Meals on wheels: Why casual street dining and food trucks are here to stay

Food trucks have become an intrinsic part of Irish food culture. Joe McNamee on why our love affair with mobile cooking is going nowhere

While the outbreak of food trucks has begun to recede with the great societal reopening, casual street dining is here to stay and that is a very welcome consequence indeed

In decades to come, a roll call of the pandemic’s most familiar tropes inevitably must alight on food trucks. When lockdown first set in, they began to spring up, tentatively at first, but soon with a vigorous proliferation that near mimicked the contagiousness of the virus itself.

They were everywhere, found in all manner of places. Apocryphal tales abounded of random civilians who’d never gone beyond knocking out a turkey and Tayto sandwich on Stephen’s Day now freshly set up in shiny new mobile units, coffee docks being especially popular because, after all, anyone can make a coffee, no? (No, ‘anyone’ cannot ‘make’ a coffee.)