Science in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts University. Mark Vallianatos is a policy analyst and advocate in Los Angeles, California, and has previously taught at Occidental College, where he has served as policy director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute. Ginette Wessel is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University. Edward Whittall is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. Mackenzie Wood is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Index I I

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© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Page numbers followed by f refer to figures; those followed by t refer to tables. 100 Miles PDX food cart, 295 141 Queen Street East, Toronto, 197 360 (restaurant), 194–195, 197, 198, 201 African Americans, displacing, 302 Agyeman, Julian, 1–16, 150, 226, 303, 311–315 Alcohol sales, 114, 121–122 Allmendinger, P., 9 American dream, 5, 173, 191 Anderson, E., 9 Apple, Jason, 138, 233 Apps Food Truck Finder App, 274 Street Food App, 252 Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California (Loncheros Association), 39, 79 Association des Restaurateurs du Québec (ARQ), 231 Association des Restaurateurs du Rue de Québec (ARRQ), 234 Atlanta (Georgia) cart vendors, 269 cuisine as cultural identity, 277–278 diversity in, 276–277 farmers’ market trucks, 275 kiosk vending, 269

sidewalk vendors, 269 spaces of, 269–274 Atlanta (Georgia), food trucks cost of, 276 food truck events, 268, 269, 270–271 food truck industry, beginnings of, 265, 267 food truck industry organizations, 267–268 food truck movement, 274–277 gourmet, prices at, 275 growth in, 263, 270 mobility, 265 owner of, 276, 277 social media driving, 274 success of, 263–264 Atlanta (Georgia), food trucks, spaces of geographical expansion, 270–273 hybrid, construction of, 278, 279t immobility, 265 online, 274 permanent spaces for, 269 private, 268–269 public, 269–270, 273–274 transformation, 273–274 Atlanta (Georgia), regulatory strategies challenging, 267–268 commercial kitchens requirement, 280n3

320 Index

Atlanta (Georgia), regulatory strategies (cont.) historically, 265–267 Mobile Food Service Unit permits, 265 permitting process, 267–268 spatial, 269 time limitations, 270 Atlanta Food Truck Park and Market (AFTP), 269 Atlanta Street Food Coalition (ASFC), 265, 267–268, 269, 272, 274, 276 Austin, Regina, 54 Autotopographies, 3–4 Bajoie, Diana E., 112–115 Baker, Jonathan, 137 Basile, Matt (“Fidel Gastro”), 189, 190, 192–193, 196, 198, 200–202, 203 Basinski, Sean, 12, 39, 59, 87–105, 195, 303, 313 Baumann, Shyon, 288 Beoku-Betts, J., 5 Beriss, David, 253 B. G. Swing Games Management, 266 Bhimji, F., 5 Bias class, 48, 132, 184 cultural, 37, 313 in food safety legislation, 79–80 gourmet food trucks vs. traditional street food vendors, 50, 132 in regulation enforcement, 313 in regulatory strategies, 2, 37–39, 42, 79, 313 Bias, ethnic/racial in food safety legislation, 79–80 gourmet food trucks vs. traditional street food vendors, 50 immigrant street vendors, 2, 80, 134, 214 Latino vendors, 37–39, 42, 79, 110, 214

in regulation, 110, 313 in regulatory enforcement, 9–10, 38 Biopolitics, 248–250 Birnbaum, Michele, 91, 93f, 97 Blaine, David, 202 Blomley, Nicholas, 131 Bloomberg, Michael, 51, 55, 92, 102 Boston, 30 Boston Food Truck Initiative, 103–104 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 287, 299, 300, 301, 303, 312 Branding, 2, 14–16, 174, 189, 203, 209, 229, 243, 244–248, 255, 256–257 Buettner, Elizabeth, 234 Burnett, Katherine, 10, 287, 294 Cagle, Bettie, 270, 272 California food safety legislation, 70f, 73, 74 food trucks in public parks, 253 regulatory strategies, 31–34, 41, 79 vendors’ rights, preserving, 41 California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA), 31, 34 California Restaurant Act (1947), 70f, 73 California Restaurant Act (1961), 70f, 74 Campbell, Bill, 266 Canale Foods Inc., 72 Caplansky, Zane, 192 Carfagna, 289 Castro, Fidel, 189 Catering trucks cost of, 75 food safety standards for, 72–74 hot trucks, 70f, 75–77, 81 industrial, 67–69, 70f, 71–72 Charlebois, Sylvain, 232–233, 237 Charlotte (North Carolina) Food Truck Friday, 37 gourmet food trucks, 37–38 loncheras, 37–39, 42 Charlotte (North Carolina), regulatory strategies

Index 321

enforcing, 38 gourmet food trucks, 38 negotiating, 37, 38, 41–42 partnership opportunities, 38 regulatory tensions, 37–39 social injustice and ethnic prejudices in, 37–39, 42 spatial, 30, 37, 38 time limitations, 37 Charlotte Food Truck Association, 38 Chesterman, Lesley, 233 Chicago (Illinois) creative cities doctrine, 212, 228 food truck controversies, 10 gentrification of, 211 gourmet food trucks, 210–212 immigrant workforce, 210, 211 political economy, 210–211 pushcart vendors, 210–212, 214, 218–219 street vending, 132, 211 Chicago (Illinois), regulatory strategies financial, 213t, 214 GPS tracking, 30, 212–214 liberalizing, effects of, 229 licensing, 214 power and control, locus of, 211–212 spatial, 212–213 time limitations, 212, 213t Chicago (Illinois) vs. Durham (North Carolina) food industry structure, differences shaping, 215–218 regulatory strategies, 212–215, 218–221 Child, Julia, 289 Chinese fruit and vegetable vendors, 80, 134 Choi, Roy, 9, 80, 91, 110 Cinnamon Snail, 103 Citizenship, mobility ties to, 172, 177–179 Clark, Jennifer, 15, 226, 263–280

