Food Trucks part I

A food truck as art in Triennale Design Museum, Milano

This and the next week I’ll take you on a trip that started long ago, had a short dip in the second half of the 20^th century but goes forward in full speed into the future. And the analogy with trips, speed and roads is completely accurate here as this blog will talk about food trucks.

Before starting this series it is necessary to introduce three words and explain how I interpret them. I promise you these are the only ‘technical’ details I will talk about. The rest will deal with good food.

Food Trucks are vans or trailers that have all the facilities to prepare and sell food and/or drinks.  One of their important characteristics is that they are mobile and not fixed to one place. The products on sale at these trucks are usually called street foods: foods that are ready to eat or drink, prepared and or sold by hawkers, usually in public spaces. In the last 50 years the quality of this food regularly equals fast food, that is food processed and prepared at high speed, usually in a deep fryer, served in snack bars and restaurants as a fast lunch or dinner to eat directly or to take away.

Street foods are maybe one of the first signs of eating outside your house. Either from a necessity – because people didn’t have a kitchen – as for convenience. A quick read of this Wikipedia page shows that street food is a worldwide phenomenon. As the street foods for the poor from ancient China became a delicacy for the wealthy that they consumed ad home, so became the French fries from the Paris streets a best seller in American fast food restaurants.

Street food has almost always been sold from what we now call food trucks. However, don’t imagine that these have always been the well provided food trucks like we know now. It is better to think of the ones you know (from pictures) as normal in the Asian streets: very simple two-wheel carts with an oven or furnace that enables the vendor to prepare the food on the spot. To see a schematic drawing of a food stall check this drawing from the Palojono blog. Therefore the food sold on the streets is mostly simple, which off course doesn’t mean it isn’t tasty and good.

The real food trucks, as we know them now, where invented in the end of the 19^th century, in the southern states of the USA. Because of the higher demands for meat, farmers moved into more deserted areas that lacked facilities to get good food. One of them was so clever to think of this up front and converted a former army truck into a mobile kitchen that was big enough to feed him and his men. More about this in the Culinary School blog.

With the turn of the century other necessities became apparent. People started to work in factories, further away from home, food habits changed and economic crises set the food-world upside down. Next week you read about this into more detail. 

From game to recipe to harvesting

At work on the terracce Il profumo del Mediterraneo

It is about two weeks ago that I told you about the project Food in the Streets is working on. Together with Noemi Satta from ZUP we invited the inhabitants of Via Cenni to participate to our ZUPlab. After not even two hours of work this resulted in four inspiring recipes  that formed the basis of the second meeting.

On a sunny Sunday I sat behind my computer and took the – sometimes even poetic - recipes written by the inhabitants of Via Cenni and translated them in colorful floor plans of their terraces. As you might know, I am educated as an architect (see more on my CV here) and now and then make some simple designs as part of the projects I work on as Food in the Streets.

Not even a week later, these floor plans were the starting point of an educative morning in which Umberto Puppini from Orti d’Azienda gave the participants an enormous bulk of useful information.  He talked about the types of soil most appropriate for cultivating veggies and spices, explained what plants  go together well and what not and learned when and how to water the plants. Fortunately everyone was loaded with coffee and sweets so we ‘survived’ the 1,5 hour lecture easily.

Being close to midday we had to hurry outside to make sure that some work could be done before it was time for lunch break. Armed with tools, potting soil and – off course – plants we headed to the balcony which from now on has the name Il profumo del Mediterraneo (the aromas of the Mediterranean).

The plans guided the inhabitants during their planting. With the help of pictures the inhabitants could see what their garden would look like when their plants are fully grown and have their fruits. The enthusiasm of the little kids confirmed that gardening is fun for every age.

Unfortunately after an hour of work, the visible results were not very convincing.  The huge vases in which we put the plants were still relatively empty. But this is a matter of patience. With enough sunshine and regular light rains the garden will be green within a few weeks. I’ve seen it myself and I can promise you that it is a beautiful thing to see the dark dirt turning into a green oasis.

Go and see the pictures of this event and make sure to stay tuned to get an updated on the growing process in Via Cenni.  

Design for food and greener cities

No design at all but delicious! Friet van Piet at Fuorisalone 2014

For the last six days, the fashion city Milan has been full of design. Like every year  the city fills-up with design lovers looking for the newest trends, talented students and the best works of famous studios. I’ll try to give an overview of what I saw, off-course seen from the eyes of Food in the Streets.

The Design week is divided into two main events: the Salone del Mobile in the Milano Fiera Rho and the fuorisalone which spreads out over the city. Personally I am not at all interested in the first one which takes place in the boring fairgrounds and is full of commercial agencies that mainly want to sell their furniture. No. As a ‘starter’ myself I am much more interested in the young people that are creative and create to make beautiful products. This year was extra interesting for Food in the Streets as also the Design Week is getting ready for EXPO 2015 exposing a lot of food related projects.

