While I was living in California as a student in the heady days when the US had a more responsible fiscal manager in the White House, the Australian dollar languished around 50 cents to the US dollar. On my meager savings, this meant that there was a thin line between me eating protein recognizable as meat when a weird cut went on special at Ralph's supermarket due to a salmonella scare ("This week: Miscellaneous Necks!") and adopting the recent immigrant diet of beans, rice and tortillas.

My housemates were somewhat horrified when I ate the Halloween pumpkin.

My small reprieve from the malnutrition was the local taco truck whose main clientele were the local immigrant workers on a survival level diet with the taste for a piece of home. I was introduced to the forbidden pleasure of the chiccarones taco, a taco singularly filled with fried pork crackling. I developed a theory that if the taco truck didn't offer cabeza (roasted cow head) then the van was not worth its garish paintjob, even if you had no plan to eat said cow or the van had it on the menu but didn't actually ever serve it. I came to suspect that it was a simple code to differentiate between the good taco truck and the evil. This is the sort of madness induced by access to meat after unwillingly enduring a low protein diet.

It is hard for me to think of a more iconic Californian food experience than chowing down on a fresh taco with a squeeze of lime, served from a vehicle that is essentially immobile. The average truck rarely moves and if it does, then there is a good chance that it will return to the same place the following day for a few hours of slinging tacos and burritos to the masses. So it was with nothing but unmitigated horror that I discovered that the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has passed new regulations that will effectively eliminate the taco truck from the streets of LA, signing what could have been my personal death warrant. From the LA Times:

Though taco trucks have long been regulated by the county, the previous law carried only a $60 fine for parking in one spot longer than 30 minutes. Many vendors who got citations simply treated them as a cost of doing business.

The revised law, to take effect May 15, allows mobile eateries to stay put for an hour. But if they fail to move after that they can be slapped with a criminal misdemeanor and face a fine of up to $1,000 or even six months in jail.

While currently the law only covers the 65% of Los Angeles that is unincorporated, it sets a grim precedent for the rest of city (and state). Much of the reasoning for the criminalization of mobile Mexican cuisine is that the taco trucks threaten the livelihoods of bricks-and-mortar restaurants, which is an entirely true and accurate appraisal on the state of the LA restaurant scene: the bulk of sit-down establishments can't compete with a guy in a truck.

See also: Save Our Taco Trucks, The Great Taco Hunt