Class difference gourmet food trucks, spaces of, 48, 132, 184 middle-class dining habits, 175–176, 199 spatiality of, 50 time as indicator of, 198 CLiCK, Inc., nonprofit, shared-use commercial kitchen challenging the industrial food system, 157–159 culturally inclusive practices, 155–156 equity and charity, distinguishing between, 159–160 funding and funding redistribution, 151–152, 154, 158–159 income generation, 154–155 inequalities addressed, 160–161 mission, 149–151, 156, 159 new regionalism, 156–157 reflexive food truck justice, 149–163 social enterprise model, 161–162 Cohen-Cruz, Jan, 199 Cold trucks, 75 Colton (California), 72 Columbus (OH) Anglo culture, 175–176, 184 food trucks, acceptance of, 174 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in, 172 public spaces, social dynamics shaping, 184–185 regulatory strategies, 174 taqueros, 172–173, 184 Columbus (OH), gourmet food trucks hyperreal spaces of, 185 owner demographics, 173 patron demographics, 175 social media, use of, 173 social spaces of ethnicity and class, 184 spatial practices of, 173, 175, 184 spatial uncertainty, 184

322 Index

Columbus (OH), taco trucks. See also Dos Hermanos taco truck construction, 172 costs of, 172, 186n5 first appearances, 174 owner fears, 172 residents’ perception of, 174 social spaces of, 184 spatial practices of, 172–175, 183–185 Comfort foods, 171 Commercial kitchens, 30, 72–73, 265, 280n3 Commissaries, 72, 76, 79 Community economic development, 7–8 Cook-aboard trucks, 68–69, 70f, 75–77 Cordery, William, 152 Cranston (Rhode Island), 30 Crawshaw, Paul, 249 Creative cities doctrine, 200, 212, 228 Cresswell, Timothy, 170–171 Croegaert, Ana, 12, 14, 109–124 Cross, J. C., 8 Cuisine, regional, 194, 201–202, 246 Culinary practices, reproducing, 171 Cultural capital, 174, 290, 298–301, 303, 304, 312 Cultural identity formation, 1, 3–7, 79, 277–278 Deal, Heather, 129, 137–139 de Certeau, Michel, 6, 9, 25, 170, 171, 191, 193–195, 199, 203, 312 Dermer, Jeffery, 157 Derrida, Jacques, 10 Dinin’ Hall, 175f, 175–176, 177, 183, 184, 199 District of Columbia, 103 Diversity cultural, gourmet food trucks creating, 185 entrepreneurial, advancing in Atlanta, 276–277

in food cart owners, 287 meaning of, 133 on nonprofit boards, 160–161 Dominguez, Dulce, 176, 178f, 180f Dos Hermanos taco truck mobility, ties of, 176–183 passing through performance, 190 social spaces, crossing, 184–185 Dragon’s Den, The (TV show), 192 Drapeau, Jean, 230 Drobnick, Jim, 193 Dunn, Kathleen, 4, 47–62, 130, 252, 313 DuPuis, E., 152–153, 156, 162 Durban, South Africa, 60–61 Durham (North Carolina). See also Chicago (Illinois) vs. Durham (North Carolina) food trucks, growth in, 210 gentrification, 209 political economy, 208–210 Durham (North Carolina), regulatory strategies financial, 213t, 214 GPS tracking, 212–214 loosening, 207–208, 210, 215, 219 spatial, 212, 213t time limitations, 212, 213t East 86th Street Association, 91–92, 96–97 Eco-habitus, 289–290 Economic capital, 299–300 Edwards, Arthur, 245 Ehrenfeucht, Renia, 12, 14, 109–124, 131 Eissawy, Moustafa, 105n6 Ellin, N., 9 El Monte (California), 72 Ely, Al, 75–76 Engels, Friedrich, 50 Entrepreneurialism diversity in, 276–277 of food truck owners, 104

Index 323

gourmet food trucks vs. traditional street food vendors, 47 of taco truck owners, 87, 183 urban, 245 Environmentalism eco-localist values and practices, 287, 291, 292–296 food trucks, 247–248 justifying gentrification, 249 social valorization of, 289 sustainability practices, food carts, 287 Vancouver (Canada), 244–250 Eshuis, Jasper, 245 Ethnic food, popularity of, 289 Evans, Graeme, 244 Facebook, 36, 92, 173, 195, 218, 234–235, 236, 252, 263, 274 Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Harvie), 196 Farmers’ markets, 111, 156, 170, 246, 272, 285, 293, 296 Farmers’ market trucks, 275 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 201 Fidel Gastro. See Basile, Matt (“Fidel Gastro”) Fiske, S. T., 214 Florida, Richard, 200, 228 Fogelson, Robert M., 71 Food city-countryside divide, perforating the, 194–195 as cultural commodity, 312 cultural identity formation and, 5–7 disciplining feral spaces through, 251 environmentally responsible, 247 paying for, 198 regional, 194, 201–202, 246 socially responsible, 247 spatial practices of, 170–174 and the temporality of place, 194–195 urban regeneration and, 250 Food cart pods, 285–286

