We’ll have a couple of items for you later today about enviro-consciousness, and a pair on nutrition consciousness. But first, we would like to bring you a great first line of a story we read today in the L.A. Times:

“All my best L.A. memories are about girls or taco trucks.”

How can you not read more? That sentence leads into a piece by C. Thi Nguyen that’s an ode to the joys of mobile food, festival food, whatever you want to call it. The news hook is that L.A. county is “getting tough on the mobile restaurants.”

We can’t help but love how the writer explains what’s great about truck food: You’re “standing outside, wind in your hair, chowing down with all the homies, hipsters, off-duty cops, nurses, professors and homeless dudes.”

Our own Chip Griffin wrote about outdoor food recently after his trip to New York, also a Mecca of festival food, so we had already been thinking about what’s so great about eating from a stand or a truck. Nguyen totally gets it:

“It feels a bit like a party out there — the mix of intense flavors, milling people, bright lights in the night. Or maybe it’s the sense of camaraderie — that nobody knows who you are or how much you make, you’re all there in the heat or the cold for the same reason — good food, for cheap. Or maybe it’s just because some of the trucks offer the most gloriously energetic food in this city — tacos that are like bullets of spiky, oniony happiness.”

The whole piece is terrific. Don’t settle for this tease — read the whole thing. He even consults a “food theorist” (what a job!) to get to the bottom of matters.

Many of you may live in a city where there’s great mobile food. Do you have a favorite spot that makes you wax poetic? Drop us a comment and tell us your story.