(2011-11-09) Rao Food Truck Index

Venkatesh Rao thinks we need a Food Truck Index. I am starting to believe that Local Food is becoming the best bellwether of the social and cultural condition of the economy as a whole. Or rather, after an aberrant half century of industrial-scale Mc Donaldization of the global economy, the local food industry is actually reclaiming the bellwether status it has always had in history... Whether you are one of the 1% who always shops at Whole Foods or better, or one of the 99% for whom a bit of indulgence in local food is a rare humanizing break from a mostly Big-Mac lifestyle, your local food choices reveal the health of your local economy. Any region where people have simply given up all hope and subsist entirely on Food Inc. produce at home, and Supersize Me food outside the home, is a region where it is Game Over for the economy... I think the real potential of globalization is finally being realized. Globalization is about homogenization, but it does not have to be of the impoverished variety where everyone eats McDonald’s burgers. As economists like Tyler Cowen have argued, it can be homogeneity via a rich, localized Diversity: anybody, anywhere on the planet, having access to an equally diverse local food scene that has a globalized sensibility. Local food is a part of globalization as practiced by small-scale players who cannot ship social costs off to distant shores governed by friendly dictators... There are several components to the local food economy besides food trucks of course: home-gardening (Kitchen Garden) and cooking, Locavore fine dining, Farmers Market-s, Social Commerce startups, and chains like Whole Foods. So why pick food trucks? It is easiest to see the logic by contrasting food trucks with other pieces of the local food economy... Food trucks have one other significant advantage: they track what Richard Florida calls the Creative Class.