Food carts. See also Food trucks; Portland (Oregon) costs of, 286–287 eco-localist values and practices, 287 economic impact, 286 owners, diversity in, 287 in public parks, 252–253 sustainability practices, 287 Food deserts, 51, 202, 275 Food geography, 170–174 Foodies defined, 288 gourmet, 288–290 values, 303 Food localism, 194, 201–202, 246, 247, 287, 291, 292–296 Food safety, legislation and regulation, 68–70, 72–74, 79–81, 120 Food sales, food services vs., 280n3 Food service industry, structural inequality, 219 Food services, food sales vs., 280n3 Food truck alleys, 193, 197–198 Food truck associations. See also Vendor associations association dues, 57 Loncheros Association (Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California), 39, 79 National Food Truck Association (NFTA), 40, 40f New York City Food Truck Association, 102 New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), 49, 57, 59, 102 Street Food Vendors Association, 143 Food truck design, 71, 73, 76, 78 Food truck events, 268, 269, 270–271 Food Truck Finder App, 274 Food truck industry advocacy organizations, 267–268 beginnings of, 265, 267 commissary owners in the, 79

324 Index

Food truck industry (cont.) expansion of, 48 social media driving, 274 success of, 263–264 Food truck industry, spaces of geographical expansion, 270–273 hybrid space construction, 278, 279t online, 274 transformation, 273–274 urban, redefining, 274 Food truck movement Atlanta (Georgia), 274–277 Toronto (Canada), 189, 192 Food truck organizations, 39–41, 40f Food truck owners community identity, 277 criminalization, costs of, 94–95, 97, 104 demographics, 276 entrepreneurial spirit of, 104 funding, 158–159 restaurant ownership, 78, 200, 201, 252 social media, use of, 92 Food trucks. See also Food carts; Loncheras; Taco trucks; specific cities acceptance of, 174 branding through, 256–257 breach hypothesis, 227–228, 239 bridgehead thesis, 228, 232, 233 community economic development and, 7–8 cultural capital, 312 cultural identity, contributions to, 79 defined, 227 displacement, contribution to, 257 environmentally responsible, 247–248 evolution of, 68–71, 81 fetishization as signifier of class difference, 48 forms of portable infrastructure, 255–256 future research, recommendations for, 313–315

gentrification and, 257, 314–315 growth in, 1, 91–92, 111, 210, 263, 270, 275 healthy meals requirement, 248–249 historically, 1–2 immigrant operators of, 97, 219–220 impact on cities, 68 inclusivity of, 197, 198, 202 informality, embrace of, 138–139, 142 licensing, 245–248 literature review, 227–229 marketing function, 199, 200 online directories, 274 postmodernism and, 8–10 precursors and variants, 69, 70f, 71 social justice and, 4–8, 274–275 socially responsible, 247 social media, use of, 97, 195, 252, 274 spatial justice, supporting, 251 traditional view of, 227, 229, 230 urban regeneration and, 250–251 Food trucks, costs of catering trucks, 75 financing, 276 permit costs, 59, 276 running costs, 233 start-up costs, 233, 234, 276 trucks, 61, 276 Food trucks, restaurant responses to cooperative model, 201 new business models, 35–36 proximity bans, 38, 192, 201, 212, 213t, 269 restrictions, 34–36 unfair competition complaints, 23–24 Food trucks, spaces of altering culture of urban space, 253–256 geographical expansion, 270–273 hybrid, construction of, 278, 279t immigrant, 219–220 mobility, 169, 195, 265 online, 97, 195, 252, 274

Index 325

permanent, 269 private, 268–269 public, 253, 269–270, 273–274 theater, 193–200 transformation, 195, 273–274 Food truck vending organizations, 39 Food truck vendors, street food vendors vs., 60–61 Food vending sector, gentrification of, 49 Food vendors, 26, 41, 59, 80, 134 Foodways, 79, 172 Ford, Rob, 189, 192, 200 Foucault, Michel, 249 Franklin, Shirley, 267 French, Earl, 27 French, Emma, 15, 226, 263–280 Friedel, Bill, 136 Garodnick, Daniel, 95, 96–97 Gastropolitan habitus, 288–290 Gatewood, Josh, 103 Gebhardt, Matthew, 15, 285–304, 312 Gehry, Frank, 211 Geller, Matthew, 157 General Growth Properties, Inc., 267 Gentrification Chicago (Illinois), 211 displacing residents, 118, 209, 211, 302 Durham (North Carolina), 209–211, 217 food vending sector and, 49, 59–60, 111, 314–315 pop-ups and, 198 Portland (Oregon), 297, 302 Vancouver (Canada), 249–251, 254, 256–257 Giard, Luce, 171 Giuliani, Rudy, 51 Godfrey, Phoebe, 13–14, 149–163 Goffman, Erving, 190 Goldstene, Claire, 157

