by David Sax
“Farragut is a first-tier spot,” Rathborne said, entering his fifth and, he hoped, final pass around the square at 9:20. “On a beautiful day like this we’ll do as much business as we possibly can.” Second-tier spots, like one near the rather isolated State Department, are easier to park in but draw far less foot traffic. “When I started back in 2010 there were fifteen trucks in the city. You could leave your kitchen at 11:00 a.m. and still get a prime spot for 11:30. Now, with more than 150 trucks, you have to get out here and play musical chairs until parking enforcement leaves.” With that, Rathborne jerked the Jeep into a spot in the middle of the block on the park’s west side. “I might just wait here and take the $100 fine today,” he said, looking around. “Officer Freeman is the one to watch out for. If the food trucks are the Road Runner, she’s Wile E. Coyote.” Rathborne got out and stood by the meter, scanning the sidewalk in either direction for Officer Freeman or, possibly, a falling anvil. He nodded to a Middle Eastern–looking taxi driver and a conservatively dressed Korean man, whose cars were parked in the adjacent spots, waiting by their meters. “These guys are saving spots too,” Rathborne said. “The taxi in front of me is probably waiting for his brother to arrive with an Afghan kebab truck.”
At the stroke of 9:30 the parking meter sprang to life with a click. Rathborne and others all around the square pumped handfuls of quarters into their meters, then hopped into other circling cars or food trucks, which took them to the off-site kitchens where they would finish preparing lunch. Rathborne spotted a Vietnamese soup truck circling the square, honking its horn with the sad desperation of a calf separated from the herd, and he shook his head. “He might be out of luck already,” he said as we bounded down the stairs of the DC Metro station to catch a train out to Alexandria, Virginia, where the Big Cheese shared a prep kitchen with the BBQ Bus and the Borinquen Lunch Box, which sold Puerto Rican food. There Rathborne checked on his employees, who were assembling and wrapping stacks of grilled cheese sandwiches in cellophane, and raced around, piling sandwiches, drinks, napkins, and other essentials onto a small cart. He kept up a steady patter with Tad Ruddell-Tabisola, the owner of the BBQ Bus, who was rubbing spices onto dozens of racks of ribs and sliding them into the smoker to cook overnight. The main topic of conversation, aside from smack talk about parking, was around “regs,” or the city’s proposed regulations, which the DC Food Truck Association was in the midst of a four-year battle to quash. Food truck owners were fearful that the new laws the mayor’s office had tabled would take the food trend they had generated, a trend that created tremendous public joy, changed the nature of commerce in DC, and fed the families of the truck owners, and crush it under the weight of unnecessary and onerous fines and penalties. It would snuff out DC’s food truck trend with the stroke of a pen. “One of the things about the new regs is that trucks need a licensed owner on trucks at all times,” Rathborne explained to me as Ruddell-Tabisola nodded in agreement. “That’s a five hundred–dollar license for two years, per person, and it’s like saying that I can’t have a restaurant open if my waiter doesn’t have a license. Turnover in this business is high for employees. I can’t afford to buy each new one a vending license at five hundred dollars a pop! In Arlington it’s thirty to forty dollars.”
Half an hour after he arrived at the kitchen, Rathborne’s Big Cheese truck, with its smiling sandwich logo, was packed, gassed, and ready to go. With Rathborne at the wheel and me and his two young employees squeezed into the back, sitting atop coolers, the truck charged back toward DC, its kitchen-backseat banging and clanging loudly all the way. “Hold on tight!” Rathborne bellowed over the loud engine. “We’ll go through yellow lights, because this thing don’t stop!” We arrived, slightly shaken, at his Jeep, still parked in its spot, at 11:24. One of the employees jumped out to move the car to a nearby parking lot, and Rathborne gave two friendly honks to the drivers of the Kohinoor Dhaka Indian and Yellow Vendor trucks, now parked on either side of his spot. They maneuvered a few crucial inches so Rathborne could wedge the Big Cheese truck into its spot. Rathborne turned off the engine and stepped outside just as the parking meter ticked to red. He fed it more quarters, then helped his other employee open the large service window. They turned on the generator and the grill, powered up two iPads as an ordering system, and hung a rack of potato chips off the side of the truck. Rathborne took one last look, then sent out a message to the Big Cheese’s 8,950 Twitter followers at 11:39, telling them where the truck was parked. Within seconds a line began forming, due more to the fact that it was lunchtime than to warp-speed social media, and the first order of the day, a Thrilled Cheese (chipotle cheddar, jalapeño, and guacamole on sourdough) hit the grill. Then, remembering one last thing, Rathborne placed a sign in the truck’s window that every truck around Farragut Square had also prominently displayed. It featured a map of the city’s core, with most streets and squares blocked out in red to show where food trucks would be prohibited from parking in just over a month if the DC city council adopted the current regulations the mayor’s office proposed. On the bottom, in big bold letters, was their twenty-first-century call to arms: #saveDCfoodtrucks.
