From Pig Foot Mary to Pinky Cole
By Ariel D. Smith
Despite the increase of visibility for food trucks as a whole, the portrayals often exclude Black entrepreneurs and rarely depict Black food as an offering on a food truck. Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels.
The food truck scene has grown exponentially since 2008. What began as lunch trucks roaming through select neighborhoods and work sites have become a phenomenon that Food Truck Nation marked as a $2.7 billion industry at the close of 2017, and has continued to climb over recent years.
However, despite the increase of visibility for food trucks as a whole, the portrayals often exclude Black entrepreneurs and rarely depict Black food as an offering on a food truck. It is as if Blackness and Black food are expected to exist everywhere else—home, restaurant, church, funeral repast, cookout, but not a food truck. And yet, the Black-owned food truck is the latest physical manifestation of everything Black street food entrepreneurship and culture is and always has been.
As a doctoral student and podcaster, I have spent the last five years tracing the lineage of food trucks and specifically documenting the history and contributions of African American entrepreneurs within the food truck industry.
Through my research, The Food Truck Scholar Podcast and travels, I have come to see Black food truck owners as the descendants of Black street food vendors whose names often go unrecorded and unremembered. The means may have evolved over time from a baby carriage, basket, wheelbarrow, pickup truck or cart into a food truck, but the reasons why Black people have turned to street food entrepreneurship and how they have leveraged it remain virtually the same.
A Path to Self-Determination
Street vending can present fewer and lower barriers to entry into entrepreneurship as opposed to opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. In the book chapter “I’m Talking Bout the Food I Sells,” from The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, Dr. Jessica B. Harris explains that street vending provided opportunities for those of African descent to earn for themselves, whether they were free, newly emancipated, or enslaved. For those who were free or newly emancipated, street entrepreneurship was a way to make a living for oneself without having much financial capital or any at all. For the enslaved, it became a path towards emancipation, an opportunity to buy back a life they had never had the chance to live on their own terms.
Today, we see African Americans entering the food truck industry in high numbers, walking away from jobs that have felt like bondage and not careers. Often, when I ask Black food truck owners what led to their food truck journey, they respond by saying they were looking for a way to live life on their own terms while doing something they enjoyed. Many have experienced work environments that drained them even to the point of jeopardizing their mental health and wellness. A prime example is Chandra James, owner of The Arctic Shack in Birmingham, Alabama.
When Chandra started her food truck in 2019, it was after hitting her final breaking point. For 12 years, her whole adult life, she had been working for a corporate employer. She had a strong reputation for a good work ethic, yet anxiety and depression were at an all-time high because her work environment was not conducive to her growth and wellness. Her job had made it clear that they did not value her at the level of which she thought she was deserving due to all she had brought to the company.
“Somebody told me, ‘Hey, you know, you make this much an hour; we can get two of them to replace you,’” she says. “So, when I heard that I was like no other employer will ever make me feel like this again.”
While on a 30-day leave of absence mandated by her doctor, James put in the work to launch her food truck and resigned. Three years later, James hasn’t looked back.
Feeding Nostalgia
Black entrepreneurs have used street food vending to serve comfort and fill the needs caused by nostalgia. Perhaps one of the best examples of this in the early 20th century is Lillian Harris Dean, also known in the streets of Harlem as Pig Foot Mary.
In her book High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from African to America, Harris chronicles the story of Harris Dean and her road to becoming a Harlem cultural icon. A Southern transplant, Harris Dean understood that many African Americans arriving in New York would find themselves missing the foods of the South that had been integral to their lives and culture. Starting with just five cents to buy a baby carriage and alternating between the only two dresses she had, Harris Dean began to set up shop selling pigs feet. Her customers came far and wide to patronize her and to partake in a meal that for a few moments could take them back to fond memories of a former life left behind.
