“My Streets! My Eats!” Campaign Champions Chicago’s Mobile Food Vendors

Following IJ’s Atlanta street-vending case launch, the IJ Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School launched the My Streets! My Eats! campaign in Chicago.

My Streets! My Eats! combines the oldest and newest tools of grassroots organizing—from meetings promoted with flyers and buttons to social media networking—in an effort to convince Chicago’s City Council that mobile chefs should be free to prepare food from trucks and carts (as long as they follow the health code) and serve it all over the city.

As IJ’s recently released Streets of Dreams study showed, Chicago is one of many cities that bans mobile food businesses near restaurants. This is done for no other reason than to protect restaurants from competition—hardly a wise or constitutional use of government power. We plan to remind aldermen that their duty is to protect the rights of citizens to earn an honest living and the freedom of consumers to choose what to buy, rather than to erect anti-competitive walls around existing businesses.

Help spread the word to your Chicago friends by sharing our campaign’s link today: staging.ij.org/mystreets.