Callahan Cooks

 

Interview by Claire Davis

As a student potentially interested in the food industry, I asked a friend who used to own a food truck if I could interview her about her job. Ms. Katherine Callahan, my neighbor, is originally from Oregon. She owned a food truck and catered to businesses around downtown Portland during her career. About 5 years ago she wanted to move away from the economic hardships there. She was watching the movie Sweet Home Alabama and based on that, she decided that she would move to Alabama. She has a picturesque home with lovely interior designing and lush landscaping. I met with Ms. Callahan one afternoon, and we sat in her home as I asked her some questions. 

Ms. Callahan worked in a food truck for 34 years with a great majority of those years spent in her own truck. Being able to cook just about anything she wanted, Ms. Callahan would deliver and serve food to several different business men and women on their lunch breaks. She loved the people. “It was a different world, and people were really grateful,” Ms. Callahan told me. By buying food at the food truck, workers were able to eat a hot lunch instead of just a sandwich and some chips. She worked for a company for the first few years but eventually bought her own truck and became self-employed. 

Ms. Callahan told me that being self-employed is strenuous. Eleven-hour shifts was just one of the difficulties of being self-employed. Unless you could hire workers, “You’re it.”  For Ms. Callahan, a normal work day consisted of making food every evening and keeping it refrigerated overnight. In the morning she would reheat it if necessary and then drive her route throughout the day. “The hardest part is being married to a business,” she remarked. “You live with it all the time.” Ms. Callahan told me that working in a food truck was not her dream job. If she did not have to provide for her family, she said that she would have been an interior designer. She explained to me, “I was a single mom with two little kids. I had to pay the bills, and I knew how to do that. So I said ‘ok! This is what we're doin’!’”

My conversation with Ms. Callahan was very enlightening. She talked about the difficulties of running her own business and how she persevered through the struggles she had. Ms. Callahan’s example shows us how to provide for and bless so many people through a job not necessarily desired.