With the pandemic idling many immigrants who normally make a living selling street food—and with food insecurity intensifying throughout the city—one program, ending this week, tackled both problems at once. 

Over the last few weeks, the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project, with funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, paid about 30 vendors to get back in their trucks to cook free meals for New Yorkers who are food insecure. About 6,500 meals from food trucks were distributed at sites in Brooklyn and the Bronx during the duration of the seven-week program, which ends Friday.

For Elena Wang, her parents, and brother, the program has been a temporary reprieve to keep business going. They are accustomed to working seven days a week, as many as 14 hours a day, operating both a food truck and a push cart on West 4th Street near New York University. The truck, geared toward NYU’s significant population of Chinese students, sells traditional Chinese fare, while the nearby pushcart serves up more Americanized dishes—like $8 teriyaki chicken. 

When the pandemic struck, it hammered the food truck business in Manhattan. At NYU, many students have been off campus, taking virtual classes. 

“It’s not slow—everything stopped,” Wang said. The truck sat in its garage. The family waited at home in Flushing, where rent was due. And Wang’s father started getting headaches. “It’s very hard,” she said.

Food truck vendors are also often immigrants—and they were well positioned to churn out large quantities of food, fast, for the hungry. Wang said her family can make 400 plates of General Tso’s chicken a day with “no problem.” 

“Because we sell the fast food on the street, and we are working very quickly,” she said.

During the pandemic, an estimated 2 million New Yorkers were considered food insecure, with immigrants, who are often ineligible for government support, disproportionately feeling that pain. 

Steve Mei, director of the Chinese American Planning Council’s Brooklyn Community Center, ran one of the food distribution points at his facility in Sunset Park. 

“The reality is that throughout the past six, seven, eight months, folks in our community in Sunset Park have been truly struggling,” he said. “This project’s able to one, support small businesses; and two, be able to provide hot and nutritious meals, and culturally appropriate meals, to a lot of the immigrant community.” 

“Culturally appropriate” means Halal meals cooked by Egyptian and Bangladeshi vendors for fellow Muslims, for example. 

“Sometimes for an Asian grandma a cold turkey or ham-and-cheese sandwich is not something they particularly understand,” Mei said. “So I think having something prepared by an Asian person for the Asian community or a [Latino] person for the [Latino] community has been really helpful.”

Listen to reporter Matt Katz's radio story for WNYC:

The funding for the seven-week program was part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s $100 million Covid-19 relief effort. The final food distribution on Friday will be from the Harlem Seafood Soul truck at Boston Secor Houses in the Bronx. 

City Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson, whose constituents in the Bronx received some of the food, called street vendors the “lifeblood of our city, feeding millions of New Yorkers across the five boroughs, from the Halal food truck to the ice cream truck.”

In addition to advocating for more access to street vendor permits and grants, the Street Vendor Project is continuing to demand relief funds for undocumented immigrants.

Matt Katz reports on air at WNYC about immigration, refugees, hate, and national security. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattkatz00.