[URBAN NOTE] "Montreal’s Food Truck Plan Is a Symbolic “Fuck You” to Poor People and Immigrants"

[rfmcdonald]

VICE's Jonah Campbell has a strongly-worded article describing the city of Montréal's apparently ill-judged approach to food trucks. Did they learn nothing from Toronto's experience?

As those who are attentive to gastronomic rumblings in Canada are doubtless already aware, a few weeks ago it was announced that Montreal is finally lifting its 60-odd year ban on street food, although it is so doing in as perversely over-regulated and ass-backward a fashion as la Belle Province can muster (Quebec, I mean, not the fast food chain). The city will be granting a small number of permits, exclusively to pre-existing restaurants and caterers, and apparently only to those that will provide food of a quality “highly respected and renowned” that showcases the gastronomic excellence of Quebec. Vendors will be restricted to food trucks per se (no carts, wagons, etc.), and the majority of the food preparation will have to occur off-location, ie: not in the truck itself.

[. . .] Arguably, what is important about street food is the opportunity it provides for people who don't have the resources to open up a full-scale restaurant to make some kind of a living through food (important in the “big picture” sense; it is also important because of how vastly it improves the quality of life of wasted people, obvs.). What is interesting about street food is that, partly due to the lower overhead, a greater flexibility is allowed – street carts can afford to cater to the specific and sometimes obscure culinary inclinations of particular neighbourhoods, communities, or cultures, and the material and logistical constraints of how to prepare and serve food on the fly can produce mutations and innovations in local culinary practices, even if it's as simple as “Fuck it, let's put it on a stick.” In this way street food comes to constitute a lively and often idiosyncratic part of the foodscape of a city.

Montreal's food truck plan explicitly precludes the former, which if one is even remotely sensitive to questions about cultural appropriation, constitutes a pretty undeniable symbolic “fuck you” to the poor people and immigrants upon whom street food has depended, basically forever. And even if you're completely indifferent to that side of things, the idea that the vendors are going to be selected on the basis of some city wonks' idea of what the culinary identity of Montreal is supposed to be should give anyone pause. The city is supposedly proceeding with due caution in light of the colossal failure of Toronto's similar A La Cart pilot program, but what is truly creepy is the consonance of this with the project of asserting a particular Québecois identity that must be carefully tailored and maintained, protected from threats both internal and external by an elaborate scaffolding of regulation and legislation.