Truck-u-lent Food

We call ‘em meals on wheels, roach coaches, taco trucks or even, perish the thought, food trucks. And in a city that defined “mobile” long before cell phones, Los Angeles is home to approximately 9,500 of those little buggers. Angelinos are long familiar with the beckoning horn sounds of “La Cucaracha” (the Mexican cockroach song… ewwww!) tied to that dilapidated old truck/cantina, often inscribed with some avuncular name (and maybe a Twitter address these days), pulling up to a construction site, offering sustenance to Latino workers looking for a meal break. Some folks swear that some of these folks deliver the finest tacos, enchiladas and chili rellenos in the city, a pretty feisty claim in a city famous for great Mexican food.

Trucks have often developed a following, and as the recession has hurled a lot of folks out of one those “stable jobs,” new trucks are coming online with modern kitchens and chichi gourmet specialties that don’t even have a Latin ingredient. Cupcakes, Korean or Chinese, they’re all coming. Amazing hot dogs and home-made sausages like you’ve never tasted. Would you believe Korean-Mexican fusion? Rabid fans often Twitter when their favorite truck is in sight, and aficionados sit by their cell phones waiting for the feast to hit a familiar location. Truck owners themselves often employ Websites, Tweets and anything else that will bring their loyal customers out with change in their hands.

Different cities have different rules about these kitchens on wheels… although so far in Chicago, they can’t cook on the street, serving only prepackaged food as the ordinances dictate. New York inspects the trucks annually and issues a very limited number of licenses: 3,100 two-year permits, 1,000 seasonal permits… and folks can wind up waiting a long time to get the right to sell in the Big Apple. Noting a surge in trucks, Austin, Texas now requires owners to post their routes with the city and subject the vehicles to health inspections.

But the October 11^th New York Times took a look at how the home of these tired taco tanks are about to be treated in the City of Angels (Angles?) when it comes to health code ratings: LA, after all, also pioneered the A, B and C ratings based on cleanliness inspections, a standard that seems to have been adopted across the United States. Up until now, there haven’t been any such standards applied to mobile food trucks in LA, but all that is about the change (probably): “Los Angeles County is moving to submit its… food trucks and carts to the same health department rules as restaurants — including requiring them to prominently post a letter grade based on food inspections — in what may be the ultimate sign that this faddiest of food fads is going mainstream.

“And if that is not establishment enough, food trucks, whose allure has been enhanced by their mysterious comings and goings, some signaled by puffs of Twitter postings, will have to file route maps (route maps!) with the health department, to facilitate at least one field inspection a year, beyond the single annual inspection now required… As with restaurants, health inspectors will be empowered to shut down a truck that scores less than a C for not enough attention to basic safety and food hygiene practices — for example, dirty counters, food left out, unwashed hands.” Ay caramba!

And why not? The health code ratings have actually worked: “‘People are saying, ‘I see A, B, C’s at restaurants, but not trucks: Why not?’ ’ said Jonathan E. Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. He said Los Angeles had seen a 13 percent reduction in hospitalizations linked to restaurant food poisoning since the county first imposed the rule on restaurants in 1997. ‘We changed the incentives, and that’s what this is all about,’ he said. ‘We want protecting consumers against food-borne illness to be top-of-mind all the time.’” In a world of corporate outsourcing, these “company cafeterias on wheels” are finding that their time has come. If they are classing up the street with delightful smells, let’s keep it that way!

I’m Peter Dekom, and even with the new codes, it probably still won’t qualify as “health food.”