The Tastemakers (36 page)

T
he DC Food Truck Association's campaign operated on a five-track approach. At the top was the association's communication efforts, which involved crafting a steady stream of press releases and arranging interviews with local and national media, who were overwhelmingly sympathetic in their coverage. More important was the use of social media to spread the message, both to the public and lawmakers. Though the DCFTA's membership hovered around fifty trucks, its combined social media audience reached hundreds of thousands. This allowed them to speak with a unified voice and leverage the popularity of the food truck trend into political capital. Kathy Hollinger admitted to me that the voice of the food trucks had been significantly louder than the restaurants with both the public and politicians, precisely because of social media. What the food truck associations lacked in money and power they made up for in organization, communication, and sheer chutzpah.

The DCFTA engaged directly in formal lobbying efforts through a registered lobbyist, who took meetings with city councilors and bureaucrats, kept his ear to the ground at city hall, provided strategic political advice, and wrote policy documents and commentary on the proposed legislation, helping to prepare food truck owners, DCFTA executives, and their allies for the day they would testify in front of city councilors prior to the vote. There was some small-scale, crowd-sourced fund-raising, such as $5 donations, which paid for some of the association's expenses, as well as efforts at coalition building with local neighborhood groups and the food trucks' other potential allies. The association also organized a number of different field activities, which ranged from handing
out #saveDCfoodtrucks stickers and flyers during busy lunches to collecting signatures for petitions. Sometimes the DCFTA would bring food trucks to underprivileged areas of the city that had few restaurants, setting up in abandoned lots or along blighted blocks, demonstrating to local politicians that food trucks served as vital proof of a neighborhood's commercial viability when the trucks inevitably drew crowds. In the weeks before the council's vote the DCFTA staged a Day Without Food Trucks, which deployed trucks at their usual spots across the city to hand out literature, petitions, and stickers but not serve any food so as to drive home their point that if the city passed the legislation, food trucks would be forced out of business. If you were one of the people who showed up that day, hungry for a half-rack of ribs from the BBQ Bus, only to be handed a flyer, your motivation to take action was as powerful as the rumbling in your belly.

Perhaps the biggest activity the association organized was food truck festivals, which assembled a large number of trucks (up to forty in some cases) on private lots during a Friday or Saturday, with live music, licensed bars, and carnival games. These events presented tremendous potential for political outreach because they drew the most devoted food truck fans and because the sheer size of the crowds provided a visually dramatic venue to show politicians, press, and other influencers the power of the food truck trend. Festivals are either organized by the DCFTA, such as their signature Curbside Cookoffs, or by private businesses, such as the Truckeroo series, which takes place in a giant lot called the Bullpen, which is ringed by converted shipping containers, outside the Washington Nationals baseball stadium. My last day in DC happened to coincide with the first Truckeroo of the season, so I headed down to the Bullpen to see how the DC Food Truck Association made their case to the public.

Right before the event I met up at a coffee shop with attorneys Bert Gall and Robert Frommer as well as political activist Christina Walsh, all of whom worked for the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian legal organization that was spearheading the court fight on behalf of food trucks across America. Though food trends are
rarely clear-cut partisan political issues, the libertarian movement, which basically espouses an ideology of regulation-free commerce, had been a persistent advocate for consumer choice in the food arena, opposing such initiatives as New York City's proposed large soda ban and restrictions on salt. “As libertarians, our objection is to regulations that serve no public purpose,” Gall said. “It's about food trucks having a
right
to earn a living.” In general, the Institute for Justice, and Gall in particular, worked closely with Matt Geller and local food truck associations across the country, filing lawsuits in some cases and advising legally and politically in others. Walsh traveled frequently, forming disparate truck owners into associations, educating them about their rights, providing their members with media training and legislative support, and even bringing restaurants onboard, when possible.

