Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez orders a pastrami taco, hold the guac. It’s a cloudy Monday in late August and we’re sitting at a four-top near the back of Flats Fix, a narrow Manhattan taqueria sidled up next to Union Square. This isn’t just another random interview-in-a-quiet-restaurant selection, though—and not just because this place isn’t quiet.

Until last February, Ocasio-Cortez spent most of her days working here, slinging tequila-based cocktails and living off tips from the happy hour crowd. Everyone knows her: the servers, the bartenders, the cooks, the regulars. “I haven’t been back in awhile,” she tells me, as yet another former coworker comes up for a hug. “Things have been a little crazy.”

Yes. A little crazy.

Last night Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. But on the day of our interview, she’s still processing the reality of having trounced the 14th District’s powerhouse incumbent Joseph Crowley in the Democratic primary. Crowley had been in politics since before she was born, repped the district unopposed since 2013. Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist of Puerto Rican descent, didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Her campaign spent just over 5 percent of what Crowley’s did. And yet, on June 26, 2018, she beat him by more than 14 percentage points and rocketed into the national spotlight; not just as an unexpected victor who proved all the polls wrong, but as a shining light for progressives—and especially young people of color.

Here at Flats Fix, with its a zigzag of fluorescent lights and trip-hop playlist and giant yellow surfboard affixed to the wall, she’s taking a moment to reflect.

“My campaign started in food, and in a lot of ways evolved out of food,” she tells me, motioning toward the wooden counter that runs the length of the restaurant, the bottles of José Cuervo and Patron stacked on shelves strung with red fairy lights and South American flags. “For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar.” Between shifts at the restaurant, she’d reach into the bag for her political literature and a change of clothes, then set out to canvass.

She leans across the table, her jean jacket buttoned all the way up, her large brown eyes intense, magnetic. “For me it was especially potent that I was working in the food service industry while running for office because I wasn’t, like, reminiscing on some summer job I had when I was a teenager. This was the life I was living.”

For Ocasio-Cortez, food is political, and the most tangible indicator of our social inequities. Sure, as living beings we all must eat to survive—and there’s unity in that—but what we eat and how much and where it comes from and what we must do to get it varies widely. “The food industry is the nexus of almost all of the major forces in our politics today,” she says. “It’s super closely linked with climate change and ethics. It’s the nexus of minimum wage fights, of immigration law, of criminal justice reform, of health care debates, of education. You’d be hard-pressed to find a political issue that doesn’t have food implications.”

Most politicians, she points out, are disconnected from these realities. At the start of this Congress, the median net worth of members across both parties was five times that of an American household. “Many members of Congress were born into wealth, or they grew up around it,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “How can you legislate a better life for working people if you’ve never been a working person? Try living with the anxiety of not having health insurance for three years when your tooth starts to hurt. It’s this existential dread. I have that perspective. I feel like I understand what’s happening electorally because I have experienced it myself.”