The Tastemakers (37 page)

O
n May 10, 2013, Washington, DC's Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs convened in council to take public comment on the proposed Vending Business Act of 2013. The session was chaired by councilor Vincent B. Orange, who presided that day over testimony from dozens of stakeholders, from food truck and restaurant owners to bureaucrats and academics.

“I'm looking for common ground here today,” Orange said in his opening remarks, “to fashion something where we can all move forward.” He was eager for compromise, and even though the vote was originally supposed to be a straight yay or nay on the proposed rules, the city was now willing to be flexible. “I'll tell you, I got ten thousand e-mails, and people love food trucks,” councilor David Grosso said. He was ashamed that the city was so unfriendly to entrepreneurs and joked that he was trending on Twitter for the first time in his career. Councilor Jim Graham noted that the debate reminded him about the hubbub decades back over whether to allow sidewalk cafés in DC. “People were aghast about people sitting outside, eating food, breathing dust, and listening to cars,” he said. “The irony of that reminds me that the vitality that comes with the food trucks also came with sidewalk cafés.”

In her testimony Kathy Hollinger noted that in the seventy-page bill, which encompassed all street vending regulations for the city, fewer than five pages dealt with food trucks, and it would be irresponsible to discard the long-delayed legislation simply because the food trucks imagined it contained restrictions that in reality didn't exist. The claims of the food truck associations and their fears over an apocalypse were unfounded, overhyped, and false. “We strongly advocate sending it to council for approval,” Hollinger said.

Then it was the DC Food Truck Association's turn. Stella*s Popkern truck owner, Kristina Kern, nearly came to tears talking about how her gourmet popcorn truck allowed her to provide for her daughter Stella and that if the legislation passed, she would likely lose her business and their home. Brian Farrell, who owned the Basil Thyme truck, called the proposed regulations “toxic” and
“ill conceived” and noted how he had already closed down one of his three trucks in anticipation of the new rules. Che Ruddell-Tabisola and Doug Povich testified as well, as did Matt Geller, who told the councilors that “no other city in the United States requires food trucks to have ten feet of unobstructed sidewalk in order to vend. If adopted by city council, these proposed regulations would transform the District overnight from having one of the most vibrant food truck industries in the country to one of the worst.”

The whole forum lasted nine and a half hours.

A month later DC City Council passed a revised set of emergency food truck regulations, which achieved the desired compromise councilor Orange had sought. The minimum required amount of unobstructed sidewalk space was reduced from ten feet to six, and the fine for expired parking meters dropped from $2,000 back to $50. Vending zones were still going to be implemented, but the truck-free buffer zone would now be limited to two hundred feet instead of the proposed five hundred feet. There would still be a lottery to determine spots, and some of the restrictions that the DC Food Truck Association had opposed would remain in the bill, but it was the kind of solution that left both trucks and restaurants equally unhappy, which, in its own way, was an ideal political solution.

Che Ruddell-Tabisola, who led the fight for close to three years, was relieved though still hesitant when I spoke with him a few weeks later. “We have to wait and see how it's actually implemented,” he mentioned with a note of caution. “I'm optimistic, but I know there are no Waterloos in politics. I think there's a good reason why we're popular. If there wasn't a trend, we wouldn't have been successful.”

He was right. By fighting for their existence the food trucks in DC and elsewhere have changed something far more than our mobile lunch options: they had secured new business models, affected the very social fabric of our cities, and changed the law of the land.

W
hen my taxi pulled up to the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum on the cold Saturday morning I flew in from DC, a crowd of several dozen people were already milling about outside, cradling coffees in their hands as they formed the start of a line. From a nearby tent the deli meat company Eckrich was handing out slices of five different delicatessen meats that had been infused with bacon. A banner proclaimed this “The Best Idea Ever,” and they were scarcely able to open the packages quick enough for the hungry crowd that rushed to devour them. Inside the doors of the building several dozen volunteers were lined up behind long registration tables, ready to process the thousands who would soon arrive, ravenous and ramped up for greasy delights at the sold out event called Baconfest.

The sprawling twenty-two thousand-square foot floor of the Forum's event hall was abuzz with activity. Six long tables, each stretching the length of the room, had been taken over by eighty-two local restaurants and bars, beer and liquor companies, and other vendors. Another eighty waiters and bartenders, working for the catering company Sodexo, wandered like lost children in black shirts while chefs, cooks, bakers, and owners scrambled to get ready. Pallets of beer kegs were being pushed around to all
corners of the room, as James Brown played over the sound system. Along the back wall a giant screen was flashing the Baconfest logo: Chicago's sky blue–and-white flag with red stars, rendered to look like a strip of bacon. Everywhere I looked people were carrying in trays, casseroles, Tupperware containers, and pulling huge hand carts piled with mountains of cooked bacon. Michael Griggs, one of the founders and organizers of Baconfest, now in its fifth year, was busy running around with a walkie-talkie, trying to corral the activity into some semblance of order.

“Hey,” said one of the chefs from the restaurant Belly-Q, who literally stepped in front of Griggs's path to get his attention, “we have a fryer going. Can we leave the hot oil in or take it with us?”

