The Lunch Wagon and the Food Truck

The lunch wagon of Hawaiʻi belongs to the plantation era, when workers from China, Japan, Okinawa, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Korea and the Philippines came to the islands under the contracts that followed the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, and when food was sold from wagons and carts to people who had no time or kitchen to go home to. The food truck of the present day descends from that wagon and from the plate lunch it carried, and it stands on the same ground as the drive-in and the lunch counter of Honolulu and the neighbour islands.

The plate lunch is the root of the matter. In the account of Provenance research it is not so much a dish as an agreement: a main protein, two scoops of short-grain white rice and macaroni salad, served in a paper container, with a rigid format and a content that changes with whoever is cooking. The protein may be kālua pork, teriyaki beef, chicken katsu, kalbi, mahi-mahi or laulau, and each of these belongs to a different kitchen of the plantation camps. The format that holds them together is what allowed every cuisine of the islands to take a place on the same plate. The wagon preceded the truck. Saimin, which carries a Cantonese name, a Japanese method of broth and a noodle closest to Chinese egg noodles, was first sold from unnamed saimin wagons at a few cents a bowl, and by the 1950s it had become a statewide institution. The wagon was therefore already the place where the cooking of several nations met in a single serving, sold to anyone who came and paid. Its kitchen was small, its menu short, and its customer a working person with a short break. The food truck of Hawaiʻi keeps this arrangement and adds mobility. The plate lunch is released from the counter: the kitchen goes to the people, where the older arrangement waited for them to arrive. The trucks sell the plate lunch itself, poke, Spam musubi and shave ice, each of them a food already settled in the local table, and each made from minimal kitchen equipment. A truck of this kind asks of the cook what the lunch wagon asked: a narrow menu, cooked well and quickly, at a price that a working person will pay. The discipline of the plate lunch is carried over unchanged. The rice remains the foundation, freshly cooked, warm, sticky and portioned in a dome with an ice-cream scoop, and a plate on which it fails fails as a whole, whatever stands beside it. Macaroni salad is the second constant, and the protein is the one place where the cook is free. The truck is therefore judged as the counter was judged, by the rice first. The form connects to the older feeding customs of the Pacific. The imu fed the household and the village from a single oven of heated stones, the lūʻau fed the family and its guests, and the truck feeds the street. In each, one kitchen cooks for many, the food is served in a portion that can be eaten where it is handed over, and the table is open to whoever comes. The truck is the latest form of that practice, not a departure from it.

The table of the truck is the plate lunch: two scoops of warm short-grain rice, macaroni salad dressed with mayonnaise, and a protein that may be glazed, grilled, fried or slow-cooked, from teriyaki beef and chicken katsu to kālua pork and laulau. It is eaten from a paper container, standing or seated at the kerb, with shoyu and chilli at hand, and is often followed by shave ice or a Spam musubi taken away for later. The taste is that of the plantation camps, with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Filipino and Native Hawaiian cooking set together on a single plate.