Food on the Move

Posted by: Michael Orey on October 06

There was a time in human history when much of what people ate was on the move. Going out for lunch meant tracking it down. One can imagine an intrepid hunter from long ago using a tom toms or smoke signals to tell the gatherers in his clan: “Mastodon at river bend. Heading toward gulch. Prepare fire pit.” Of course, in some areas, those ways have not completely vanished (think: Alaska, Sarah Palin, moose). And in others they are making a comeback. Take Manhattan, for example, where mobile food trucks are a proliferating part of the lunch scene. Tacos, pizza, Jamaican fare, South Asian cuisine, barbecue, waffles and on and on are proffered from boxy, UPS style trucks that vie for strategic curbside locations around the city. But, being trucks, they move, and one can never be sure from day to day where favorite vendors will be found. They have to be tracked down. Last week, just after ordering a lamb and rice dish at one such truck on East 45th Street, I noticed a new contender on the block: the Rickshaw Dumpling truck. Today I thought I would give it a try. (Obviously, having been once burned by my shrimp dumpling fiasco last week didn’t deter me from my dumpling quest.) Luckily, instead of tom toms, these days, we have Twitter. I didn’t have to go in search of my quarry; it told me where it was. Alas, the dumpling truck was in lower Manhattan, apparently hoping for a synergistic romp with the dessert hawking Treats Truck. That was too far beyond my hunting range. Instead, I ordered in. I suppose the equivalent of that for my troglodyte ancestors would have involved a creature unwittingly stumbling into their cave. “Did someone order bear?”