Guillermina Villa’s lunch truck is loaded with health

Guillermina Villa is famous for the seafood she prepares at El Pescadito Tacos y Mariscos, a lunch truck that has been serving customers for more than 25 years in South Los Angeles’s Florence-Firestone neighbourhood.

Customers who grew up in the largely industrial area travel great distances — from as far as North Hollywood, Rancho Cucamonga and Oxnard — to treat themselves to favourites such as shrimp tacos and empanadas.

But these days a new sign on Villa’s truck advertises a smattering of new menu items such as quesadillas made with whole wheat tortillas and ceviche served with a side of plain yogurt and fruit.

The offerings represent a new direction for the business: They are designed to provide healthy balanced meals of less than 700 calories apiece, loaded up with whole grains, fruits and vegetables and carefully calibrated portions of meat and dairy.

“We are concerned about what people are eating,” said Alfredo Magallanes, Villa’s husband and co-owner of the truck. “That’s why we are doing this.”

The family’s effort is part of a collaboration with Dr Deborah Cohen, a researcher at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica who studies causes of obesity.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health, she has launched a pilot program to see what might happen if taco trucks start offering healthier meals to their customers.

Lonchera operators volunteer to participate in the effort, which offers them help creating and marketing their healthy offerings and pays them $250 (Dh918) once they complete the requirements for study participation.

Cohen, a family medicine doctor by training, began working with loncheras — the traditional taco trucks that have been a staple in Los Angeles for decades — because they serve a high-risk population, she said.

Cohen estimates that several thousand loncheras operate in Los Angeles County. Many of their customers are Latinos and lower-income people, groups that suffer disproportionately from obesity and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

According to the 2011 Los Angeles County Health Survey, 31 per cent of Latinos and 30 per cent of people with incomes below the federal poverty level are obese.

Cohen thinks getting trucks to sell healthier fare could help reduce those numbers — if customers buy the better meals.

“If we are able to get the trucks to successfully promote healthier meals, we could have a substantial, measurable health impact,” she said.

On the evening of November 19, registered dietitian Monica Montes, who is part of Cohen’s team, visited El Palador Oaxaqueno, a night-hours truck that has operated for 10 years, seven of them in West Los Angeles.

Montes was there to help owners Doroteo and Victoria Lopez devise their new, balanced dishes. Handing the couple a set of measuring cups and a brand-new food scale, she asked them to prepare some candidate dishes — showing them how to measure the ingredients as they went along. Montes would later take the plates with her to analyse their nutritional content and finalise working recipes.

As Doroteo Lopez painstakingly prepared reimagined versions of beef with nopales and chicken, beef tacos, weighing avocado slices and measuring out citrus wedges, a long line of patrons snaked from the truck’s service window. It was a chilly night, and most ordered comfort food — tacos or quesadillas served with piles of rice and beans, or traditional Oaxacan clayudas stacked with bean spread and cabbage.

Cohen hopes to have 20 trucks signed on by the end of the year. Once all have completed their work with Montes and started selling their revamped meals, it will be up to customers to make the decision to give tidbits such as yogurt, whole wheat tortillas and fresh fruit garnishes a try.

The program gives truck operators the option of handing out coupons to customers who buy the new meals but urges participants to avoid emphasising the nutritional content of the plates.

Adelita’s Catering, a high-volume truck that operates daytime hours in the Fashion district downtown, has had good success with its four new offerings: a grilled fish salad, a grilled chicken salad, and plates called El Pescado Incomparable and El Pollo Majestuoso (which offer whole grain rice, fruit and vegetables with fish and chicken, respectively).

Owner Mario Lopez, who operates the truck with his wife, Adela, says he sells 40 or 50 of the new plates every day.

At El Pescadito Tacos y Mariscos, sales of the healthy meals have been slower-going, Alfredo Magallanes said, with customers buying only about three or four a day.

“People are still getting to know the plates,” he said. “They come in for the traditional options.”

Magallanes said one reason he wanted to participate in Cohen’s program was to dispel the popular notion that catering trucks only sell junk.

“We have homemade food,” he said. “Everything we sell is fresh.”

Over six months, Rand researchers will track the success of the effort, logging healthy meal sales and conducting customer surveys with nonprofit community health organisation AltaMed.

If they find that people are buying the healthier plates, they’ll expand the project to study how the offerings have improved customers’ diets, Cohen said.

— Los Angeles Times