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This Philly food truck is so plugged in - it's electric

Philly Greens might look like a golf cart. But it's serving a smaller carbon footprint.

From the side and rear, Greg Alden Steele's new Philly Greens food truck looks like just about every other one on the road today.

But just look up front at the cab portion. It's rounded and snub-nosed. Is a golf cart powering this truck? Close. It's a Polaris GEM electric utility vehicle. Philly Greens is one of the few electric mobile food operations out there.

Steele's journey to the food-truck life was fueled not only by a love of food but the environment.

As a young man, Steele, now 49, worked for 10 years in the restaurant business. But he made his career in database administration, which led him to a job at Amtrak. Life in what he calls "a cube farm" bored him. In his office, "I could see a little bit of sky."

He sought a way out. He explored other business ideas but settled on the idea of a food truck. Seeking to reduce its carbon footprint, he decided to go electric. He bought the Polaris and had the body fabricated at a shop in Port Richmond.

His menu would be healthful - salads in the summer and soups/chili in the winter.

This week, he's offering vegan chili made with quinoa and sunflower seeds, arugula turnip soup, and a conventional chili.

"When you talk about the environment, you can get very negative," he said. "I prefer to think of more positive alternatives."

Then, he said, he spun his wheels "metaphorically and literally," in setting up the business. That's when he enrolled in Community College of Philadelphia's three-month Mobile Food Management course. "That was really helpful," he said. The profs taught him about food, marketing, and bureaucracy.

Two days a week, he parks outside his alma mater, on 17th Street between Callowhill and Spring Garden Streets. The rest of the time, he moves around; his schedule is posted on the website. On Monday, he parked at Girard College - all by himself - not to sell soup but to hand it out to Martin Luther King Day volunteers.

The truck is not completely "off the grid," energy-wise. It still must be plugged into an outlet for four to six hours at his Brewerytown commissary. He also runs a small gas generator to power the crockpots and a small heater.

He plans to add solar panels to the roof to make it more self-sufficient.

It still has no propane, no grill, no need for ventilation. "This is the perfect urban vehicle," he said. "I still go faster than a SEPTA bus."