That same sense of comfort and nostalgia can be heard from food truck entrepreneur Deundre Zachery. The owner of Ragin’ Cajun Louisiana Kitchen in Shreveport, Louisiana, made it a point to emphasize that his food truck serves “food from scratch—just how your grandma used to.” For Zachery, the food on his truck invokes nostalgia for himself as well as his customers who grew up with a Black Southern family matriarch who prepared every meal from scratch.
A Launching Pad
Perhaps the most significant parallel between the Black street vendors of today and yesterday is how they leveraged their street food business to enter other entrepreneurial ventures and impact lives well beyond their own. In the case of Harris Dean, selling pig feet out of a baby carriage afforded her the opportunity to upgrade to a steam table and then eventually secure enough financial capital to enter the real estate market. Through street food vending, Harris Dean went from a penniless Southern migrant in New York to a Harlem cultural icon and with an impressive real estate portfolio and wealth.
Today, we can see elements of her story present in the story of Pinky Cole, founder of Slutty Vegan. It seems like not a day goes by without Cole announcing the launch of a new brick-and-mortar location, signing a huge deal with another brand, purchasing more property, or starting a new initiative to support the Black community. However, Cole’s life did not begin at the mountaintop nor was Slutty Vegan a walk-up spot from the start. It began as a delivery service and began to take off as a food truck. That one food truck then became two and soon the restaurants began to follow. The rest is now history, but the accolades Cole has earned (including being the first food entrepreneur to ever grace the cover of Essence along with partner Derrick Hayes of Big Dave’s Cheesesteak) can in many ways be traced to when lines wrapped her food truck before she ever had a building.
Though the connections between Black street vending practices of past and present are there, it is understandable that many of these narratives are not known or go underrecognized. Drs. Harris, Ashante Reese and Psyche Williams Forson have all noted that by the 1950s, Black street food vendors had faded from view on street corners crying wares throughout the country such as New Orleans, Charleston, the Deanwood community of Washington, D.C. and Gordonsville, Virginia. The rise of the supermarket industry, coupled with stricter street vending ordinances to favor brick-and-mortars and technological advancements, drove many Black street food vendors out of business. Not only did they fade from view on street corners with their pushcarts, wagons, wheelbarrows and strollers, but many of them faded from public collective memory as well, with little documentation of their existence and contributions preserved or even documented.
Scholars and historians like Harris, Williams-Forson, Reese, Dr. Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Michael Twitty, Adrian Miller and others have done incredible work to document and preserve the stories we do have of the history of Black street food culture. Now, it is important to document and preserve the present and future state of Black street food culture and vending—food trucks and any iteration that follows.
References
Harris, J. B. (2013). I’m Talkin’ ’Bout the Food I Sells: African American Street Vendors and the Sound of Food from Noise to Nostalgia. In J. T. Edge, E. E. S. D., & T. Ownby (Eds.), The larder: Food studies methods from the American South (pp. 10–15). essay, University of Georgia Press.
Nierenberg, A. (2019, November 27). Overlooked no more: Lillian Harris Dean, Culinary Entrepreneur known as 'pig foot mary'. The New York Times. Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/obituaries/lillian-harris-dean-overlooked.html
Reese, Ashanté M. (2019). Black food geographies: race, self-reliance, and food access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Smith, A. D. (2019, July 22). The food truck scholar: Chandra James: The Arctic Shack LLC on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-food-truck-scholar/id1456602492?i=1000445063769
Smith, A. D. (2019, May 6). The Food Truck Scholar: Deundre Zachery: Ragin cajun on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-food-truck-scholar/id1456602492?i=1000437363543
US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. (2018, March 29). Food Truck Nation. Retrieved March 22, 2022, from https://www.foodtrucknation.us/
Williams, V. S. (2020, September 27). Slutty vegan starts a new conversation around plant-based eating. Cuisine Noir Magazine. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/slutty-vegan-atl-burgers/
Williams-Forson, P. A. (2007). Building houses out of chicken legs: black women, food, and power. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