Goodman, David, 152–153, 156, 162 Gottlieb, Dylan, 235 Gourmet food, redefining, 288–289 Gourmet foodie, 288–290 Gourmet food truck organizations, 39–40, 57 Gourmet food truck owners advantaged status, 48–49 demographics, 57, 173 Patty’s Tacos case, 92 restaurant ownership, 57–58, 59, 252 Gourmet food trucks advantaged status, 2 appropriation of culinary culture, 59–60, 216, 235, 238, 299, 314 costs of, 275 defined, 173 growth in, 34, 37–38, 80, 173 opposition to, 23–24, 29 other vendor types compared, 23 patron demographics, 175 policing, 58–59 popularity, rise in, 23 precursors, 81 prices at, 23, 275 regulation drivers, 23–24 regulation of, negotiating, 38–39, 41–42, 56, 57, 92 social media, use of, 23, 92, 173 street marketing, 59 taco trucks vs., 173–174, 185n1, 189–190 Gourmet food trucks, spaces of class difference, 48, 132, 184 cultural diversity, 185 geographic, 175 hyperreal, 185 inclusivity, 228 mobility, 173, 184 online, 23, 92, 173 social, 184 uncertainty, 184

326 Index

Gourmet food trucks, traditional street food vendors vs. association dues, 57 criminalization, 48–49, 313 differential treatment, 2, 50, 313 entrepreneurial classification, 47 legitimizing, 47–48 perceptions of, 60, 132 policing, 58–59 regulation of, 38–39, 48, 50, 132 social injustices, 50 GPS monitoring, 23 GPS tracking, 30, 213t Great Depression, 27 Great Food Truck Race, The (TV show), 210 GreenCarts program, 51, 53–54, 137–138 Green Pirate Juice Truck, 103 Grocery carts, mobile, 51, 53, 137–138 GrowWindham, 160 Grumman ’78, 233, 234, 236 Guilloud, Stephanie, 152 Guthman, Julie, 170 Gutiérrez, Lisa, 176–184, 178f, 180f, 190. See also Dos Hermanos taco truck Gutiérrez, Luis, 176, 183, 190. See also Dos Hermanos taco truck Gutierrez, Marco, 2 Hanser, Amy, 12, 14, 129–144, 228, 312 Harrell, Milt, 135 Harrison, Jill Lindsey, 152–153, 156, 162 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, 51 Hartford (Connecticut), 157 Harvey, David, 6, 190, 193, 200, 201, 202, 226, 245 Harvie, Jen, 190–191, 196–197, 198, 203 Healthism, 248–250 Heinz, Chashma, 139 Helms Bakery, 69 Hernández-López, E., 5 Herod, Andrew, 50

Hirt, S., 9 Ho, Eliza, 175–176 Hot dog vendors, 140–141, 143 Hot trucks, 70f, 75–77, 81 Hsu, Howard, 269 Hulu/HBO campus, 36 Ice cream vendors, 23, 26, 79, 230 Identity formation cultural, food and, 1, 3–4, 5–7, 79, 277–278 multicultural, in Vancouver (Canada), 245–246, 248 Ima, Kim, 101 Immigrant foodways, 172 Immigrant neighborhoods, food trucks impact in, 68 Immigrants deportations, 172 employment opportunities, 210, 230–232, 286 food truck operators, 78, 97, 219–220 invisibility of, 190 Los Angeles, 77–78 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 172 Industrial Caterers’ Association, 72, 74, 75 Industrial catering, 68, 70f, 71–72 Inequality income and wage, 209, 210 privatization of space in preserving, 190 Informal food economy, 157–158 Ingrassia v. Bailey, 72, 78 Instagram, 274 Jacobs, Jane, 10 Jefferson Parish (Louisiana), 110 Johnston, Josée, 288 Kiflu, Tesfalum, 92 Kiosk vending, 269

Index 327

Koba, Marc, 157 Koch, Edward, 28, 51 Kogi Truck, 9, 80, 91, 110 Koslowitz, Karen, 93f Kregor, Elizabeth, 80 LaBonge, Tom, 35–36 La Guardia, Fiorello, 27 Lai, Tim, 175–176 Language differential use of technology, 218 mobility, ties to, 176–183 Lappin, Jessica, 90–95, 93f, 102 Lasserre, Michael, 156–157 LA taco truck, 78 Latour, Bruno, 197 Leap, Norris, 67 Lee, T. L., 214 Lefebvre, Henri, 6, 9, 169 Lehrer, Ute, 253 Lemon, Robert, 130, 169–186, 189–191, 199, 226, 301, 303, 312 Lemon Rue restaurant, 36 Letter grades, 29t, 30–31, 67, 70f Levin, Laura, 200 Ley, David, 132, 138, 139, 251 Linnekin, Baylen J., 157 Lively streets concept, 138–139 Localism, 194, 201–202, 246, 247, 285, 287, 289, 291, 292–296 Locavores, 289, 295, 300, 303 Loera, Alberto, 56, 87–105, 90f, 98f Loncheras. See also Taco trucks advocacy groups, 39, 79 Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign, 37 Charlotte (North Carolina), 37–38, 42 community resistance to, 38–39 defined, 169, 313 regulating, social injustices/ethnic prejudices in, 37–39, 42 rise of, 78