The fuorisalone started already on the Saturday before, as I promised my friends from Orti d’Azienda to help them to prepare their installation in the Ventura Lambrate District. I was delighted to spend some hours far from my computer and put my hands in the fertile soil to plant rosemary, tomatoes, colorful flowers and much more. While working where were surrounded by the  Dutch that are present in the area. One of the exhibitors was Amaro Creative Industries, a Dutch pop-up restaurant that – I found out later – was so arrogant to think he could prepare the Italians a spaghetti they would like. He was mistaken.

Esterni organized this years’ Public Design Festival on Piazza XXV Aprile, a busy square between the old center and the new Porta Garibaldi Area. Here 10 street food trucks where hosted, feeding the hungry design lovers with some creative energy. As I was one of the participants of their contest, I wanted to see what the others did. Although the atmosphere wasn’t optimal (it lacked a central area where people could eat all together), the idea was good and I could imagine that over the time (hopefully over the 5 days) it developed itself into something that functions.

One of the advantages of the fuorisalone is that it gives the visitors the possibility to visit places that are usually closed to the public. In Via Palermo I bumped into an interesting project by PiuArch. They presented an interesting project called DiCortile in Cortile which aims to make their courtyard (cortile in Italian) more green and more livable. In a similar location not far away, Amazelab presented their Sky Hives. In different courtyards within the city they build these ‘hotels’ for the bees, insects that are indispensable for our food system but which have a hard time surviving.

Just before the design week finished I passed through the Ventura Lambrate District again. Hungry after six days of visits in the city, aperitivi and short nights, it was time for a drink at Via Canzi. Besides the free beers there was, to my surprise, the delicious ‘Friet from Piet’. Like Amaro, Piet is also a Dutch project but Piet understood that you better stick with what you’re good at. Piet sells typical Dutch fresh fries with mayonnaise. Even though it is not something I used to eat a lot in the Netherlands, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

All in all it was an inspiring week again. Now it is time to translate this into more durable projects and see if we can get an even ‘foodier’ design week in 2015!

  

Food in the Streets eats ZUP

In in Via Cenni (Milano) the first seeds are planted 

It is time to break the silence that Food in the Streets left you with in the last weeks. Let me tell you what I’ve been up to and show you some of the first results.

Since autumn this year I am working with Noemi Satta on a project called ZUP – the recipe for change. ZUP is an abbreviation for Zuppa (=Italian for soup) Urban Project and was founded in 2010. It is Noemi Satta who has developed this method which, over the past years, has proven to be very useful in cases where (complex) situations ask involvement of many or where new visions on ‘the usual’ are required.

If one follows a ZUP lab you and your group mates will go through a list of about five questions and tasks. This results in a personal recipe that can be a starting point of a longer process. What this process is and how long it takes, depends on the question(s) posed by the client.

Unfortunately it is not always simple to explain in a few words what a ZUPlab exactly is. Therefore I will go into more detail and bring you a short report of what we did last Saturday. Soon enough you will get to understand it and see also the relation with Food in the Streets and that what I usually talk about in this blog.

Saturday morning at Via Cenni started early but with a hot cup of tea and a freshly backed cake. In this case the aim of the ZUPlab was to involve the inhabitants of the social housing project in the design of the four urban gardens they wish to start on their rooftop terraces. 

After a short introduction on the ECO Courts project, the twenty garden-enthusiasts that participated were divided in four groups. Their first task was to describe in one word what an urban garden means to them. After five minutes we collected the answers of each individual and exposed them on a whiteboard and shared them. There were of course values that were shared by more than one person (like ‘relax’) while others were unique. Anyways, we had a starting point from which we could continue.

The second question we asked them, was to write down three characteristics (values, wishes and qualities) that they wanted to plant. ‘Plant’ because in this case the recipe that we wanted them to make in the end, is to be translated in a design for the garden on their terraces. The next step was to share the personal characteristics between the group members and extract six characteristics shared by all the group members. Now each group knew their shared characteristics they could work on in the next step.

For the third and last step, the participants where provided with a list of ingredients that coincided with the seeds that they would later plant in their garden. Each group was asked to relate an ingredient (for example bread, rosemary or egg-plant) to each of the characteristics they named before. The relation between characteristic and ingredient was to be interpreted by the group: some choose to connect the characteristic ‘sharing’ with the ingredient ‘parsley’ because for them this ingredient represents something that can be added to every dish and goes along with everyone. Continuing this way, the participants wrote down the ingredients of that what had to become a recipe in the last part of lab.

After not even two hours of work, the inhabitants of Via Cenni had written down four recipes with beautiful names like ‘The garden under the stars’ named after one of the ingredients or ‘The smells of the Mediterranean’ because of the presence of typical Mediterranean products like zucchini and thyme. You see, this is the food, people and cities that I promised you to talk about. And if you don’t understand, check the photo’s.

After this part of the program, the work of the inhabitants moved outside, where they literally started to plant the seeds for their garden. Food in the Streets stayed behind her desk and will make the plans of the gardens. 

The inhabitants of Via Cenni continue their work in two weeks, when Orti d’Azienda comes to give a lecture on the technical part of gardening and when the seeds and plants will be put in the right place. I’ll promise you to write about this as well.