Biting into a greasy, crunchy, altogether delicious gourmet grilled cheese sandwich, politics are probably the last thing that enters your mind. After all, food is one subject that tends to cut across ideological and political divides. Republicans and Democrats love bacon just as much as hardcore communists and die-hard capitalists enjoy ice cream. Few of us would associate kale bought at the farmer’s market with a particular cause or their morning latte with a stance on global trade policy because we rarely realize how much food trends matter as an impetus for political power and change. But matter they do, because food trends have the ability to change laws and behaviors by the sheer nature of their popularity, shaping everything from economics to social policy well beyond the plate.
In many instances a food trend’s political influence is straightforward and overt. The rising popularity of organic foods, locally produced foods, and ethically raised animals are all significant food trends that grew from political ideals but later became intertwined with taste and flavor trends. They began in places like Northern California and bourgeois hippie restaurants like Chez Panisse, but eventually they spread out across the food world’s tastemakers. Where importing the finest ingredients from around the world was once the chief point of pride among the finest restaurants, today the best kitchens in the world, from Denmark’s NOMA to Charleston’s McCrady’s, all try to outdo each other with seasonal, local, organic ingredients, sometimes from as nearby as the restaurant’s own rooftop gardens. These are places where the chefs made their names by foraging in the dirt, taking seaweed and wild flowers and crap that nobody even took a second look at, and charging $20 a plate for it. It is a movement that has made farmers like Glenn Roberts stars in the culinary world, and it is now affecting chains as large as Chipotle, in which the company strives to serve vegetables that are local and organic and meats raised humanely without hormones. Although the political aspect of these trends remain at their very core—they are a yin to industrial food’s yang—the diners and shoppers opting for these options today do so increasingly out of a sense of taste. Organic food and local food tastes better, the advocates say, and although this isn’t really always the case, it is driving the industry’s tremendous growth.
Trends like these can directly impact government policies. From the moment Michelle Obama entered the White House as First Lady, she vocally promoted local, sustainable food for families, communities, and, most significantly, schools. A lot of this has been chalked up to photo ops of Mrs. Obama in the White House garden or distributing apples to cute children, but over time her stance has had a significant impact. Hundreds of schools across the country have begun planting their own gardens, sourcing local food, and working with farmers to develop better lunches and cafeteria offerings. In 2012 the Department of Agriculture introduced a pilot program that offered grants to farmers and schools
pairing up to provide healthy, local foods to children. Its funding was minimal, just $5 million, likely what the nation’s schools spend each week on French fries, but its symbolism was significant. Mrs. Obama’s evangelism for local food has signaled to policymakers, from school principals to town mayors and even national agencies, that the White House will view this issue favorably.