Loncheros Association (Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California), 39, 79 Los Angeles (California) demographics, 77–78 food safety legislation, 70f food truck controversies, 10 food trucks, 1, 39, 68–71, 70f gourmet food trucks, 39–40, 132 immigration, 77–78 LA taco truck, 78 manufacturing employment, 77–78 sidewalk vending, 28, 68, 110 Los Angeles (California), regulatory strategies food safety, 30, 73, 81 historically, 28, 36, 80 merchandise vendors, 28 spatial, 28, 34–37, 41 Los Angeles Association of Ice Cream Vendors, 79 Los Angeles County demographics, 77–78 industrialization of, 71 public health and safety regulation, 30, 81 Los Angeles County Art Museum, 34–37, 35f Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, 81 Los Angeles Police Department, 82 Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia, 131 Lunch trucks, 72 Lunch wagons/lunch cars, 69, 70f Marketing branding, food trucks and, 244, 246, 256–257 food trucks used for, 199, 200 gourmet food trucks, 59 Martin, Nina, 14, 132, 143, 207–221, 236, 301 Martin, Trayvon, 2

328 Index

Martinez, Raul O., Sr., 78 Marzari, Darlene, 136 Matthews, Caitlin, 1–16, 226, 303, 311–315 Mayol, Pierre, 171 McClintock, Nathan, 15, 285–304, 312 McGinnis, Danny, 134 McLaren, Duncan, 150 Merchandise vendors’ regulatory strategies, 28 Merio, Joe, 75 Merrifield, Andy, 274 Mexico Blvd., 103 Mexicue, 102 Microloans, 158 Miller v. City of Atlanta, 267–268 Minkoff-Zern, L., 5 Mitchell, D., 6 Mitchell, K., 248 Mobile food industry sales revenue, 111, 149 Mobility, apps allowing, 252, 274 Modan, Gabriella, 133 Monning, William, 31–34 Monrovia (California), 40 Monroy, Patricia, 56, 87–105, 90f, 98f. See also Patty’s Tacos Monroy v. City of New York, et al., 100–101 Montreal (Canada) demographics, 228 employment opportunities, 230–232 food trucks, 230–234, 312 regulatory strategies, effects of liberalizing, 229 Montreal (Canada), food truck pilot project background, 225, 231 criticism, 232–233 customer expectations, 233, 234 customer reactions, 234–236, 238 food trucks, costs of, 233–234 inclusiveness of, 233

licensing requirements, 231–232 operator goals, 234–235 press coverage, 229, 232–233 regulatory compliance, 234 success, measuring, 226, 237–238 summary overview, 236–239 Morales, Alfonso, 12, 39, 87–105, 195, 303, 313 Moustafa (vendor), 55 Multicultural identity, Vancouver (Canada), 245–246, 248 Munoz, Lorena, 79 Musgrave, Sarah, 232 Nash, Alan, 14, 225–239, 304, 312 National Food Truck Association (NFTA), 40, 40f Neighborhoods gentrified vs. immigrant, shaping industry, 217 identities, rewriting, 251 immigrant, food trucks impact in, 68 walkability, connectivity, and food trucks, 249–250 Newman, Katherine Alexandra, 14, 229, 243–257, 285, 312 Newman, Lenore Lauri, 10, 14, 229, 243–257, 285, 287, 294, 312 New Orleans (Louisiana), regulatory strategies alcohol sales, 114, 121–122 parade regulation, 114 permits, 110 proximity bans, 110 second lines, 115–123 second lines vending, 109–110, 112–123 street vending, contradictions in, 112–115 supportive, 109, 110 time limitations, 110 transient vending ordinance, 113t trash collection, 114, 122–123

Index 329

New Regionalist movements, 156 New Urban Question, The (Merrifield), 274 New York (state), 49 New York City demographics, 118 First Amendment vendors, 52 GreenCarts program, 51, 53, 137–138 Push-Cart Commission, 27 pushcart vendors, 27–28, 102, 230 sidewalk vendors, 110 street food vendors, 52 street vending, 28 street vendor worker centers, 53–56 vendor criminalization, 49 New York City, regulatory strategies bias in, 51, 313 conditions of impossibility, 53 enforcement, 27, 28, 51, 94, 103 financial, 51, 54–55, 59, 89, 90–91 food permit caps, 52, 59 historically, 27–28 Patty’s Tacos, 87–89, 93–97 permit and license system, 51–52, 59, 230 power and control, locus of, 51, 96–97 protests, 51 spatial, 27–28, 52, 56, 88, 93–101 time limits, 90–91 vendor caps, 28, 39, 51 New York City Food Truck Association, 102 New York City Street Cleaning Commission, 27 New York City Street Vendor Project, 39 New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), 49, 57, 59, 102, 103 New York Police Department (NYPD), 52, 93–98, 103 Nicolaides, Becky, 78

Nonprofits, diversity in board members, 160–161 Novie, Alex, 15, 285–304, 312 Oligopticon, 197 Omi, M., 2 Otherness, 5–6, 190 Paletero, 26 Parade regulations, 114, 115–123 Parks, food trucks in, 193, 252–253 Patty’s Tacos creative enforcement, 93–97 introduction, 87–89 litigation, 97–101 oppressive legislation, 89–92 radical street performance, 199 war on, aftermath and effects, 101–104 Pearson, Mike, 197 Pelosi, Nancy, 47 People of color disappearing, 48 displacing, 209 immigrant street vendors, policing, 53–56 on nonprofit boards, 160–161 public space, conflicts over, 50–51 racialized labor discipline, 50–51 People v. Margarita Garcia, 35 Performance invisibility and, 190 “passing” through, 190 pop-ups as, 189, 191 site-specific, 197–198 transforming space, 190 Perkins, Harold A., 250–251 Permit and license system, 1, 24, 51–52, 59, 140–142, 230, 267–268 Permit caps, 51, 52, 59, 192 Permit costs, 49, 59, 110, 192, 276 Philadelphia, 103 Phonomenal Dumplings, 210

