My Streets My Eats
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My Streets My Eats is a grassroots campaign to spread the word about the legal restrictions Chicago places on mobile chefs and to advocate for reform. My Streets! My Eats aims to mobilize Chicagoans to urge City Council to say yes to mobile chefs by repealing restrictions. Chicago should let entrepreneurs figure out what customers want and serve it up fresh and hot!
On July 25, City Council passed a new law that will allow food preparation and cooking on food trucks. Unfortunately, this law still places unfair and anti-competitive restrictions on mobile food businesses:
- Ban within 200 feet of restaurants, except a few spots selected by the City
- $1000-2000 fines for parking too close to restaurants or longer than 2 hours
- GPS surveillance
- No service between 2:00am and 5:00am
The strict 200-foot rule and harsh parking penalties have nothing to do with protecting the public. Check out our map of the Loop, which shows how crippling the law would be. The city is giving special benefits to restaurants and treating food truck entrepreneurs like second-class citizens. Tell the City Council that they should treat all Chicagoans with business dreams equally, and allow Chicago’s creative chefs to start small and grow big!
Read IJ Clinic director Beth Kregor's compelling testimony from hearing on this law.
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| Click to view the full sized map of the Loop. |
What can you do?
- Tweet at your local politicians that you support economic liberty for food-truck entrepreneurs. Here are some suggested tweets!
- Help Chicago free the food trucks by emailing Food-Truck Freedom: How to Build Better Food Truck Laws in Your City and Seven Myths and Realities about Food Trucks to your city mayor and councilmembers.
- Visit a local food truck and post a picture of the deliciousness using #freethefoodtrucks on Instagram.
- Promote this campaign on your Facebook or Twitter. Tag the map with friends' locations and post it.
My Streets My Eats Mobile Food Symposium and Meet Up
On April 14, 2012, the IJ Clinic on Entrepreneurship hosted “My Streets My Eats: Chicago Mobile Food Symposium and Meet Up” at the University of Chicago Law School. Over 150 entrepreneurs, scholars, government officials, and activists gathered to discuss the importance of street food in urban cultures and economies, the need to reform vending laws in Chicago, and develop a model for city governments that would allow street vending to flourish. Following the symposium, hundreds more community members joined symposium attendees for a food truck meet up featuring 19 of Chicago's mouth-watering trucks. (Read more)
