Congratulations on Winning the Falafel Arms Race!

Most people don’t know this but the falafel business is super aggressive. There’s a food cart every few feet looking to take down its nearest competitor, and doner salesmen who shell out low quality falafel along with their be-spoked mystery meat are constantly trying to undercut hard working Middle Eastern men like yourself who special in the ancient and time honored art of preparing falafel.

There are many paths to success. Coming up with the most delicious recipe, marketing your cart well, or just being lucky enough to have a store in a hippy-heavy neighborhood where protein crazed attractive young people flock to your shop to keep from keeling over. But in New York, the biggest of apples, sentiment against the Middle East following Nine-Eleven, a dense concentration of falafel related businesses and a diffusion of hippies in areas where it is not economically viable to rent store space have combined to make an especially hostile environment for making and selling falafel, be it over rice, in a sandwich or in a nice summer salad with some balsamic vinegar and a little pinch of love.

But you play games to win. You came to this country after the first Iraq war, you kept your business running through the second one while depression razed many of your competitors to the ground and now you stand on the eve of your victory. Today you’re going to win the falafel arms race.

The day will start with that new fryer you order showing up. You’ll have been waiting for it for months and months, and its arrival will signal a red letter day for your business: the day that you can finally stop worrying about running out of falafel in the middle of the day. With this new fryer you’ll be able to keep up with demand and produce fresh falafel with unprecedented speed. That means better ground, fried chickpeas for your customers and less waste for you.

This will be the final piece of a business plan you’ve been working towards for half a decade, but it won’t be complete without a quick call to homeland security to inform them that “Nature’s Best Falafel,” the store run by white people next door to you, is a terrorist cell.

“Why else would white people run a falafel store?” you’ll shout at the agent when he questions the authenticity of your evidence. He’ll quickly agree to your reasoning and hang up, eager to arrest someone who isn’t brown for a change.

Your opponents will be carried out of their shops during peak business hours (just after normal person lunch when hippies are either just waking up or just getting out of their bullshit hippy jobs) to the jeers and boos of onlookers. Everyone hates a terrorist, and even if the charges are eventually refuted they’ll never be able to recover from that. You’ll wring your hands and cackle as you watch, and when your customers look at you like something’s up you’ll shrug at them and shout at the top of your lungs.

“FUCK TERRORISM! I LOVE AMERICA!”

Congratulations on Winning the Falafel Arms Race!