“Take it with you,” said Griggs over his shoulder as he blew past the chef and kept moving on to the next issue.

One by one the restaurants turned on their portable griddles and ovens, reheating their bacon creations, which ranged from simple candied strips of bacon to concoctions like bacon-spiked bloody Marys, bacon peanut butter macarons, bacon cupcakes, bacon pineapple donuts, bacon pizzas, bacon biscotti, chicken-fried bacon, bacon meatballs, and bacon cotton candy, to name just a few. Puffs of bacon vapor were visibly rising into the air, settling down a few minutes later as a fine mist of aerosolized bacon grease that clung to every possible surface. In the corner of the hall a chef from one of the restaurants walked up to a table run by Jones Dairy Farm, one of the few dedicated bacon producers attending Baconfest. They had hung a whole slab of bacon, several feet long, from a rack next to their table, while a glistening warm pork belly rested on a carving board, lit up by a heat lamp like a Broadway diva. “Look at how beautiful this is,” said the chef, who was tapping his fingertips together rhythmically like Mr. Burns plotting something diabolical. “I'm like a moth to a flame. Or a fat guy to a slab of bacon.”

At 11:30 the doors opened to 150 advanced guests. These VIPs had paid $200 each for tickets that allowed them to enter an hour earlier than the rest of the 1,500 Baconfest attendees (whose general admission tickets still cost $100 each). All of the event's three thousand–odd tickets, for both the lunch session and the dinner session (identical format, but with different restaurants) had sold out
months before, in just forty-one minutes, and others had paid even more for scalpers' tickets. The VIPs quickly fanned out with their Baconfest program guides in hand, heading to the tables that most interested them. There were families in newly purchased Baconfest T-shirts (including one portraying the Blues Brothers as flying pigs), wealthy well-dressed couples, hardcore foodies with expensive DSLR cameras, and a lot of burly men in Chicago Blackhawks jerseys. I walked outside and looked at the general admission line, which now stretched all the way around the corner and down two full blocks. Inside Griggs gave the signal over his radio to unlock the doors, and when they were flung open a cheer went up from the line. One man shouted “BACON!” at the top of his lungs like a general leading the cavalry charge.

“Oh my god,” a woman said as she came into the hall and saw its sheer scope.

“Where's the bacon?” asked another man in a panic, making a beeline to the nearest restaurant's table, where he encountered the Signature Room's smoked bacon bread pudding, with pork tenderloin stuffed with chorizo and wrapped in bacon and topped in bacon-braised red cabbage and a bacon ancho sauce. He ate it in a single bite, then packed away another.

Some people entered the room and bolted to a particular booth, while others just froze for a minute, drunk with excitement at the overwhelming sight of so much bacon. Two men stood at the entrance and slow clapped. Nearby a police officer turned to his partner and said, “If this crowd gets out of hand, we may have to use bacon spray instead of pepper spray.”

Baconfest Chicago was a display of the bacon trend's culinary inspiration and scope, literally a giant buffet of every possible bacon dish that had wound its way into the American food chain over the past few years, from restaurant meals and sandwiches to drinks, desserts, and candies. If an economist wanted to examine the culture of a food trend, from the irrational exuberance of its core followers and what bacon represented in their lives to what the bacon trend said about the time and place we were living in, that economist could not choose a better place to start studying. I am no economist, but I am a journalist, and as much as I wanted to indulge in all the
baconalia, I was here for the money. Of all the reasons food trends mattered, none was more important than their economic impact. Whether they were cultural or culinary in their origin, all the trends I had encountered—chia seeds, Red Prince apples, Indian cooking, food trucks—were ultimately motivated by commerce. What drove people to open one more cupcake bakery in cities filled with them wasn't their desire to unleash the perfect strawberry buttercream on the world—it was to make a buck. Food trends were products of capitalism, the edible manifestation of the free market deciding what was valuable to eat and what wasn't. The bacon trend, which began in the early 2000s and really hit its stride a decade later, was a powerful example of why food trends mattered economically. It took a food that was common but undervalued and raised its value significantly, affecting everything from farming practices to commodity trading while also generating economic opportunities worth billions, including jobs, investments, and tax revenues. In terms of a food trend having a financial impact, this one literally brought home the bacon.

T
here is nothing new about bacon. Salted cured pork bellies have been eaten for thousands of years, particularly in Europe. It is relatively cheap and easy to produce. Pigs will eat anything and don't require much space, and you only need pigs, salt, and smoke to make bacon. Bacon travels well and can sit around unrefrigerated for long periods of time. Its high-fat content and dense flavor make it an ideal protein to use in cooking, even sparingly. A few cubes of cooked bacon can elevate the lowliest salad or plate of vegetables into something extraordinary. The experience of eating bacon is everything humans are designed to love: a crunchy, chewy, salty, smoky, fatty powerhouse of umami wallop. Nothing else comes close. Bacon's smell is unmistakable. It seeps through doors and wakes up roommates, and when cooked in a house, the scent will cling to the walls for weeks. It is a powerful meat.