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This chapter explores the evolution of Atlanta’s local food truck movement, contextualizing the rise of this emerging industry within the changing local and state regulatory environment. Through a review of historical documents and a survey of social media outlets, the researchers find that food truck vendors in Atlanta, aided by third sector intermediaries, have thrived by working around, rather than within, the existing regulatory framework. Despite the ability of this new industry to cater to a specific middle and upper class market, food trucks in Atlanta have not increased entrepreneurial diversity or access to new and healthy foods for low-income neighborhoods as some advocates have argued. 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.

This chapter explores the evolution of food trucks and food safety regulations for these vehicles in the Los Angeles region between WW2 and the present. It shows how food trucks have reacted to and influenced the region’s industrialization and deindustrialization, and how food trucks became more informal and public as immigration made Los Angeles a majority non-white metropolis. In considering how food safety changed as operators began cooking on board trucks, the chapter examines how safety rules can both protect the public and reflect social norms of legitimacy around identity and public space.

There is a profusion of food trucks roaming the streets in the United States that cater to a variety of people. In this paper I argue that food truck types can be defined through their mobility practices. To this end, I present an original framework for food studies through the exploration of spatial practices. I then empirically evaluate a mixed ethnic couple that owns and operates a taco truck and the ways in which they navigate the Latino and Anglo landscapes of Columbus, Ohio. Their practices make evident the city’s uneven social terrain and how aspects of social injustice sculpt the city’s cultural contours. I conclude by considering what social justice means for taco truck operators and their Mexican clientele.

The urban food scape is changing rapidly. Food trucks, which are part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending, are an increasingly common sight in many cities throughout the United States and Canada. With this rise in the popularity of food trucks, the key issue of regulatory conflicts between the state, street food vending and food truck entrepreneurs, and the wider industry as a whole, has risen to the fore. Cities have responded in various ways to increased interest in mobile food vending – some have adopted encouraging and relaxed regulations, some have attempted to harness the momentum to craft a city brand, and some have rigidly regulated food trucks in response to protest by brick-and-mortar competitors. This Introduction frames the volume through its guiding questions and a variety of lenses - community economic development, social justice, postmodernism. The Introduction also outlines the sections of the volume (Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices and Spatial-Cultural Practices) and summarizes the chapters included in each section.

After a seventy-year ban, the Canadian city of Montreal began a pilot program in 2013 that permitted a limited number of food trucks back onto its streets. Such an experiment offers opportunities to re-evaluate the “traditional view” that food trucks are part of an informal economy in which new arrivals to a city can create jobs for themselves, and the contrary positions that newer “foodie” food trucks have either opened a “breach” with that informal economy by catering only to the more affluent, or offer instead a “bridgehead” by bringing newer cuisines to the street where everyone can experience them. This paper explores the merits of these viewpoints through analysis of the long-running debate over Montreal’s ban on food trucks; the pilot program’s regulations permitting such trucks back into the city; a survey of the goals of the trucks’ operators; and, fourthly, an analysis of customer reviews on the social media site Yelp. This evaluation concludes that Montreal’s food truck experiment should not be interpreted as either a “breach” or a “bridgehead” – rather, it represents the use of food trucks as a pawn (or “Trojan horse”), in a much larger strategy by city planners to promote Montreal through “place branding”.

Our applied research/practice team of two attorneys and a social scientist produced this case study of an immigrant woman, who learned to be an entrepreneur. Our central narrative describes how New York City government’s response to mobile food vending prioritized powerful special interests at the expense of expanding economic opportunities in the service of the greater public good. This central narrative develops through our detailed description of an immigrant woman’s circuitous path to business and back to wage labor.

Chapter 6 investigates how food trucks have positively transformed Columbus’s city image. The chapter expands to the scale of the city to show how urban branding and the influx of gourmet food trucks has eased the acceptance of taco trucks. Since city boosters rebranded Columbus as “a smart and open city,” food trucks have become markers of ethnic diversity that enhance the city’s cultural capital. However, taco trucks somehow still seem to be missing from the city’s central consumption spaces. This chapter evaluates why that is, arguing that white privilege most often favors the boutique food truck variety, which systematically excludes traditional taco trucks from primarily public spaces and places.

This chapter applies different concepts of radical street theatre and urban performance in order to theorize the ways in which food trucks form temporary communities in urban spaces through embodied, performative intervention. An ethnographic portrait of one of Toronto’s first and best-known food truck entrepreneurs, Fidel Gastro, is employed to demonstrate the precarious position food trucks hold within the political narratives governing public space in the city of Toronto, and the ambivalence food truck entrepreneurs display toward current configurations of urban market economies. David Harvey’s conception of the right to the city is then critically applied to this scenario in order to argue that food trucks harbor the potential to intervene in dominant urban narratives, allowing urban dwellers to assert the common right to change ourselves by changing our cities.

Regulating food trucks and street vendors is a policy issue facing many cities across the U.S. This paper compares the street vending regulations in Chicago, IL and Durham, NC, cities which have pursued opposing approaches. Chicago, IL maintains a strict policy, while Durham has a liberal policy towards the sale of street foods. Despite the regulatory variation, similar inequities among groups of street vendors exist. Namely, both cities have a set of gourmet food trucks that operate in the central business district and gentrifying neighbourhoods, and a set of immigrant vendors that are excluded from these spaces. Regulation, therefore, cannot be credited with reducing inequities in the bifurcated labour practices of the street vending industry. Rather, variation in regulation is found to have minimal influence on the practices of street vendors across the two cities. Therefore, changing regulations from restrictive to liberal is an imperfect solution, contrary to the findings of much of the literature. Instead, structural inequities between vendors should be addressed.

