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Fear of FalafelPosted on April 17th, 2011 by David in culture, eatingAre you afraid of falafel? Well, if you is or if you ain’t, I direct your attention to a bout of the limeduck national sport, overthinking, going on over at the Clover Food Lab (and trucks), where they sell a sandwich called “chickpea fritter” that might actually be… falafel.
There doesn’t seem to be much debate that the chickpea fritter sandwich is in fact falafel. I can also say that it seems quite popular and is in my opinion, a delicious lunch and quite satisfying for $5, too. So… why not just call it falafel? Clover opened that can of worms themselves in a blog post in February, which I’ll quote most of here:
You’re operating a food truck outside of MIT (and a restaurant in Harvard square, plus more trucks in Boston) and are worried that people won’t know about falafel? I’ve got to say, this just doesn’t hold water for me. Sure, Clover is pretty plain-spoken about their food, but would it hurt anybody to put one more word on the menu board? You can look up the nutritional content of Clover’s fritters and find mention of tahini and hummus and even Israeli salad, but a strange absence of the word falafel. Two of my friends had identical but oddly opposite darker interpretations, wondering if Clover were somehow anti-arab or anti-israeli. I’m certainly not going to take sides on the falafel origin debate, and I don’t buy this unpleasant take on Clover’s choice of words either. So what gives? Why is Clover so defensive about the issue on their blog? I’ve got a funny story to add. On my first visit to the Clover truck was back in August, before garbanzogate, I opted for the BBQ Seitan sandwich because I didn’t know what a chickpea fritter was. That’s right, I chose seitan, a food whose actual composition I cannot describe or explain [it's wheat gluten, dude, also known as mock duck, go figure] but one that I had eaten before, over the chickpea fritter which I did not recognize as familiar falafel. Also on the menu board that day were tabbouleh and quinoa, make of that what you will. So I guess food ignorance can go both ways, but the last thing you want at a food truck’s lunch line is to have to take time to discuss the menu with your order taker. The way I see it, Clover has three choices on this:
So what’s it going to be? Until something changes (and I’m not holding my breath) I encourage both of my loyal readers to visit your nearest Clover truck and order the falafel. It’s delicious. Tags: boston, cambridge, denial, falafel, food trucksThis entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2011 at 7:04 pm and is filed under culture, eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Fear of Falafel”
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How does it compare to Rami’s?
So is their chickpea fritter entre really a full of fail sammich?