Food trends are powerful political forces because they draw together a diverse group of motivated consumers and tastemakers. In 2011 an investment group backed by a Boston hedge fund made an application to develop a massive aggregate quarry on thousands of acres of farmland the company had been quietly acquiring north of Toronto—just a ways down the road from Thornbury. Local farmers and weekend residents, including the celebrated chef Michael Stadtlander, who runs a gourmet farm restaurant nearby, formed a grassroots opposition campaign to what they dubbed the “Mega Quarry.” They began spreading word through the chef and foodie community in Toronto that the quarry would greatly affect the food and water quality that provided the same local, seasonal food that went on their plates. “Stop the Mega Quarry” bumper stickers and T-shirts soon began appearing at the city’s most coveted restaurants as well as on the Volvos and Audis parked outside. That fall Stadtlander organized an event in the community called Food Stock, which brought eighty chefs and thousands of food fans to a wet, rainy potato farm near where the quarry would be located for a day of eating, drinking, and advocacy. The farmers and the chefs had vastly less money than what the investors had wagered on the quarry, but in the end they leveraged the trend of local seasonal food by using the chefs and their sophisticated customers to turn a local land use issue into one about choice on the plate. The quarry’s investors withdrew their application, and the land was sold to a consortium that promised to keep it for farming.
Other food trends exert political influence by their economic might. The rapid rise of espresso coffee culture in the 1990s was spearheaded by Starbucks, which quickly became the largest coffee shop chain in the world. As Starbucks grew and other coffee chains proliferated, the politics of the coffee business seeped into the conversation, largely focused around fair wages paid for coffee beans grown in producing countries. Under consumer pressure, in 2000 Starbucks began purchasing Fair Trade–certified beans and quickly grew into the largest Fair Trade coffee seller in the world. This gave the Fair Trade coffee movement greater visibility, and other competing chains and coffee retail brands adopted the standard in order to compete with Starbucks. Now, even mass retailers like Costco and 7-11 sell Fair Trade coffee. Starbucks has also leveraged its trendiness so as to lobby lawmakers to support free trade deals with countries such as Colombia, Peru, and South Korea. Their lobbying budget is small, less than a million dollars a year, but the company’s influence is derived from its popularity. A green and white Starbucks coffee cup is a powerful symbol of American capitalism on a par with McDonald’s’ golden arches or a red can of Coke. The lawmakers, bureaucrats, and power brokers in DC and other capitals know that, as sure as their staffers know their morning order of a venti double skim latte, no sugar.
In the case of food trucks, a culinary trend has morphed into a political issue that is having profound effects on the way commerce is conducted in cities all over the world. Since Roy Choi launched his Kogi Korean BBQ truck in Los Angeles in late 2008, caravans of new food trucks have rolled out in cities and towns all over North America and, increasingly, other countries. Estimates of the number of food trucks in North America range anywhere from roughly ten thousand to over a hundred thousand. From the Swiss-style hot dogs at Swieners in San Diego to the pad Thai at the One of a Thai truck of Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the food truck revolution has covered thousands of miles in a short period of time and emerged into one of the most significant, fastest growing food trends of our time. Food trucks have rolled out with nearly every cuisine imaginable, capturing lunch diners by offering freshly cooked, often innovative food that is easily accessed at an affordable price point.
The politicization of the food truck trend happened almost immediately. In every city and town where trucks have established a presence they have been met with almost immediate opposition in the form of restrictive regulations, outdated bylaw enforcement, and lobbying campaigns from a collection of interests headed up by established restaurant owners and others who are threatened by the new business model food trucks present. In every case the nascent food trucks have banded together and formed coalitions and associations in order to fight for their very livelihood. They quickly learned the art of politics and leveraged the power of their food trend not only to safeguard their business but also to change the laws of commerce across the continent. And this should matter to all of us because food trucks not only increased our lunch options; they also fostered innovation in the food business in a way that allowed new economic models to emerge where there were none before. Before the food truck trend the idea of selling quality, innovative meals on the street was something people talked about when they came back from travels abroad, and those who wanted to start a new food business had to either open up a costly restaurant or keep on dreaming. The food trucks have changed this. Roy Choi’s Kogi taco has upended the way food was sold in our cities and towns and the way young cooks and chefs brought their ideas to the public. More than their individual businesses, the food trucks were fighting to save this, while the opposition was trying to keep it from spreading further.
