Cattails as truck stop grub?

So I've been working on a "real" contract (i.e. one that pays the bills) all week and have barely looked at Crimes since my last posting... such is the life of a stay-at-home mom/freelance translator: I take what I can get. However, there is no lack of translation questions to look at in this novel, so I'll post about one from a few chapters back. Here's the issue:

Ce n'est pas en travaillant chez Miss Patate, à servir des quenouilles végétariennes et des frites à manger au cure-dent, que je me sauverai et que je deviendrai un être libre.

Miss Patate is the truckstop mentioned in an earlier post. This sentence is again talking about the food served there. Now, I'm no truckstop connoisseur, but I know that truckers aren't known for eating their fries with a toothpick, nor are truckstops often celebrated for bringing locally foraged eco-foodie delicacies into into their menus. The "quenouille" is a cat-tail, which is edible and can be made delicious, or so I've heard (see recipe here), but it's not liver and onions.


roasted cattails with hollandaise sauce

The truckstops that I've experienced have been mostly Husky gas-station restaurants and the like, which are renowned for their good, fresh coffee and their stick-to-the-ribs fare (mostly burgers and the like), not for their vegetarian cattails.

But it's not just the incongruity of the food vis-a-vis the establishment that is troublesome about this sentence. Literally:

"It's not by working at Miss Patate, serving up vegetarian cat-tails and fries to eat with toothpicks, that I'm going to get out of here and become free."

Does that sound unwieldy to anyone else?