The Tastemakers (33 page)

I
t was a quarter past nine on a Wednesday morning, and Patrick Rathborne's Jeep had already circled DC's Farragut Square three times as he rounded the corner for a fourth loop. “It's like musical chairs here,” said Rathborne, who is tall and slender, with a shaved head. “You can't be the first to park because it's illegal before 9:30, but you can't be the last either.” He talked a mile a minute as he kept one eye on the road and another on the eighteen highly coveted metered parking spots that ring the picturesque square. Located just three short blocks away from the White House, Farragut Square is surrounded by blocks of prime office space filled with employees from government agencies, law firms, lobbies, and unions. If you are in the business of selling lunch, Farragut Square is the most valuable real estate in the nation's capital. Rathborne owns the Big Cheese DC food truck, which specializes in gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, so lunch is definitely his business. But before he so much as unwraps the gruyere or switches on the griddle, he first needs to secure a parking spot. This was exactly why every other food truck operator, their employees, siblings, cousins, and even paid parking spot holders—who can be hired on Craigslist for $200—were circling the square like buzzards that very same moment.

“Farragut is a first-tier spot,” Rathborne said, entering his fifth and, he hoped, final pass around the square at 9:20. “On a beautiful day like this we'll do as much business as we possibly can.” Second-tier spots, like one near the rather isolated State Department, are easier to park in but draw far less foot traffic. “When I started back in 2010 there were fifteen trucks in the city. You could leave your kitchen at 11:00 a.m. and still get a prime spot for 11:30. Now, with more than 150 trucks, you have to get out here and play musical chairs until parking enforcement leaves.” With that, Rathborne jerked the Jeep into a spot in the middle of the block on the park's west side. “I might just wait here and take the $100 fine today,” he said, looking around. “Officer Freeman is the one to watch out for. If the food trucks are the Road Runner, she's Wile E. Coyote.” Rathborne got out and stood by the meter, scanning the sidewalk in either direction for Officer Freeman or, possibly, a falling anvil. He nodded to a Middle Eastern–looking taxi driver and a conservatively dressed Korean man, whose cars were parked in the adjacent spots, waiting by their meters. “These guys are saving spots too,” Rathborne said. “The taxi in front of me is probably waiting for his brother to arrive with an Afghan kebab truck.”

At the stroke of 9:30 the parking meter sprang to life with a click. Rathborne and others all around the square pumped handfuls of quarters into their meters, then hopped into other circling cars or food trucks, which took them to the off-site kitchens where they would finish preparing lunch. Rathborne spotted a Vietnamese soup truck circling the square, honking its horn with the sad desperation of a calf separated from the herd, and he shook his head. “He might be out of luck already,” he said as we bounded down the stairs of the DC Metro station to catch a train out to Alexandria, Virginia, where the Big Cheese shared a prep kitchen with the BBQ Bus and the Borinquen Lunch Box, which sold Puerto Rican food. There Rathborne checked on his employees, who were assembling and wrapping stacks of grilled cheese sandwiches in cellophane, and raced around, piling sandwiches, drinks, napkins, and other essentials onto a small cart. He kept up a steady patter with Tad Ruddell-Tabisola, the owner of the BBQ Bus, who was rubbing spices onto
dozens of racks of ribs and sliding them into the smoker to cook overnight. The main topic of conversation, aside from smack talk about parking, was around “regs,” or the city's proposed regulations, which the DC Food Truck Association was in the midst of a four-year battle to quash. Food truck owners were fearful that the new laws the mayor's office had tabled would take the food trend they had generated, a trend that created tremendous public joy, changed the nature of commerce in DC, and fed the families of the truck owners, and crush it under the weight of unnecessary and onerous fines and penalties. It would snuff out DC's food truck trend with the stroke of a pen. “One of the things about the new regs is that trucks need a licensed owner on trucks at all times,” Rathborne explained to me as Ruddell-Tabisola nodded in agreement. “That's a five hundred–dollar license for two years, per person, and it's like saying that I can't have a restaurant open if my waiter doesn't have a license. Turnover in this business is high for employees. I can't afford to buy each new one a vending license at five hundred dollars a pop! In Arlington it's thirty to forty dollars.”

Half an hour after he arrived at the kitchen, Rathborne's Big Cheese truck, with its smiling sandwich logo, was packed, gassed, and ready to go. With Rathborne at the wheel and me and his two young employees squeezed into the back, sitting atop coolers, the truck charged back toward DC, its kitchen-backseat banging and clanging loudly all the way. “Hold on tight!” Rathborne bellowed over the loud engine. “We'll go through yellow lights, because this thing don't stop!” We arrived, slightly shaken, at his Jeep, still parked in its spot, at 11:24. One of the employees jumped out to move the car to a nearby parking lot, and Rathborne gave two friendly honks to the drivers of the Kohinoor Dhaka Indian and Yellow Vendor trucks, now parked on either side of his spot. They maneuvered a few crucial inches so Rathborne could wedge the Big Cheese truck into its spot. Rathborne turned off the engine and stepped outside just as the parking meter ticked to red. He fed it more quarters, then helped his other employee open the large service window. They turned on the generator and the grill, powered up two iPads as an ordering system, and hung a rack of potato chips
off the side of the truck. Rathborne took one last look, then sent out a message to the Big Cheese's 8,950 Twitter followers at 11:39, telling them where the truck was parked. Within seconds a line began forming, due more to the fact that it was lunchtime than to warp-speed social media, and the first order of the day, a Thrilled Cheese (chipotle cheddar, jalapeño, and guacamole on sourdough) hit the grill. Then, remembering one last thing, Rathborne placed a sign in the truck's window that every truck around Farragut Square had also prominently displayed. It featured a map of the city's core, with most streets and squares blocked out in red to show where food trucks would be prohibited from parking in just over a month if the DC city council adopted the current regulations the mayor's office proposed. On the bottom, in big bold letters, was their twenty-first-century call to arms: #saveDCfoodtrucks.

