Food for Thought

In a former life (or like, 6 months ago), I had some ambitions of one day owning my own food truck (with a super catchy name like The Crag Dog or The Dump Truck). I had a vision of combining my loves of cooking and travel and climbing into one incredible Power Rangers Megazord career that would allow me to live on the road, selling street food to hungry climbers after a long day at the crag. I’d take a few burns on a project wherever I happened to be, and when the climbing day was done, fire up my grill and feed all the Rock Monkeys as the sun set. 

The bad news is that I’ve done a bit of research since then and have discovered that owning and operating a restaurant, even a mobile one, is really hard (duh) and even harder to make profitable. The start-up investment alone is enough to make my student loan debt recoil in terror, not to mention the ongoing costs and overhead. Even after wrangling up the cash, permitting and licensing a travelling food truck would be a nightmare of red tape to sort through, and then there’s the whole “food handling safety” to think about. 

It is certainly not impossible (apparently there are people out there who have done/do this sort of thing with success), but I realized that the amount of work required, not only to get the thing off the ground but to do full-time (and it would need to be full-time to make any kind of money), would be too much for me and the work/life balance I want to have. 

I can hear the privilege present in my desire for “work/life balance.” And in some ways, it feels almost like a cop out, or like I’ve given up on my big dream because “it’s too hard.” I’m fighting my knee-jerk reaction of thinking that maybe I’m just lazy or afraid to fail or any of those other reasons people don’t do the things they aspire to. 

But I have other dreams, too. I dream of training for and attempting Time Wave Zero in Mexico in the coming years (maybe even next year if my Permanent Residency gets processed). I dream of feeding birds in my garden (gotta get a garden first) and learning Korean so I can better communicate with my mom. And I dream to having the time and energy to have grand adventures and other general shenanigans with you all. I don’t think that I can give a food truck what it would take to properly function while maintaining these other valuable-to-me parts of my life at the moment. It’s not that a food truck, or something akin to it, is off the table forever; but for now, it’s on the back burner, as they say. 

I’m happy to have had the idea, however, because it inspired me to take my work in the kitchen more seriously. I’ve been experimenting more and trying to hone my skills by reading food blogs and (very slowly) working through The Professional Chef (the Culinary Institute of America’s textbook). I’m still not that great at taking constructive feedback (note to self: must invest in some heat protective wear), but I’m working on that, too. 

Even though the food truck may never pan out, my life at the cutting board is still flourishing, and that’s something to be excited about.