Their initial victory was a suit against the city of El Paso, Texas, filed in 2010 on behalf of the city's food trucks, which were largely Mexican taco trucks at the time. The El Paso city council had passed a law slapping a one thousand–foot truck-free buffer zone around each restaurant, and also prohibited trucks from idling or stopping. “Those rules had nothing to do with health and safety,” Gall said. “They were designed to benefit the restaurant association. If a regulation isn't designed for health and safety purposes and really just exists for economic protectionism, it can't withstand judicial review.” The laws were tossed, and following the victory the Institute for Justice, which has represented other street vendors in the past—immigrants selling souvenirs, for example—began looking at food truck laws in other cities. They had since challenged laws in Atlanta, Chicago, and even smaller municipalities like Highlea, Florida (a Miami suburb), and advised local associations along the way in places like New Orleans and Pittsburgh. Washington, DC, was their hometown, and they were loath to see the nation's capital set a precedent for restrictive regulation that other cities would emulate.

“Food trucks are spreading,” said Walsh. “They're still going into new towns and cities, especially small and midsized ones. As cities see other cities passing good laws, it will normalize. They'll realize that the sky doesn't fall when you see food trucks. We have a
few years of hard fights and winning victories in small cities ahead of us. The more good laws that pass, the more it becomes morally unpopular to pass bad laws.” Matt Geller said a similar thing, noting how the more wildly restrictive and unreasonable a city's proposed laws were, the easier they would be to defeat. In Geller's opinion DC's proposed regulations were among the most far reaching in the nation.

“The legislation will destroy the food truck industry here,” Frommer said. “The only place where they can vend will be in stationary locations.”

“Right now is a critical time,” echoed Gall. “Food truck owners are trying to run a business twenty-four-seven, but they realize that if they don't spend significant time talking to the media and politicians, they won't have a business.”

We all walked the few blocks to the Truckeroo event, which was gearing up for a lunch rush of defense contractors and military personnel from the nearby Navy Yard. The crowd was split between uniformed soldiers and men and women in khakis and golf shirts with ID badges that said foreboding things like “missile intercept group” and “chemical warfare.” Twenty trucks had shown up to Truckeroo, and by noon lines as long as forty people were forming at some of the most popular trucks, including the BBQ Bus, the Maine Lobster Roll truck, TaKorean, and Goodies Frozen Custard, a blue-and-white retro VW van where men in bowties and bright shirts served malts, floats, and sundaes to the tune of classic Motown hits blaring from a speaker. A dozen volunteers from the DC Food Trucks Association and the Institute for Justice, dressed in “Truck Yeah! I Support DC Food Trucks” T-shirts, were handing out “I Stand with DC Food Trucks” stickers at each line, explaining the impending regulations to customers and collecting signatures for a petition to councilor Vincent Orange, who was in charge of the city's vending regulation committee.

“Have you heard about DC's food truck regulations?” Asher Huey, a political consultant with the American Federation of Teachers and one of the founders of the DCFTA, asked every single person waiting in line for the Curbside Cupcakes food truck. He held up a
large copy of the association's widely circulated map depicting restricted zones and explained in as few words as possible the rules that would affect food truck customers the most. “Would you sign our petition and Tweet to councilor Vincent Orange to save food trucks?” Huey asked. Nine times out of ten people in line complied, waving him off only when they were trying to stuff a cupcake into their face. No one rebutted Huey's argument or stood up for more regulations. One woman ran up to him to sign the petition, calling the mayor “an idiot” for even proposing the regulations. Another said “that sucks” before sending a Tweet to councilor Orange on his phone.

“It's one of these issues that brings people of all political stripes together,” Huey said as he moved on to the lineup for the Pepe truck, the mobile outlet of Spanish chef José Andrés's Think Food Group. As I ordered an asparagus and hand-carved Serrano ham sandwich with romesco sauce and a side of patatas bravas—which was amazing, by the way—Huey compared the struggle of food trucks vs. restaurants to David and Goliath. “We don't have the money or power of the restaurant association, but we have the public on our side and as activists. The past four times the city proposed regulations, the public flipped out. They take action when we ask them to.”

