 |
| 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 20th 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 19th
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.
