Chicago’s Tamale Wars Finally Made Right

Letter to Romans: I still crave the Tom Tom Tamale made blocks from my childhood home. Chicago’s health regulators & lawyers helped them slowly disappear from the streets along with the bicycle vendors hawking them. But, alas, the culprits are now my heroes again…

I have to admit: My craving & nostalgia was triggered by the WSJ story lamenting how the “tamale” was disappearing from Mexican restaurant menus all across the nation. Seems today’s ingredients wrapped in “real” corn shucked leaves have become too expensive & hard to make. Frankly, the taste of the organic but boring restaurant tamale is NOTHING compared to the steam-cooked, spicy beef Tom Tom wrapped in a fiery hot corn meal casing. But I digress. My fascination with the Chicago tamale’s history is also fed by having grown up to be a lawyer (and a municipal one for a time) who saw how progressive reformers can go overboard with their bright ideas helped by well-meaning gov’t lawyers. (Need I bring up the COVID nightmare as an example?) Instead, consider how in pre-JFK days Chicago (and other big cities) had neighborhood streets filled with such inexpensive food. Besides the tamale, the Windy City boasted the incomparable Chicago Red Hot & Italian Beef sandwiches ala carte.

Understandably, increasingly powerful progressives continued to worry over the safety, sanitation & traffic issues; but instead of them & their gov’t lawyers focusing on safety they attacked HOW it was being sold. They made license fees & required equipment too expensive for the biker men who increasingly called it a career. A key Illinois appellate decision in 1963 even upheld a legal challenge to Chicago’s broad regulatory authority over the peddlers & affirmed the city’s power to license, tax & otherwise regulate the hell out of them via costly fees, inspections & (even alleged police harassment). Yet private counsel refused to throw in the towel. As the University of Chicago Law School’s Institute for Justice Clinic had complained the street vendors justifiably “pled with the city for licensure for decades.” One vendor testified she was “tired of being scared” after having been arrested & her “pots of tamales” confiscated. By 2015, lawyers representing the squeezed-out vendors finally persuaded the City Council to legalize them again, albeit with a progressive (albeit more vendor-friendly) win-win ordinance. The rest is history. Buon appetito!

Davd Soul