It reflected something Matt Geller said when I spoke to him about the source of the food truck movement's political power. “A food truck organization isn't about large numbers,” he told me. Instead, it was about the power of a popular food trend. The public had some sympathy for the economic plight of food truck owners and the opportunities their business model created, in everything from incubating new foods and concepts, to employing workers. But fundamentally they would fight for food trucks because they liked the food they bought there. “I say to politicians, ‘Do you really want to be the guy that we point to and say,
that's the guy who is trying to restrict your access to reasonable food at good prices
?' People get pissed about their access to food. Everyone eats. It's visceral.”

At a picnic bench in the middle of Truckeroo, Che Ruddell-Tabisola sat and talked strategy with Doug Povich. Ruddell-Tabisola had been meeting with several city councilors over the past weeks,
facilitating visits with food trucks to demonstrate the economic opportunities they can create. This included their expansion into brick-and-mortar businesses such as Pleasant Pops, which began as a food truck selling gourmet Mexican-style ice pops in 2010. Two years later Pleasant Pops had opened a store in the popular Adams Morgan neighborhood and sold their products at various markets around the region. Ruddell-Tabisola hoped to torpedo the restaurants' core message that food trucks were killing their businesses. “The truth is you cannot show one single restaurant that closed because of food trucks,” he said. “In fact, it's showing the exact opposite.” When it comes down to it, most food truck operators eventually want to become brick-and-mortar restaurant owners. Food trucks may have lower overhead and startup costs than restaurants, but they are limited to one customer at a time and constrained by weather—their business is dead all winter or whenever it rains. Food trucks don't have seating, and they can't sell liquor, which makes up a majority of a restaurant's profits. For all the popularity, experimentation, and fun, owning a food truck is actually a pretty lousy business that is nearly impossible to scale. Owners enter the business in a truck to test out a concept, but if it works, they almost always convert that into one or more stationary restaurants.

And this seemed like the core point: The arrival of food trucks had enlivened a middling restaurant scene in many parts of DC and elsewhere. To regulate it out of existence was to choke off an innovation that people not only liked but were also willing to pay good money for. This was food trends at their best, awakening the culture and the food economy. (Even if they also, unfortunately, awakened some twee lunch concepts and awkward, pun-ny business names.)

“There's a huge opportunity missed when you talk about restaurants and trucks working together,” Povich said. His sister's original Red Hook Lobster Pound truck had already spun off two successful seafood restaurants in Brooklyn and Long Island in addition to its lobster roll trucks in New York and DC. Across the continent the battle between food trucks and restaurants was slowly giving way to a convergence. Truck-to-restaurant expansions included El Naranjo
in Austin, 5411 Empanadas in Chicago, Lardo in Portland, and Seattle's Marination Station, to name but a handful, including Roy Choi's Kogi BBQ Taco truck, which had grown into four trucks and three Choi-affiliated restaurants. On the flip side restaurants were moving into food trucks. In Toronto the charge to open the city up to food trucks was actually led by my friend Zane Caplansky, who saw a chance to promote and expand sales of his eponymous Jewish delicatessen by taking it mobile, something that other restaurants, including national chains like Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Applebee's, and Burger King—which launched forty trucks in 2012—were trying to take advantage of with trucks of their own. Even Steve and Marlene Loeb, the deli owners who had no love for the food trucks in Farragut Square, were considering a truck. They already had the kitchen space, and it could expand their business into areas where they could capture whole new populations of customers. “I mean, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em,” Steve said with a shrug.

Already the National Restaurant Association, America's umbrella restaurant lobbying group, reported that nearly a quarter of its fast-casual members were interested in starting food trucks, and food trucks have been invited to the annual National Restaurant Association trade show for the past few years. “Most of your food truck owners will eventually become members of a restaurant association,” said Richard Myrick, the Chicago-based editor and chief of the food truck industry news site Mobile Cuisine and author of the book
Running a Food Truck for Dummies
. Once that happens it will be far more difficult for those same associations to lead the opposition to food trucks in their respective cities. Food trucks associations will also see increased funding, as the companies profiting off of food trucks—from truck builders to food suppliers like Sysco to insurers like Progressive, which offers specific food truck owner policies—will back efforts to defend food trucks and the dollars they generate. That may still be several years away, but as the food truck trend moves from an urban novelty to a fixture of our everyday eating landscape, the will to fight against it will surely evaporate.