Drop that snack! L.A.'s long war against working-class people eating tamales, tacos, Cheetos, and other tasty food.

• Author: Arellano, Gustavo

IN 1985, legendary food critic Ruth Reichl wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times that sounded ludicrous then and just pathetic today. She was reviewing Border Grill, a nouveau Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles' ever-hip Melrose district run by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger--nowadays food royalty, but back then two hotshot Midwestern chefs. The review rightfully raved about the food, and Border Grill continues to feed suburban moms and their rich husbands to this day.

But then Reichl inadvertently gave readers a taste of the tortured food psychology that eternally infests America's second-largest city. "It looks like all the people who keep asking when Los Angeles is going to get a great Mexican restaurant," she enthused, "may finally have an answer."

This, in a city that was almost one-third Latino. That had once been a part of Mexico. That was swarming with Mexican eateries of every provenance, from taco trucks to diners to white-tablecloth and beyond. But because those spots were popular with the working class--whites and Latinos--they didn't count.

In Reichl's defense, she was just verbalizing what most of the city's learned class thought, then and now. For decades an innovator in food trends--from fast food chains to the California cuisine of Wolfgang Puck and Nancy Silverton to Mexican everything, Korean grub, food trucks, Taco Bell, prepared foods (canned menudo! frozen burritos!), Wienerschnitzel, so much more--Los Angeles is America's ultimate food laboratory. Whether you're a gourmand or a grubber, what's being eaten here by kids and workers today will show up in Topeka in a couple of years.

Hey, Jayhawkers: Get ready for bacon-wrapped hot dogs!

But Los Angeles, particularly though not only in the 21st century, has also become a place for do-gooders to try to govern the habits of the public gut. Those bacon-wrapped hot dogs, sold off of carts, are nowadays as much a part of the Angeleno nightlife as Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully and nosy po-po. But said po-po usually impound said carts under orders from health officials who are afraid eaters will die from the unholy union of pork on pork. It's the way of L.A.: From banning new fast food restaurants to arresting people who sell raw milk to cracking down on backyard chicken coops, Los Angeles has set the standard for the rest of the country on how to legislate against our right to nosh on what we want. And the hammer inevitably falls on the common man.

"California produces and innovates and eats in ways the rest of the U.S. and increasingly the world notices," says Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange who has written about Southern California's taco-truck wars. "At the same time, local and state interests inspire crackdowns on the innovation. Because many trends happen here first, so do the efforts to regulate them."

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken: L.A.'s official food policy seems to operate on the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happily eating.

More and more, those two worlds of L.A. culinary innovation--the elite and the street--are colliding. Roy Choi, the fusion taco artist who revolutionized American cooking nearly a decade ago with his Kogi Korean BBQ truck, made his name popularizing among hipsters what had long been a staple of the California working class, especially Mexican immigrants. He has now become an active proselytizer for bringing top chefs into the 'hood--in order to save the very people who invented the taco truck and know all about organic food from their home countries and their own eating habits.

"There are no chef-driven restaurants in the' hood," where people are "starving" for quality food, Choi complained to a rapt audience at the 2013 MAD Symposium, an annual event held in Copenhagen that's like a TED Talk for the foodie set. "Not one... The restaurants that do exist are fast food chains." His suggestion? "What if every high caliber chef, all of us in here, told our investors as...