Midtown Tunnel This Lane

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The most luscious watermelon the Deep South has ever produced was once so coveted, 19th-century growers used poison or electrocuting wires to thwart potential thieves, or simply stood guard with guns in the thick of night. The legendary Bradford was delectable — but the melon didn’t ship well, and it all but disappeared by the 1920s. Now, eight generations later, a great-great-great-grandson of its creator is bringing it back.

Saving The Sweetest Watermelon The South Has Ever Known

The humble food cart is a fixture on the streets of New York, and in recent years the offerings available have gone a long way beyond pretzels and the classic “dirty water” hot dogs. Now you can find food carts serving dosas, and arepas, and Bangladeshi-style marinated lamb over rice. People line up patiently on the sidewalks of Midtown to get their favorite “street meat,” and carts vie for bragging rights over who grills up the best halal chicken. Between food carts, which can set up on the sidewalk, and food trucks, there are now as many as 8,000 mobile food vendors in this city alone.

But while the culinary advances in New York’s street food scene have been tremendous, the carts themselves are still relatively old-school. Flashing LED light displays, now ubiquitous, are about the only concession to the 21st century. The vendors are mostly cooking with propane gas—which has been known to explode—and powering their rolling homes with dirty, noisy diesel generators.

That may be beginning to change. This week, a company called MOVE Systems introduced what its founders hope will be the food cart of the future: the MRV100. The sleek unit, designed with input from vendor focus groups, runs on compressed natural gas, with a solar panel providing supplementary power, and the ability to charge up off the electrical grid as well. The new cart is cleaner and quieter by several orders of magnitude than its traditional counterpart, with a restaurant-quality kitchen and far better refrigeration facilities than is typical.

Its developers also say that it is equipped—through a proprietary point-of-sale system—to take food carts into the future, or at least the present, by enabling credit-card payment, electronic inventory control, and perhaps, in the future, a consumer app for pre-ordering.

-Is This the Mobile Food Cart of the Future?

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