Flavorwire

With food trucks parked on the streets of every major city, serving up menu items from coffee to snail lollipops and everything in between, actual restaurants have started almost seem passé. But like so many trends, the food truck is actually a thing of the past, as well. Nineteenth-century ur-food trucks may not have sold their wares out of metal pigs or featured menus devoted entirely to egg salad, but they do date back to the chuckwagons of the 1860s, invented by a smart Texas ranger named Charles Goodnight who realized that putting a kitchen on wheels could solve a lot of people’s problems. Below the jump, we take you through a tour of the early history of the food truck.

A chuckwagon parked in Wyoming’s Roundup Camp in the 1880s.