GETTING HUNGRY?

surprise!
It's really interesting how, in just the last few years, there's been this surge in interest in thinking about Chinese restaurants:

Cheuk Kwan's amazing Chinese Restaurants series

Indigo Som's Chinese restaurants art project

Jennifer 8. Lee's recent Fortune Cookie Chronicles

And now there's "Have Food Will Travel" a new travelogue video that my old student from the Bay Area, Leonard Shek, is putting together. Check out the teaser video that finds Shek traveling to the Pearl River Delta to learn something about the place that turns out so many immigrants who come to the U.S. and cook our food. Looks promising:


Have Food Will Travel: Pearl River Delta from Leonard on Vimeo.

--O.W.

THE WAR ON LATINOS GOES TO THE STREETS...LITERALLY

enjoy 'em while they last
Forget Arizona. Right here in Los Angeles, legislators are going after...taco trucks.

$1000 fine or six months in jail for...selling tacos out of a truck? Are you serious? This is what the L.A. City Council considers valuable legislation? Isn't there, for example, low income housing they could focus on? De-congesting traffic? FIXING LAUSD?

Cotdamnit, leave my al pastor alone!

And while you're at it - leave the bacon-wrapped hot dogs be, too.

---

It's not all bad news...NPR's Morning Edition highlighted the extraordinary story of Guy Gabaldon, a Chicano from East L.A. who learned Japanese from his Issei and Nisei friends growing up and used that skill to convince 1,000 Japanese to surrender during WWII. A new documentary is coming out to tell a story that has gone under the radar for 60 years.

--O.W.