B
iting into a greasy, crunchy, altogether delicious gourmet grilled cheese sandwich, politics are probably the last thing that enters your mind. After all, food is one subject that tends to cut across ideological and political divides. Republicans and Democrats love bacon just as much as hardcore communists and die-hard capitalists enjoy ice cream. Few of us would associate kale bought at the farmer's market with a particular cause or their morning latte with a stance on global trade policy because we rarely realize how much food trends matter as an impetus for political power and change. But matter they do, because food trends have the ability to change laws and behaviors by the sheer nature of their popularity, shaping everything from economics to social policy well beyond the plate.

In many instances a food trend's political influence is straightforward and overt. The rising popularity of organic foods, locally produced foods, and ethically raised animals are all significant food trends that grew from political ideals but later became intertwined with taste and flavor trends. They began in places like Northern California and bourgeois hippie restaurants like Chez Panisse, but eventually they spread out across the food world's tastemakers. Where importing the finest ingredients from around the world was
once the chief point of pride among the finest restaurants, today the best kitchens in the world, from Denmark's NOMA to Charleston's McCrady's, all try to outdo each other with seasonal, local, organic ingredients, sometimes from as nearby as the restaurant's own rooftop gardens. These are places where the chefs made their names by foraging in the dirt, taking seaweed and wild flowers and crap that nobody even took a second look at, and charging $20 a plate for it. It is a movement that has made farmers like Glenn Roberts stars in the culinary world, and it is now affecting chains as large as Chipotle, in which the company strives to serve vegetables that are local and organic and meats raised humanely without hormones. Although the political aspect of these trends remain at their very core—they are a yin to industrial food's yang—the diners and shoppers opting for these options today do so increasingly out of a sense of taste. Organic food and local food tastes better, the advocates say, and although this isn't really always the case, it is driving the industry's tremendous growth.

Trends like these can directly impact government policies. From the moment Michelle Obama entered the White House as First Lady, she vocally promoted local, sustainable food for families, communities, and, most significantly, schools. A lot of this has been chalked up to photo ops of Mrs. Obama in the White House garden or distributing apples to cute children, but over time her stance has had a significant impact. Hundreds of schools across the country have begun planting their own gardens, sourcing local food, and working with farmers to develop better lunches and cafeteria offerings. In 2012 the Department of Agriculture introduced a pilot program that offered grants to farmers and schools pairing up to provide healthy, local foods to children. Its funding was minimal, just $5 million, likely what the nation's schools spend each week on French fries, but its symbolism was significant. Mrs. Obama's evangelism for local food has signaled to policymakers, from school principals to town mayors and even national agencies, that the White House will view this issue favorably.

Food trends are powerful political forces because they draw together a diverse group of motivated consumers and tastemakers. In 2011 an investment group backed by a Boston hedge fund made an
application to develop a massive aggregate quarry on thousands of acres of farmland the company had been quietly acquiring north of Toronto—just a ways down the road from Thornbury. Local farmers and weekend residents, including the celebrated chef Michael Stadtlander, who runs a gourmet farm restaurant nearby, formed a grassroots opposition campaign to what they dubbed the “Mega Quarry.” They began spreading word through the chef and foodie community in Toronto that the quarry would greatly affect the food and water quality that provided the same local, seasonal food that went on their plates. “Stop the Mega Quarry” bumper stickers and T-shirts soon began appearing at the city's most coveted restaurants as well as on the Volvos and Audis parked outside. That fall Stadtlander organized an event in the community called Food Stock, which brought eighty chefs and thousands of food fans to a wet, rainy potato farm near where the quarry would be located for a day of eating, drinking, and advocacy. The farmers and the chefs had vastly less money than what the investors had wagered on the quarry, but in the end they leveraged the trend of local seasonal food by using the chefs and their sophisticated customers to turn a local land use issue into one about choice on the plate. The quarry's investors withdrew their application, and the land was sold to a consortium that promised to keep it for farming.

Other food trends exert political influence by their economic might. The rapid rise of espresso coffee culture in the 1990s was spearheaded by Starbucks, which quickly became the largest coffee shop chain in the world. As Starbucks grew and other coffee chains proliferated, the politics of the coffee business seeped into the conversation, largely focused around fair wages paid for coffee beans grown in producing countries. Under consumer pressure, in 2000 Starbucks began purchasing Fair Trade–certified beans and quickly grew into the largest Fair Trade coffee seller in the world. This gave the Fair Trade coffee movement greater visibility, and other competing chains and coffee retail brands adopted the standard in order to compete with Starbucks. Now, even mass retailers like Costco and 7-11 sell Fair Trade coffee. Starbucks has also leveraged its trendiness so as to lobby lawmakers to support free trade deals with
countries such as Colombia, Peru, and South Korea. Their lobbying budget is small, less than a million dollars a year, but the company's influence is derived from its popularity. A green and white Starbucks coffee cup is a powerful symbol of American capitalism on a par with McDonald's' golden arches or a red can of Coke. The lawmakers, bureaucrats, and power brokers in DC and other capitals know that, as sure as their staffers know their morning order of a venti double skim latte, no sugar.