Broadcasting Traditions

John T. Edge is a Georgia boy, but his sensibilities might as well have stepped off a boat. “American street food is the food of outsiders, the food of the immigrant class,” Edge says. “To work on the street is to broadcast your traditions.”  No wonder that a Bush administration official railed against licking ice cream cones and public displays of eating (this was in 2006, people!!!! it reads like a Victorian screed) Edge says American street food came into its own just this year, when vendors from taco trucks to ice cream trucks began advertising their location and specials using Twitter. And perhaps, if I’m reading it right, this is the year that street food also went fusion, with dishes like papaya duck tacos being sold in San Francisco by a truck that calls itself “Kung Fu Tacos,” and the Indian tacos found in DC.  But there’s a caution here as well: “It would be a shame,” Edge says, “if the Twitter trucks pushed out the vendors who can’t pay for their SRO if they don’t sell enough tacos today.”