data modeling: halal food trucks part 1
Since the pecha kucha and the class on paper prototyping, I have been thinking about the scale and scope of my project. It started with my wanting to map out halal food carts in the city, and imagining the density of what that networked map would look like, how the street food vendors provide coverage through fast, cheap food to different parts of the city, and through that data work through relationships, and connectors of tracing back origins (nationality, ancestry, ethnicity, immigration status) and assess how the carts were linked – how many worked as part of the same company? Where did they serve food? What kind of shifts did they cover? And see how the vendors were connected: were they related? Did they come from the same neighbourhood? Or the same country?
I have so many questions.
13th street and 5th avenue on a weekday (outside new school building)
I soon realized that this was the start of a very ambitious project. I could not possibly exhaustively and accurately map out all halal food street carts in the five boroughs. I thought about my methods of selection: what could be a good representative sample? In class we discussed the possibility of interviewing one street food vendor, or cart to represent each borough. So far my range of conversations with street food vendors has been limited to Manhattan. My conversations have been interesting enough: I learnt about the differing nature of work hours and shifts (for example Burak, who is Egyptian and works a halal food truck at 14th and 6th avenue, located next to a fruit vendor’s cart, outside Urban Outfitters, and located next to one of the F/G subway entrances, told me that he works every day, seven days a week, no holidays for six months straight. His work hours are typically during the day. Then he travels back to Egypt to spend time with his family, for six months. His work/holiday cycle is conducted through a six month period). I learnt through my conversation with one of the managers, Sharif, at ‘The Halal Guys’ (http://53rdand6th.com/locations-timings/) about how permits to operate carts are no longer available, so people can’t own their own carts, but they could rent out and run a cart from someone who already is in the business.
I’m now thinking more and more to scale this down. After the pecha kucha, I began thinking more about looking at the journey of the food and ingredients. During earlier conversations with Shannon, we had already been talking about mapping the journey of the food truck, to visualize it, and to anthropomorphize it. If I were to map out the journey of the truck, of the food items, and the journeys of the vendors and to create a map plotting those as nodes and access points – what would that look like? Admittedly, this would also mean narrowing my focus down to a few instead of very many but it would be more organized and complete this way.
During my conversation with Sharif, I asked how a map might be useful: what would they like to see in a map if it was drawn out or compiled? He said it would give them free publicity and that would be useful. Others (perhaps who are more new to the scene, and less established) might have different answers to that query, but I guess (good) publicity is always welcome.
No project presented at the end of UMA has ever been “finished”; everyone always sees so much more that *could’ve* been done. And that’s okay! I’d encourage you to think of your map as a prototype – a template for your pretend successors! Perhaps you could create three scenarios, or chapters — each representing a different mode of mapping: one following a cart through the city for a day; one following Burak through his day and *year*; etc., etc. Perhaps you’ll have time to flesh out only one case study for each of these approaches — but I think the variety of approaches would more effectively convey the “overdeterminedness” and the complex geopolitics of the food truck cultural economy, than would multiple similar maps of different trucks.
I hope that makes sense!