This is a classic Mexican food truck that offers a wide array of edible animal parts. Only…read morerecently did we refer to meat as muscle tissue only. They have head, intestines, and skin tacos. Gross you say? What the hell do you think is in your hot dog and hamburger, rib eye? They also have regular meat. For whatever reason, Americans have lost their taste. Now I still hate French cheese, but must Kraft cheese taste like nothing? Must our milk and butter taste of nothing? Must our meats taste of nothing unless drenched in sauce? Okay, the head is a bit much. A decent taco food truck, and yes, they are el rapido.
Long before the trendy food truck craze initiated by Kogi's Korean BBQ Taco Truck in Los Angeles (they were not the first gourmet truck but the first to use social media), there were taco trucks. Before that, there were lunch trucks serving donuts and sandwiches. There were a number of taco trucks in Reno, but you don't see them out as often. Why? Well, the City of Reno, in response to an outcry from brick-and-mortar restaurants, passed a number of regulations limiting them to a 3-hour time limit and 100-feet from restaurants. Mind you, this was not passed because of taco trucks but the explosion of gourmet trucks. Now, you may argue, hey, I got a restaurant, worked my butt off, why should I have to put up with some food truck outside stealing my customers? My answer is, well, in a free market, you compete freely or perish. You adapt. When existing businesses collude and press government to pass laws to undermine new competition, what do you call this? Unfair! So all these hardworking Latino food truck owners got shafted. Nobody had ever complained about them, but with the new regulations, you see less of them. Every three hours they have to pack up and move. How unfair is that? Time and time again, the free market is undermined by existing lazy businesses colluding and conspiring with government to stifle new competition, stifling progress and innovation, and keeping prices up for consumers. A major cause of poverty is not lack of government handouts but rather the excessive costs, training requirements, and regulations required to start your own business or craft. Yes you want a well-trained professional, but increasingly consumer review sites like Yelp and Angie's List can help you weed out the unprofessionals not regulations which act only to create formidable entry barriers. Back in the day, guilds were village monopolies requiring unpaid apprenticeships to enter the field and barring all outside competition. Hello! We still have guilds.
In nature, organisms became more mobile in order to adapt, exploit new territories, outrun predators, or conversely outrun prey. This is why we have legs and are not rooted to the ground. Food trucks are likewise, an evolutionary adaptation. It makes starting a business cheaper and it's less costly to try innovative menus that might fail. Hence, there's a lot more food innovation with food trucks than brick-and-mortars. In evolution, if you don't adapt you perish. However, in America these days, it seems we're more and more willing to subsidize failure and weakness. Nature proves this is unsustainable. Nature sometimes engages in monopolies. Pandas can only eat bamboo, but this is a rarity. What if an epidemic wipes out bamboos? They're screwed. This is why nature prefers diversity. How about almost 300K species of plants and 7.8 million species of animals. But we insist on only coddling one species of food vendor? In fact, our omnivorous appetite was an adaptation. Ironically nature gave us brains to better adapt, perhaps to study and learn from nature, but we insist that nature's laws don't apply to us, that somehow we're better, and as such, we will all become extinct, despite our brains. Our brains didn't do us in, our system of rewarding and subsidizing idiocy did.