Washington, DC, was one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the food trucks wars and, because of the city’s highly political nature, one of its most interesting. The first of the current generation of food trucks (alternatively called “gourmet,” “hipster,” or “Twitter” trucks) appeared in the city in early 2009 around the time of President Obama’s inauguration. One of the pioneers was the Fojol Brothers, which sold a mix of Ethiopian and Indian street food out of a carnival caravan, complete with decorative turbans and waxed mustaches. Other trucks soon followed, as the city’s lunch crowd rapidly embraced new options, which were often cheaper and better quality than the takeout lunch spots in the core of the city. In mid-2009 the DC city council set up a task force to look at amending the regulations governing who could sell food on the street. For decades street food in DC was limited to roving ice cream trucks and stationary hot dog carts, which served the same menu from fixed locations around the Washington mall and other tourist sites. The rules that governed them were over four decades old, and the market was as stagnant as the water the hot dogs steamed in. The food trucks provided a direct challenge to the regulatory status quo. They served all sorts of unexpected foods, from southern barbecue to Vietnamese soups, and though they changed locations each day, most parked for hours during lunchtime in one spot instead of the quick stops ice cream trucks typically made. The task force that city council had appointed was heavily skewed with restaurant owners and representatives of business improvement districts (BIDs), which are associations of landlords and business owners from a particular area. Only one food truck owner was invited to join the task force, and others who requested a seat were flat out told not to join because it wouldn’t be a friendly environment.
In early 2010, as the number of trucks in DC grew to over a dozen, restaurants, through their trade group the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW), and a number of BIDs intensely lobbied the city council to halt food trucks’ rapid expansion. They argued that food trucks took up valuable parking spaces, obstructed the sidewalks in front of restaurants with crowds, and encouraged litter to pile up nearby. Most importantly, the trucks were perceived to be pulling away paying customers from the established, taxpaying restaurants and food stores in these areas, and in the midst of a recession, no less. In the past the BIDs and the RAMW had directly supported several city councilors’ election campaigns, and their relationships were longstanding, so it wasn’t a total surprise when the DC city council proposed a moratorium on new licenses for food trucks later that year. The mov
e would have slammed the brakes on DC’s emerging food truck scene. When the food truck owners heard about the moratorium, they immediately called each other and raced down to the city council’s offices.
“City council was going to drop emergency legislation, and everyone would have been out of business in a matter of months,” recalled Che Ruddell-Tabisola, who co-owned the BBQ Bus with his husband, Tad. “We all ran down. Some guys wore dirty chef’s coats and smelled like French fries. We were running up and down the stairs, and it was our first time lobbying, but we did it!” Through pure persuasion and a relentless last-minute effort, the food truck owners had banded together and finally got their voices heard. The city’s moratorium was shelved, and the District of Columbia began a long and arduous debate over how to effectively regulate street food as well as street vending. The food trucks’ first battle was won, but the war was just beginning. To continue the fight, DC’s food trucks would need advice, organization, and allies to keep their trend alive. They got all three by way of California and a man named Matt Geller.
In the politicization of the food truck trend, Matt Geller is the central figure who has linked disparate truck owners across the nation, organized their ranks into formidable forces, and taught them to fight for their rights. He is the Cesar Chavez of food trucks, and he lives to make sure that food trucks everywhere can sell their meals without undue restriction or constraint. Geller was no stranger to the food business. He managed restaurants in his twenties but later received a law degree from UCLA and had some experience in local politics. Just after Christmas 2009, Dominic Lau, a friend of his who owned the new Don Chau Taco truck in Los Angeles, called Geller with a problem. “ ‘Matt, I don’t know what to do,’ ” Geller recalled Lau telling him. “ ‘My truck got shut down for three weeks because I didn’t have access to a restroom for one night.’ My immediate concern was that my friend is being harassed,” Geller said. “I grew up in Venice, California, and I have a problem with authority. Don was getting harassed by other municipal forces—in any given day he would get harassed by the county health department or the LAPD, which is run by the city. What did I have to do to make sure my friend didn’t get harassed? The food truck thing was just a passion project for him. He said, ‘Matt, I don’t know what to do. I just lost $25,000. I don’t know what to do.’ When I heard that, I thought Hell no!”