Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice

The urban foodscape is changing, rapidly. Fish tacos, vegan cupcakes, gourmet pizzas, and barbeque ribs, and all served from the confines of cramped, idling, and often garishly painted trucks. These food trucks, part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending, while common in the global South, are becoming increasingly common sights in many cities, towns, and universities throughout the United States and Canada. Within the past few years, urban dwellers of all walks have flocked to these new businesses on wheels to get their fix of food that is inventive, authentic, and often inexpensive. In From Loncheras to Lobsta Love, we offer a variety of perspectives from across North America on the guiding questions “What are the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion of mobile food vending?” and “How might these motivations connect to the broad goals of social justice?” The cities represented in the chapters range from Montreal to New Orleans, from Durham to Los Angeles, and are written by contributors from a diversity of fields. In all, the chapters of From Loncheras to Lobsta Love tell stories of the huckster and the truckster, of city welcomes and city confrontations, of ground-up and of top-down, of the right to entrepreneurship and of rights to active citizenship, of personal and cultural identities and patterns of eating and spatial mobilities, of cultural and political geographies, of gastro-tourist entities and as city-branding tools, of the clash of ideals of ethnic ‘authenticity’ and local/organic sourcing.