On Sunday, June 26, dozens of restaurant workers in tall paper toques and flimsy plastic aprons charged into the Taste of Chicago.

It was a Saturday morning in late fall, 2008. A drizzly, downright shitty Saturday morning in early December. No way were our friends going to gather for brunch, so that left nothing to do but head to yoga class. I pulled on my pair of the tall rubber rain boots and tromped out my door down Cortelyou Road, the vena cava of my rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.