330 Index

Pickering suburb, Toronto, 201–202 Pilcher, Jeffrey M., 171 Pill, Alexandra, 277 Place food and the temporality of, 194–195 shaping meaning making in performance, 190 Place-branding, 243–245 Placemaking cultural, 1 through growth and celebration of culturally appropriate foods, 3–4 pop-ups and, 5–6, 196 Police powers, 122, 131 Policing gourmet food trucks vs. traditional street food vendors, 58–59 gourmet food truck vendors, 58–59 immigrant street vendors of color, 53–56 street vendors, 48, 82 working people of color, 48 Pop-up kitchens, 189 Pop-ups defined, 196 gentrification and, 198 inclusivity of, 197, 198 place-making of, 5–6, 196 Toronto Underground Market, 196–197 Pop-up urbanism, 1, 9 Portland (Oregon) demographics, 290–291, 291t, 302 eastside boundaries, 290 eastward urbanization, 290 food trucks, 1, 312 gastropolitan foodscape, 286, 298–302 gentrification of, 302 Green City branding, 285 localism, 285 populations displaced, 302 street food vending, 1 sustainability goals, 285

Portland (Oregon), ethnic food carts, eastside eco-localist values and practices, 291, 292–296 foodie terms advertising, 292–293 gastropolitan capital, 298–302 owners, minority/immigrant, 291–292 pods, spatial and demographic differences, 294–295 socioeconomic gradient, 295–296 sourcing ingredients, 292–294 success, factors in, 303 supporting, 304–305 Portland (Oregon), food carts costs of, 286–287 eco-localist values and practices, 287 economic impact, 286 geographic locations, 285 media coverage, 286 Mercado, 297–298, 300 number of, 285 owners, diversity in, 287 pods, 285–286 regulatory structure, 285 sustainability practices, 287 Portland Mercado, 296–298, 300 Postmodernism, 8–10 Poverty displacement and, 48, 198, 302 racialization of, 50 Povich, Susan, 103 Power criminalization and, 312–313 in regulation of mobile food vending, 2, 30, 31, 32–34, 41, 211–212 social justice and, 8 street food consumers escaping the imposition of, 195–196 urban poor, displacement of the, 48, 198, 302 Produce vendors, 26, 55 Property bans, 41

Index 331

Proximity bans, 23–24, 26–28, 29t, 31–34, 110, 268 Public health and safety driving regulation, 23–24 immigrant street vendors, bias against, 214 regulations, 23, 24, 30–31, 77, 81, 280n3 Public space. See also Space adaptability vs. regulation of, 114–115 cultural politics of, 133 de-ethnicizing, 50–51 disappearing the poor from, 48 equality of access in, 198 lively streets concept, 138–139 New Orleans second lines, 115–123 normalizing, 251 odors in, dream vs. dialectical, 193 regulating, 251 right to control, 91 shaping, consumer tastes in, 133 sidewalks, 130–132 social dynamics shaping, 184 taming, 251, 253, 256–257 transforming, 190, 195, 273–274 Public space–private space boundaries, 190 Pushcart vendors, 23, 26–28, 39, 102, 210–212, 214, 218–219 Quality of life, commodification of, 200 Quastel, Noah, 249 Radical acts, 199 Radical street theater, 199 Rankin, Henry, 136 Rebel without a Kitchen (TV show), 189 Reed, Kasim, 270 Reflexive food justice, 150, 152–162 Regulation of mobile food vending. See also specific cities challenging, 267–268

compliance, 234 conditions of impossibility, 53 to control growth of vending, 41 to curb vendor behavior, 41 decision making, 24–25 design, 24, 30, 136–137 equipment operations, 24 food preparation units, 75–76 GPS monitoring, 23, 30 health and safety, 23, 24, 30–31, 81, 280n3 historically, 26–28, 36, 80, 265–267 inclusiveness of, 174 loosening, creating equal opportunity through, 207–208, 219 negotiating, 38–39, 41–42, 50, 56, 57, 92 permit caps, 51, 52, 59, 192 power and control, locus of, 2, 30, 31, 32–34, 41, 211–212 protests, 51 social media and, 92 strategic, 29–31 suggestions for the future, 42 trash disposal, 24 vendor caps, 28, 39, 51 Regulation of mobile food vending, bias in ethnic/racial, 37–39, 42, 79, 80, 110, 134, 313 implementing, 312–313 negotiating change, 38–39 Regulation of mobile food vending, financial cost of violations, 51 feeding the meter ticketing, 89, 90–91 licensing, 51 partnership opportunities, 38 permit costs, 59, 110, 192, 276 restraint of trade, 36 unfair competition complaints driving, 23–24

