Last Run of the Night
In Los Angeles, the new conventional wisdom is that the nueva truck craze has plateaued, either because it has become oversaturated and/or the recession has forced it to scale back.53 Even Kogi had to downsize: from 2009 through 2011, it slowed from roughly seventy-five stops per week by five trucks to roughly fifty stops per week by four trucks.54 Despite this slowdown, the nueva truck phenomenon has not shown signs of abating elsewhere. Outside Los Angeles, many other cities are experiencing their own rapid expansion, creating many of the same problems of licensing, excessive competition, and brick-and-mor- tar tensions seen in Southern California in recent years.55
There are many unanswered questions about what this movement means. In regard to the relationship between nuevas and loncheras, some people, includ- ing Choi, have suggested that the nuevas helped redeem people’s previously poor opinion of loncheras, often derided as “roach coaches.”56 But it seems more likely that nuevas carved out a different niche for themselves, one that comes with culinary school pedigrees, reputations first burnished in estab- lished brick-and-mortar eateries, and the blessings of prominent food writers and publications. These all have helped make nueva trucks more acceptable, even desirable, to certain middle-class consumers, but meanwhile, loncheras continue to be as invisible as before.57
Another concern, especially if nueva truck operations are downsizing, is whether the progress of shrinking voids will also slow if these operations grow more conservative and fall back to more familiar locations. As I have stressed, many voids are located in historically underserved neighborhoods, and if the nueva truck movement wants to live up to the rhetoric of “representing the city,” it must find ways of expanding into these areas. A truly transformative activation of public space would find a way not just to bring people from West- mont to Westwood but go in the other direction as well.
Future research could go in a variety of directions. My project was to look at a single truck and to examine and map its location data. But there are more than three hundred nueva trucks in Los Angeles alone and thousands of loncheras, some of which have also started using Twitter. I therefore hope
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to use this research as the basis for a collaborative project that looks more closely and critically at how food trucks relate to their cities, and vice versa. As should be evident, my analyses are highly inductive and speculative, closer to a series of critical thoughts or primordial hypotheses than firm conclusions. I find it especially revealing that whenever I have discussed my project with like-minded scholars and journalists, they suggest new directions I had never considered. It shows that mobile eateries are a rich topic on which to ruminate but one that we have only begun to sample.58
Notes I would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Miriam Fraire, Danielle Abdelja-
ber, and Brenda Martinez, as well as additional suggestions for this project from Oiyan Poon, Jeff Chang, Sean Slusser, Jenny Banh, Jonathan Gold, David Leonard, and Mac Kane. Thanks also to Karen Tongson, the first to mention Kogi to me in late 2008, and Linda España-Maram and Larry Hashima, my coteachers at Cal State University, Long Beach, who assigned our first field trip to Kogi.
1. Jesus Sanchez, “King Taco Got Start in Old Ice Cream Van,” Los Angeles Times, Novem- ber 16, 1987, available at http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-16/business/fi-14263_1_ice- cream-truck. Lonchera is translated literally as “lunch box” but in colloquial parlance, it refers to a catering truck in Los Angeles, of which the taco truck is one of the most prominent configurations.
2. Jesse Katz, “Wheels of Fortune: Nearly 4,000 Taco Trucks Roam the Streets of L.A. Tacos Jeesy’s Is Hoping There’s Room for One More.” Los Angeles Magazine, October 1, 2006, available at http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1531012. Katz’s estima- tion combines 2,422 officially health-permitted food trucks with 1,465 formerly permit- ted trucks that could still be in operation.
3. Heather Shouse, Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press), 6. Shouse claims there are “3820 licensed trucks on record” and quotes another estimate, putting that number closer to seven thousand. For both Katz and Shouse, what is clear is that nonpermitted/off-record trucks are the hardest to keep track of, thus obfuscating the true number of trucks in operation on any given day in Los Angeles.
4. Mac Kane, “Taco Trucks,” Polar Inertia, 2006, available at http://www.polarinertia.com/ jan06/taco01.htm (italics added).
