Nancy Luna (the Fast Food Maven) is someone whose writing I admire, and she scoops absolutely everything about fast food in OC. I know that when the Buttermilk Truck or the Grilled Cheese Truck or any of the other, suddenly-fashionable higher-end food trucks come to OC, she will know about it before they even tweet it, and so I was glad to see a post about more food trucks coming to OC, because it probably means she has insider information.
I read through the post (and Nancy, you're a food truck tease) and am excited by what I read, but the comments! The comments made me cringe.
You'd think I'd have learned by now never, ever, ever to read comments on any story at all on the Register's website. There has to be some kind of OC corollary to Godwin's Law, whereby the chance of someone ranting, usually completely off-topic, about illegal immigrants increases exponentially with the length of the comment thread.
The comments on Nancy's post weren't as xenophobic as normal for the Register, but they still made me cringe. They contain nearly all the stereotypical, misinformed objections to food trucks. Read on, dear readers, as I tackle the big ones in turn:
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1. Sanitation
Let's just get this right out of the
way. I have eaten at food vendors from Hong Kong to London. I have
eaten so-called “dirty water” hot dogs, barbecue brisket, grilled squid
on sticks, Mexico City-style quesadillas de huitlacoche and, yes,
Korean grilled pork tacos, and I have never gotten sick. Not only have I
never gotten sick from a mobile vendor, I don't know anyone who has
ever gotten sick from food from a mobile vendor. I have, however,
gotten food poisoning on multiple occasions at bricks-and-mortar
restaurants. Now, while the ratio of time I eat at mobile vendors
vs. bricks-and-mortar restaurants is fairly low, it's definitely
high enough that I should have gotten sick by now if sanitation were
the issue the detractors say it is.
The simple fact is that
there's nothing to hide about the sanitation of a food truck, because
food trucks are almost always small mom-and-pop operations that succeed
or fail based on word of mouth. If a food truck (I'm sorry, leasing
people, I'm not going to call them “road stoves”) poisons someone, it
is the kiss of death for that business, so they are going to make
absolutely sure that they don't. They're under constant inspection by
their patrons, who can see exactly what is going on in there. If they
engage in unsanitary practices, people will just leave, and they'll
tell others, and it's curtains for the owner.
2. Neighborhood disturbance
This
one depends on where you are. Somehow, I don't really see food trucks
driving into the maze of tracts that makes up most of OC's residential
zone. Most food trucks don't want to pull into residential
neighborhoods, because there's hardly any traffic that drives by;
eating at a food truck is often an impulse decision (“I'm hungry…
mmm, barbacoa.”) and the trucks are there to make money, just like any other business.
This is one complaint, however, where the food
trucks can take a step to make sure they're being good neighbors. Don't
stop in parking lots adjacent to residences (such as the weekly Kogi
stop at Luigi's D'Italia in Anaheim); pick a spot that isn't going to
keep people awake in their houses until the wee hours. Provide trash (and recycling) receptacles.
For those people who choose to flout the rules, the answer
is simple: fine them. Fine customers for littering, or fine the trucks for not
cleaning up after their patrons. We already have laws about
littering: enforce them. There will always be people who don't want to
be good neighbors, but the solution is not to ban food trucks
completely. Fine the bad ones and let the good ones sell food in peace.[
3. Taxes and Competition
One
of the biggest beefs restaurateurs have about food trucks is that they
aren't subject to the same taxes and rules as bricks-and-mortar
restaurants, and that this is inherently unfair.
There's a simple reason for this: Food trucks are different. There
isn't a sensible taxation structure in place, and there needs to be. In
most places, restaurants are taxed based on the number of seats, or the
square footage. This isn't practical for food trucks, who don't have
seats (usually) or square footage. I don't have an MBA and I don't work
for the government, so I can't say how this should work, but there's
got to be a way to level the playing field. (Sorry, food truck people.
Nobody wants to pay taxes, but that's life.)
As for the unfair competition business, I call bollocks.
If your
business is so similar to a food truck that people passing by will go
to the food truck instead of into your business, well, this is America,
home of the capitalist dream. Lease a food truck yourself, enjoy the
lack of taxes (for now) and different rules. Go out there, do it better
than your competition, and reap the rewards. Chances are if that's the
case, you could do just as well without the overhead of the building.
People normally go to restaurants because they want to be
served. They want to sit and have their food brought to them, and they
want air conditioning and bathrooms and real silverware. They want wine or beer or a drink with dinner, things that are not possible with food trucks. People who fit this description
are not going to pause on the way in to an Italian trattoria for a $15 plate of lasagne and a glass of Chianti and decide
they'd rather have a grilled cheese sandwich and a bottle of Jarritos from a truck instead.
There's room for both restaurants and food trucks, and anyone who
thinks that OC would turn into a vast, congested obstacle course of
food trucks with no physical restaurants is either overdramatic or
deluded.
4. Foods We'd Like To See Sold From Trucks
The
suggestions in the comments on Nancy's post include Carl's Jr. (which already has a
mobile food truck, as does In-N-Out), Coco's, “a clash between Quizno's
and Subway,” Popeye's, Rubio's and Baja Fresh.
I'm mentally
poking my eyes out, because you cannot drive a mile on a major road (at
least in north OC) without hitting at least one of these stores or
clones of them. There's simply no reason for them to sell from trucks.
Also, the Mexican food sold from the trucks is normally so far superior
to Rubio's and Baja Fresh that it's embarrassing for the chains.
If having roving trucks of this stuff would cause people to change
their minds about food trucks in general, though, then go for it: carpet the
county with mediocre chain fast food sold from trucks.
One of the commenters bemoaned the lack of choice for work lunches in
Yorba Linda. The
great thing about food trucks is that they can turn any restaurant
wasteland into a place to get your grub on, even if it's only for an
hour or so. As an example, one particularly unlovely section of Burbank is made tolerable by the visit of a couple of food trucks every day;
breakfast burritos in the morning, then tacos or Italian food at
lunchtime. There's no reason Yorba Linda couldn't have trucks going through and delivering people from the burden of Same Three Restaurants Syndrome.
As for me, my personal list of foods I would dearly love to see sold from food trucks in OC includes arancini (risotto balls stuffed with things and deep-fried), dim sum-type snacks (can you imagine walking out of work and getting a cha shu bao?), soft pretzels like I had as a kid in New Jersey, real French crN;pes, and Italian-American food like sausage and pepper sandwiches, pasta, etc.[ One of the hallmarks of a great city (and I'm counting OC and our
3,000,000 people as a “city”) is the presence of great street food. New
York has it; Chicago has it; Mexico City has it; Toronto has it; nearly all of Asia has it. All of these places
have vibrant restaurant scenes AND vibrant street food scenes. If street food and restaurant food can
coexist there, they can coexist here.
Thanks, Nancy, for covering the scene for those of us who don't think food trucks are the tools of the devil, and here's hoping that your readers will stop and think about it before posting things. I'm looking forward to more news about roving chow… and now I desperately want a pambazo from a taco table.