332 Index

Regulation of mobile food vending, spatial central business district restrictions, 37, 51 designated vending zones, 23 feet of separation, 24, 30, 37 food truck alleys, 193 GPS tracking, 30 limiting mobility, 29–30 mobility, 174 parking restrictions, 35–36, 88 parks, operations in, 193 property bans, 41 proximity bans, 23, 24, 27–28, 31–34, 110 restaurant proximity bans, 38, 192, 201, 212, 213t, 269 size and placement of units, 52 vending zones, 24 Regulation of mobile food vending, time limitations days at a location, 37 effectiveness of, 24 hours in one location, 192 hours of operation, 37 metered parking spaces, 56, 90–91, 93–101 minutes in one location, 110 removing, 270 Regulatory enforcement, mobile food vending bias in, 38, 51, 312–313 cost of violations, 51 difficulty in, 27, 28, 41 evictions, 51 First Amendment vendors, 52 lack of, 174 oppressive, 94 Restaurant, defined, 73 Restaurant ownership food truck owners, 78, 200, 201, 252 gourmet food truck owners, 252

gourmet food truck vendors, 57–58, 59 street vendors, 59 Restaurant protectionism, 34–37, 38, 41, 192, 201, 212, 213t, 269 Restaurants, responses to food trucks cooperative model, 201 new business models, 35–36 proximity bans, 38, 192, 201, 212, 213t, 269 restrictions, 34–36 unfair competition complaints, 23–24 Rickshaw Dumplings, 102 Right to the city Basile’s claim to, 189 consumption practices creating, 216 cultural strategies creating, 215–216 Harvey’s framing of, 190 is to inhabit, 169 pop-up urbanism as an expression of, 9 quantifying, 190–191 street food and, 200–203 transformation and, 193 ROAM Mobile Food Vending Conference, 41 Robertson, Gregor, 129 Rockett, Alan, 139 San Diego County, 76 Schinkel, Willem, 248 School proximity restrictions, 31–34, 110 Second lines vending regulation, New Orleans, 109–110, 112–123 Shapiro, Matthew, 12, 39, 52, 55, 87– 105, 195, 303, 313 Sidewalk space, 130–132 Sidewalk vending/vendors, 28, 61, 68, 110, 269 Skinner, Caroline, 61 Slocum, R., 6, 8, 170 Smart Growth initiatives, 156

Index 333

Smith, Greg, 265, 267, 270 Smith, Maggie Rentz, 265, 267 Smyrna (Georgia), 270–271 Snowday Food Truck, 159–160 Sobel, Adam, 103 Sobel, Hannah, 1–16, 226, 303, 311–315 Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs (SA&PCs), 114, 115, 117–120 Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force, 114 Social Aid and Pleasure Club Vendor, 112 Social justice cultural diversity in achieving, 185 defined, 226 Drive Change program, 159–160 food trucks and, 4–8, 274–275 in local food politics, 152–163 postmodernism and, 8–10 power and, 8 race and, 8 spatial tactics in, 169 Social Justice and the City (Harvey), 226 Social media food trucks use of, 23, 92, 97, 173, 195, 218, 252, 274 industry structure, shaping with, 218 pop-ups and, 196 regulatory strategies, fighting with, 92 Twitter trucks, 70f, 80–81 Solga, Kim, 200 Song, Eddie, 59 Southern California, 68, 71, 72, 75, 77–78, 81 Southern California Mobile Food Vending Association (SCMFVA), 32, 39–40 South Gate suburb (Los Angeles), 78 Space. See also Food trucks, spaces of; Gourmet food trucks, spaces of; Public space; Taco trucks, spaces of feral, disciplining through food, 251

shaping meaning making in performance, 190 social practices shaping, 184 Spang, Rebecca, 198 Strategies, defined, 193–194 Street food consumers escaping the imposition of power, 195–196 cultural appropriation, 59–60, 216, 235, 238, 299, 314 defined, 201 gentrification of, 59–60 middle-class preferences, tailoring to, 175–176 place-branding through, 244, 246 popularity of, 1 restrictions on, 243 right to the city and, 200–203 in the suburbs, 201, 202–203 Vancouver (Canada)’s pilot program for, 244 Street Food App, 195, 252 Street food dining halls, 175–176, 177, 183, 184, 199 Street food experience, 201 Street food vendors. See also Street vendors food trucks vs., 60–61 future research, recommendations for, 313–315 income security, 51 licensing, healthy meals requirement, 248 number of, 52 permitting processes, 1 restaurant ownership, 59 Street food vendors, gourmet food trucks vs. association dues, 57 criminalization of, 48–49, 313 differential treatment, 2, 49, 50, 313 entrepreneurial classification, 47 legitimizing, 47–48

334 Index

Street food vendors, gourmet food trucks vs. (cont.) perceptions of, 60, 132 policing, 58–59 regulation of, 38–39, 48, 50, 132 social injustices, 50 Street Food Vendors Association, 143 StreetNet International, 53 Street theater, 193–200 Street vending. See also New Orleans (Louisiana); Vancouver (Canada) disputes over, 131 historically, 47 reforming, 61–62 regulatory strategies, 28 social equity in, 23 Street vendor associations, 28, 39–40, 53, 143. See also Food truck associations Street Vendor Project (SVP), 12, 39, 49, 52–57, 60, 92, 94–101 Street vendors. See also Street food vendors criminalization of, 48–49, 53–56, 105n6, 211 demographics, 53 financial risk, 28 opportunities for, reducing, 28 participatory planning, 60–61 policing, 48, 82 rights of, 39–42 social justice for, 61–62 spatial impact, 120–121, 251–252 worker centers, 53–56 Street vendors, immigrant bias against, 2, 38–39, 104n2, 214 of color, policing, 53–56 criminalization of, 48–49, 105n6, 211 public spaces, removing from, 50 unjust regulation of, 218–219 Street vendor worker centers, 53–56 Suburbs food truck events, 270–273, 274–275 street food in the, 201, 202–203

