Skip the Drive-Through, Hit the Street

Guest Opinion

Food truck season is upon us. Glorious glorious summer food. From Manistee to Marquette and plenty of places in between, we are dining alfresco, and washing it down with local offerings of beer, wine, soda, and cider. Whether they honed their skills at culinary school or their grandma’s kitchen, our Michigan street chefs bring a lot to the picnic table.

I’m thankful for a country where so many foodways have found a home, and thankful for the neighbors who brought them. Some recipes travel with intrepid newcomers seeking adventure, while others arrive tossed in with the hastily gathered belongings of people leaving their homes to flee hardship and strife.

However they come here, their journey goes into the food they prepare. It’s a longing for home that translates into care for the ingredients and for the person who will eat it. That longing may fade or it may not, but I believe the care never does. It’s traveled from Cuba and Lebanon, Poland and Korea, Ethiopia and Mexico, to feed people well.

While I enjoy food in any setting, there’s an immediacy to street food that sets it apart. Maybe it’s the tight space that intensifies things. It forces the cook to choose ingredients wisely, arrange them just so, and use simple steps, all to get the flavors to your mouth at their peak and in the nick of time to keep the line moving. Food truck lovers are often on the go, grabbing a bite on their way to or from something else. But you can slow down and be social around the truck too, with strangers sharing tables, tastes, and stories.

Like the diversity of the people, their knowledge, and skills, Michigan street food culture also reflects the diversity of the agriculture around it. Menus are scrawled on a chalkboard for a reason. While vendors may have a signature dish or two, they’re also ready to change things up, depending on what made it to market that day. They use what’s fresh at hand while they can.

It might start with spring ramps and mushrooms. Then come young peas and crunchy radishes. Next it’s all the asparagus you can eat until about now, followed by the parade of berries—a new one every month. Of course at the same time there’s greens and beans and carrots and squash and corn and you name it, until October rolls in with apples and pumpkins.

Those of us lucky to have access to all that, not to mention local honey, eggs, and meat, are blessed. Our food can come in colors right from the field, not always dull from a store long after it was picked. To also have someone willing to slice, saute, roast, or wrap it for us is just gravy.

Sadly, between these food oases there can be miles of food deserts, with no grocers, let alone farm markets. If there is any food, it’s likely to be a fast food restaurant or a convenience store. The lack of access to nutritious food is linked to many factors, not least of which is industrial scale farming that concentrates control over our food system in the hands of powerful agribusinesses.

These are behemoth corporations that operate on immense tracts of land. Their “farming” methods strip the soil of all that would support healthy growth, and then add petroleum based and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to grow too much of one commodity in too small an area.

Its goal is maximum production and profit. Our dependence on these methods for so much of our food supply is making us sick. Our food lacks the nourishment our body needs and is filled with additives we don’t need that contribute to diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic diseases

Good food depends on diversity in the soil and the plants and creatures living in and on it. Getting there from where we are is a big problem to solve. It’s going to take a movement and many smart people to do it.

But we don’t have to wait for the big stuff to do better for each other on the way. When you have a choice, choose the colorful food, grown by a farmer who’s not too far away, whose work builds the soil that feeds the food that feeds you. Support and promote programs that give others the chance to do this, such as Double Up Food Bucks, and Northwest Michigan Food Rescue.

When you eat out, try food from a truck that someone has put their journey and their history into. Then build a community with people who value this too, one picnic table conversation at a time.

Cathye Williams is a local climate activist. She writes from the northern corner of Manistee County.

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