Hope endures for Toronto food trucks

Last Thursday, city councillors Mary-Margaret McMahon and Josh Colle kicked off a two-month pilot project that will see food trucks given the green light to operate at five city parks. For those of us who are a little tired of Toronto street-food options being mostly limited to hotdogs or, well, hotdogs, this is a good thing.

After all, Toronto has experienced a bit of a food-truck renaissance in recent years, with gourmet vendors drawing huge crowds at festivals. But they’ve been forced to navigate a tricky and restrictive set of bylaws that limit them to private property that’s been zoned commercial.

Up until last week, to actually operate a food truck anywhere else meant dealing with a tangled web of oddly specific restrictions, curbside moratoriums and outright bans. For potential operators, it was all about as easy to understand as the relationships between the characters on Game of Thrones.

So this is progress. Yes, it’s slow. At a glance, it’s hard to understand why the city is only doing a pilot project instead of a full-on expansion. It’s not exactly clear how allowing vendors to sell good food to hungry people in public places could go wrong, since food trucks are already licensed by the city and subject to the same health inspections as any other restaurant.

Unless there’s concern that the food will attract roving packs of rabid wolves, it’s hard to identify potential downsides.

But this is Toronto, and we do tend to be cautious about these kinds of things. Compared to city hall’s last attempt to expand street food, this latest food-truck project feels almost libertarian.

That last attempt, dubbed Toronto a la Cart and launched in 2009, saw the city try to get into the food-truck business with custom-made carts. The city carts, which were sold to vendors, ended up being too heavy to conveniently move around — kind of a deal-breaker. And then owners were shackled with bizarre regulations dictating things like how many hours a cart owner had to spend operating their business, to how often they could change their menu.

That program failed, of course. It was too complicated and too restrictive. What some politicians and bureaucrats have been forced to realize over the last decade is that there’s nothing to gain from over-complicating what should be a straightforward business arrangement between people who like to eat things and businesses who sell things to eat.

Sometimes things really should just be kept simple. This food-truck pilot is a good example, a good start and, I hope, acknowledgement that what street food really needs to thrive in this city is for politicians to stay out of the kitchen.