Sustainability justifying gentrification, 249 Sustainability practices, food carts, 287 Sutton, David, 253 Sweet Auburn BBQ, 269 Sweet Auburn Curb Market, 268 Table d’hôte, 198 Tacofino, 252 Taco truck owners entrepreneurial spirit of, 87, 183 fears of, 172 Taco trucks. See also Loncheras background, 171, 174 bias against, racial, 110 costs of, 172, 186n5 cultural identity, contributions to, 79 defined, 70f gourmet food trucks vs., 173–174, 185n1, 189–190 impact on cities, 68 innovation of, 81 municipal supports, 110 residents’ perception of, 174 Taco trucks, spaces of crossing boundaries, 184–185 geographic, 175 mobility, 172–174, 184 permanency, 173 perseverance, 184 sense of place, evoking, 171–172 social, of ethnicity and class, 184 symbolic space of hope, 184 uncertainty, 184 Tactic, defined, 195 Tamale vendors, 26, 296 Taqueros, 172, 184 Taschereau, Sylvie, 230 Taylor, Dorceta, 161 Terroir foods, 202 Theater food trucks and, 191–193

Index 335

pop-ups as performance, 189, 191 radical street performance vs., 199 site-specific, 197–198 Thrift, Nigel, 191 Time, marking social status, 198 Toronto (Canada) alternative event and media scene, 189 creative cities doctrine, 200 food truck alleys, 197–198 food truck movement, 189, 192 food trucks, 191–200 regulatory strategies, 191–193 street food and the right to the city, 200–203 view of the city, 194–195 Toronto Underground Market, 196–197 Treats Truck, 101 Tunney, Tom, 214 Twitter, 35–36, 173, 195, 218, 235, 252, 274 Twitter trucks, 70f, 80–81 Underground food economy, 151, 157–158 Unions, street vendors, 53 Urban entrepreneurialism, 245 Urban foodscape, changes in the, 1 Urban planning and design, 138 Urban poor, displacement of the, 48, 198, 302 Vallianatos, Mark, 1, 28, 67–85, 226, 252–253 Valverde, Mariana, 133, 142 VAMOS Unidos, 49, 54–56, 57, 59 Vancouver (Canada) biopolitics, 248–250 branding, 244–248, 256–257 gentrification, 249, 251 Greenest City initiative, 244–250 livability, 243, 256–257

multicultural identity, 245–246, 248 Olympic Village development, 254–255 Zero Waste culture, 247 Vancouver (Canada), food trucks in branding through, 256–257 culture of urban space, altering the, 253–256 ecological responsibility, 247–248 forms of portable infrastructure, 255–256 gentrification and, 257 healthy meals requirement, 248–249 licensing process, 245, 246–249 megavents, supporting, 255–256 in public parks, 252–253 public support for, 243 reintroduction of, 243–244 social responsibility, 247, 251 Vancouver (Canada), street food vending licensing, healthy meals requirement, 248 pilot program for, 244 place-branding strategies through, 244, 246 restrictions, 243 Vancouver (Canada), street vending 1970s hippie vendors, 129, 134–137 2010–present, 129, 137–142 background, 130–134 eliminating, 243 geographical expansion, 251–252 regulation of, 129–130, 133–134, 136–137, 140–143 Vancouver Food Cart Fest, 254–255 Vancouver Food Strategy, 251, 253 Van Houdt, Friso, 248 Vendor associations, 28, 39–40, 143 Vendors’ rights, 39–42 Vigneault, Karine, 202 Vij’s Railway Express, 246, 252

336 Index

Volrich, Jack, 129, 135, 136 Voss, Oleg, 101 Waal, Peter, 129 Waguespack, Scott, 214 “Walking in the City” (de Certeau), 191 Walsh, Elaine, 91 Wang, Oliver, 81 Weber, David, 57, 58, 59, 102 Wessel, Ginette, 23–43, 226, 253 Whites/Anglos middle-class dining habits, 175–176, 199 social practices shaping urban space, 184 Whittall, Edward, 14, 189–204 Wieditz, Thorben, 253 Wiener, Scott, 33 Willimantic (Connecticut), 151, 153, 157 Winant, H., 2 Windham County (Connecticut), 151, 153 Wood, Mackenzie, 15, 226, 263–280 Woodruff Arts Center, 268 Working people of color, 48, 50–51 World Trade Center, 194 Wright, Geoffrey, 98, 100–101, 104 Yelp, 235, 238 Yelp reviews, 67, 88 Yolk’s, 252, 254 Young, Carson, 265 Youth programs Drive Change, 159–160 GrowWindham, 160 Yumbii truck, 265 Zimmerman, George, 2 Zukin, Sharon, 132–133, 215, 250