5. Ibid. 6. Food access is an ongoing issue in poorer Los Angeles neighborhoods, many of which
rely on a loose combination of fast-food franchises, liquor stores, greengrocers, and mobile eateries to fill in the gaps left by the absence of larger, full-resource supermar- kets. While loncheras play a part as a stopgap measure, from a community health per- spective they are not ideal, given the poor nutritional content of what they often serve. See Andrea Azuma, Food Access in Central and South Los Angeles: Mapping Injustice, Agenda for Action (Los Angeles: Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, May 2007).
7. Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez, “LA’s Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests,” Chapman University Law Research Paper, 2010, available at http://works. bepress.com/ernesto_hernandez/10. Chapman University law professor Ernesto
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Hernandez-Lopez conducted an in-depth exploration of the “taco truck wars” of 2008 and 2009, during which many loncheras came under regulatory fire from LA city officials. See also Gustavo Arellano, “Bribery, Threats, Broken-Down Vehicles, Lawsuits, Pioneers, Good Food: Tales from OC’s Taco Trucks,” OC Weekly, July 23, 2009, available at http://www.ocweekly.com/content/printVersion/479478/. Orange County Weekly food writer Arellano also described similar issues in Orange County.
8. The correct answer: Tacos Leo on Venice and La Brea, but only on weekends when it brings out the al pastor spit.
9. Alison Caldwell, “Will Tweet for Food: Microblogging Mobile Food Trucks—Online, Offline, and In Line,” in Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, ed. Psyche Forson and Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2011), 316. Caldwell writes about the new generation of food trucks in New York City, but there is no reason to think the same idea applies to LA loncheras, especially with sites like The Great Taco Hunt (http:// greattacohunt.com) devoted to meticulously evaluating and documenting these traditional trucks. L.A. Taco (http://lataco.com) has a running series, My Favorite Taco, in which it asks local culinary and cultural luminaries to name their preferred taco trucks and stands.
10. Kane, “Taco Trucks.” 11. The term “luxe lonchera” was coined by Arellano. See Gustavo Arellano, “Where Are
the Loncheras at the Luxe-Lonchera Fests?” OC Weekly, September 1, 2010, available at http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2010/09/where_are_the_loncheras_at_the.php. I use the term “nueva truck,” but they both refer to the same phenomenon.
12. Alison Abodeely, “The Kogi Effect: Food Trucks and Social Media,” allieabo2, March 19, 2011, available at http://allieabo2.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/kogi-effect/.
13. Caroline McCarthy, “When Twitter Met Food Trucks,” CNET, May 18, 2009, available at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10242185-36.html.
14. Oliver Wang, “to live and dine in kogi l.a.,” Contexts 8, no. 4 (fall 2009): 69. 15. Jennifer Steinhauer, “For a New Generation, Kimchi Goes with Tacos,” New York Times,
February 25, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/dining/25taco.html. 16. Andrew Romano, “Now 4 Restaurant 2.0.,” Newsweek, February 28, 2009, available at
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/02/27/now-4-restaurant-2-0.html. 17. Jonathan Gold, “The Korean Taco Justice League: Kogi Rolls into L.A.” LA Weekly,
January 28, 2009, available at http://www.laweekly.com/2009-01-29/eat-drink/the- korean-taco-justice-league-kogi-rolls-into-l-a/. Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano was not content with just viewing Kogi through a LA filter when he wrote, “Kogi’s rapid rise reflects the same cultural moment that produced Barack Obama; youthful, urban, multiethnic, wired and communal” (“Now 4 Restaurant 2.0.”).
18. Kim Severson, “Should Cities Drive Food Trucks off the Streets?” New York Times, July 16, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/sunday-review/17foodtrucks.html.
19. Jessica Gelt, “Kogi Korean BBQ, a Taco Truck Brought to You by Twitter,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2009, available at http://www.latimes.com/features/la-fo-kogi11- 2009feb11,0,4771256.story.
20. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 56; Wang, “to live and dine in kogi l.a.,” 69–70.
21. Andrew Blankstein and Richard Winton, “LAPD Botched Use of Downtown Crime Cameras,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2011, available at http://articles.latimes. com/2011/dec/24/local/la-me-police-camera-20111224.