Beginning in 2008, city policymakers across the nation became increasingly involved in regulatory debates and policy revisions surrounding mobile food vending. Despite vendors’ abilities to reactivate neglected urban areas and increase food access for underserved neighborhoods, many issues related to unfair competition, public health and safety, and prejudices continue to dominate regulatory frameworks that limit vendors’ entrepreneurial freedoms and spatial opportunities. Using three regulatory conflicts between food vendors and policymakers, this chapter highlights the motivating factors that can guide regulatory decision-making and the ways vendors destabilize and shape formal mechanisms of regulatory control. Topics include public health, restaurant protectionism, and cultural injustice at both state and city levels. This research suggests that despite rigid regulatory policies and the variety of economic, social, and political factors that influence governments’ responses to mobile food vending, active municipal investment in the public realm combined with vendors’ grassroots efforts can generate just policies. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the significance of vendor advocacy and the supportive roles of food vending organizations across the United States to illustrate the ways vendors increase social justice in cities.

The reintroduction of food trucks to Vancouver responds to widespread public demand, yet has also been taken up as another tool of urban governance. Licensing restrictions are used to further municipal policy priorities, thus incorporating street food into city branding and urban redevelopment strategies. Although crafted to foster liveability, food truck licensing is also expected to advance the goal of making Vancouver the Greenest City and to project an image of a healthy, sustainable, multicultural city. While street food is being made increasingly accessible, it is simultaneously becoming a tool of biopolitical regulation. As food trucks participate in shaping urban space, they risk contributing to gentrification and the displacement of the very residents this increased accessibility is meant to serve.

In San Francisco, young economic developers help immigrant women turn their small, informal businesses into thriving corporations, while others try to take advantage of the boom in boutique food trucks. These entrepreneurs discuss how they package and market street foods for middle-class consumption. The chapter introduces basic urban geographic concepts, such as cultural capital, cosmopolitanism, symbolic capital, social distinction, and the geographic imagination. It argues that elevating immigrant foods for middle-class consumption creates complex issues that pertain to cultural appropriation, which can cause ethnic exclusion and spur gentrification.

In this reflection on the chapters included in the volume, the editors draw out major threads of discussion and highlight opportunities for future research. Two main threads of conversation about power surfaced throughout the collection: power and cultural identity, and power and criminalization. This final chapter explores and summarizes the ways in which the chapters in the volume illustrate the emerging urban trend of food as a cultural commodity. Additionally, the chapter synthesizes depictions of the bifurcation of the food truck industry and the discriminatory implementation of regulations. Finally, the editors recommend further investigation into the direct connection between identity formation and social justice, as well as the impact of incubator organizations on food trucks and street food vending. Importantly, the editors call for research on the relationships between street food vending, food trucks, and gentrification.

This chapter critically applies the concept of reflexive food justice to the creation and running of a non-profit shared-use commercial kitchen, CLiCK, Inc., in Eastern Connecticut in order to critically evaluate to what degree it does or does not meet the criteria of reflexive food justice. The purpose of such an analysis is to question the ways in which shared use kitchens can act as agents of progressive social change in relation to facilitating low-income community members to have access of a commercial kitchen so that they may incubate a food business, which may or may not involve a food tuck or food cart. In many states food trucks and food carts need to be affiliated with a brick and mortar kitchen and so CLiCK makes such an affiliation affordable to those who might not be able to otherwise start a food business. Since the chapter is written by CLICK’s co-founder and Board President this critical analysis provides intimate details as to the struggles in not just running a non-profit shared use commercial kitchen, but in doing so in ways that seek to promote progressive social change, both within the organization itself and the surrounding community.

During 2010s, in response to new food truck operators, the city of New Orleans loosened regulations for food truck vending. At the same time the city turned its regulatory eye towards other forms of street vending and introduced a new second line vending ordinance. Using the New Orleans case, 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. The authors participated in and observed 32 second line parades (parades organized and sponsored by African-American historic benevolent societies) during one season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of the new ordinance. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the second line 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. We argue that increasing compatibility between vending and other street activities makes food and goods available in the spaces were urban residents can most easily access them, and thereby establishes a more effective and just public space.

This chapter examines the contrast between street vending and city regulatory responses in Vancouver, Canada during two time periods—the 1970s and the 2010s. The comparison of “hippy” vending in the 1970s and “hip” food carts and trucks four decades later illustrates the contradictory impulses that shape regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of “formalization” that seeks to tame the informality and messiness of street vending through new rules, standards and regulations. But by the 2010s, a second, contradictory, impulse appears: an embrace of informality reflecting new ideas about “vital” city streets and identifying street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” But the apparent embrace of the informal has unfolded through highly formalized procedures, and the vitality associated with vending in Vancouver is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form.

The epilogue begins with consideration of the way the nineteenth-century London restaurant features in individual and collective memory. It insists that such memories were not exclusively characterized by notions of dispossession, melancholy, or regret, and the distance between eating out in the middle of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century was often expressed through the sentiments of progress and improvement. It then moves on to a reflection on how returning the restaurant to a central role in our understanding of metropolitan history in the Victorian and Edwardian period has important connotations for how the history of Modern Britain, more broadly, might be researched and written. In particular, the restaurant requires more attention to be given to the more materially grounded aspects of the urban experience as much as it does to the more abstracted motifs of representation, performance, and subjectivity.