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Food Truck thoughts: Street food is already much loved in the Bay Area. We have everything from fusion Korean-Mexican tapas to your street corner hot dog stand. With this pandemic it seems like the rent cost of Bay Area real estate will be deadly for many restaurants. THREAD 1/
Many restaurants are sitting vacant. Some are boarded up. Even if they offer take-out the cost of renting the property is entirely wasted-- you are only utilizing your kitchen, your staff (cut back) and your food budgets. Food trucks are much better suited to our times 2/
Pretty much any kind of food can be prepared in a properly outfitted food truck. They efficiently combine kitchen, staff and food stores into one compact space. They are well suited to protecting their workers behind screens and windows. They are visible as they prep your food 3/
Food trucks are ideally suited to providing food to our most essential employees as well. Bring the food to them. Feed our hospital staff, firefighters, paramedics, police and other first responders where they are. Park next to our groceries, pharmacies, fields. 4/
Food trucks are connected to our farmer's markets and the idea of mobile, adaptable groups of people sourcing and meeting food needs. Park them in food deserts. Feed the poor who are disproportionately ill with COVID-19 where they live. Feed the homeless where they stay. 5/
Take the properties used by restaurants and turn it into mixed income housing in central areas. Restaurant culture should turn its eyes to mobility, responsiveness, adaptability to change. Avoid the next catastrophe by trimming down your restaurant to its essentials. 6/
Design an app that puts flags on a map to which Food Trucks respond. Users log in to post cuisine requests and the app searches for an available match. Food Truck startups respond to trends in user requests, customizing their offerings-- tailoring their food to the consumer. 7/
In this way, food is sourced and produced in a way that more closely matches the consumer-- kind of like a food box but with the added value of the preparation. The rise and fall of eateries would continue, but with lower overhead and a lower entry bar, more opportunity. 8/
Maybe adapting to a new "normal" in which brick-and-mortar investments make less and less sense will be a downstream "benefit" of this horrible pandemic. We might learn to develop a better food network, be less wasteful, be more responsive, more cautious. Who knows?
Here's an example of street vendors as communication hubs https://twitter.com/VendorPower/status/1248993821553307649?s=19
@chefjoseandres shows us the bigger context of why we need an adaptabke, mobile food system-- universal food security for our working poor https://twitter.com/chefjoseandres/status/1249023208470253568?s=19
Here's a good thread on what has been going wrong with food in the pandemic https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1249122178504822785?s=19
