STREET FOOD

London Street Food

The people of southern China are very broadminded about what they eat. It’s said that in the city of Guangzhou they will eat ‘anything with four legs but a chair, anything that flies but a plane’. At the animal markets of Guangzhou, until quite recently you could buy practically any wild animal on the planet (apart from pandas), most of them still alive. Sacks of writhing cobras and other snakes were sold by the kilo and turtles, wild boar, raccoons, badgers, squirrels, deer, ferrets, ponies, bats, monkeys, rats, as well as a wide range of birds and reptiles were also sold, many to be killed and cooked in front of you. But the Chinese government, sensitive to foreign media stories about cruelty to dogs and cats, and fearful of a repeat of the SARS outbreak, when a virus leapt the species divide from civet cats (sold in the markets) to humans, has now closed many of them. The Chinese are certainly passionate about food.
Kai Strittmatter, who for many years was a foreign correspondent in the country, says that ‘eating is to the Chinese what sex is to the Europeans – only it is celebrated and practised even more obsessively’. As a result, they have one of the world’s finest cuisines. In the thirteenth century, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo marvelled at the number of fine restaurants he saw in Hangzhou, which at the time was the world’s most populous city. Some specialised in a specific type of food, such as shellfish, salted fish or dog meat, while others offered cooking from different regions of China, such as spicy Sichuan food. In this city there was always something to tempt even the most jaded of urban palates. Although restaurants are an important part of city life, street food is a uniquely urban phenomenon.

Mumbai Street Food

I love Chinese food and I’m particularly keen on their dumplings, or bao, of which there are countless varieties. If you’ve ever eaten dim sum, you’ll be familiar with these delicious bite-sized parcels of food. When I stayed in Shanghai you could buy them throughout the city from street stalls or hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Bao come in all shapes and sizes, steamed or fried, and with different fillings of meat, seafood or vegetables. In Shanghai the bigger ones sometimes contain a meat broth, which you drink through a straw in the top (these are known as Tang bao). But dumplings are by no means the only kind of street food on offer in Chinese cities. At night markets, such as the ones on Yunnan Lu in Shanghai (east of Renmin Park), Temple Street in Kowloon’s Yau Ma Tei (especially good for seafood), or the Donghuamen Yeshi on Wangfujing Dajie, Beijing, you will find scores of stalls offering xiaochi (literally, small food). On a brief stroll through one of these markets you can take a culinary tour around the entire country, sampling specialities from all over China, including such delicacies as skewered scorpions or grasshoppers.
Every day, more than 2.5 billion people eat street food around the world. On the global street food menu today there might be a vadai (a deep-fried savoury dal or lentil fritter) or pav bhaji (curry and bread) in Mumbai, a falafel (deep-fried chickpea ball) in Damascus, Cairo or in Tel Aviv, a döner kebap (lamb in a flatbread) in Istanbul, takoyaki (octopus dumplings) in Tokyo, nasi lemak (steamed rice in a banana leaf) in Kuala Lumpur, or pho (noodle soup) in Hanoi. Street food’s timeless appeal is that it is cheap and convenient: for many low-income workers and students, the first meal of the day is bought from a street stall and eaten while travelling to work or school. The most vibrant street food cultures are found in the vast, sprawling megacities of the developing world. The street food of such cities, which are full of rural migrants, reflects local cultures and is a vital part of urban life. Setting up a street food stall requires minimal capital outlay and low (or even no) rent.
For this reason it provides employment for large numbers of city dwellers. n the 1980s, it was estimated that the Indonesian city of Bogor had one street food business for every fourteen people. Often whole families depend on it for their income. Bangkok has twenty thousand street food vendors who provide the city’s inhabitants with 40 per cent of their energy intake, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In Latin American cities, as much as a third of household budgets is spent on street food. But as stalls are outdoors and have only the most rudimentary facilities with which to prepare and cook food, there are often problems with hygiene, as well as a potential risk of contamination from heavy metals or pesticides.

New York Street Food

In 1996, when the FAO conducted tests on food from some of the 130,000 street-vending stalls in Kolkata, India, they found the bacteria E. coli (often a sign of faecal contamination) in 55 per cent of the samples.
For this reason, savvy locals often stick to trusted stalls or buy fried rather than cold food. Today, traditional street food vendors are facing fierce competition from global fast food chains. Kentucky Fried Chicken opened a store in Beijing in 1987, its first in mainland China. Twenty years later, KFC had proved so popular with Chinese people that it was opening a new store in China nearly every day. In 2008, there were more than 2,300 KFCs and Pizza Huts in the country and a thousand McDonald’s. These global fast food chains now dominate high streets across Europe and America, often driving out traditional local food vendors, such as fish and chip shops in Britain, which have been common since about 1900. As with other aspects of modern life, globalisation is creating a more homogenised urban experience as increasingly cities are dominated by ‘non-places’, to use Marc Augé’s term. However, in those districts where there are strong immigrant communities, regional street food bu sinesses can survive.
KFC may be popular in China, but in Chinatowns around the world I’m happy to say that you can still find all sorts of tasty bao for sale. City dwellers have been buying snacks and meals on the street for thousands of years. In ancient Rome, there were vendors selling everything from wine by the glass, to hot chickpeas by the plateful for as little as an ass (the smallest Roman denomination). There was such fierce competition between vendors that food in Rome was cheap. In Pompeii, archaeologists have discovered some two hundred bars, taverns and shops where you could buy fast food, quite a number for a town of 12,000 people. A common sight on the streets of Renaissance Florence and other Italian cities were the treccole or trecche, women selling fresh fruit, vegetables and cooked food from baskets which they carried, somewhat precariously, on their heads. The streets of early modern cities, such as Paris and London, were filled with a motley crew of hawkers, criers and tradesmen.

Rio de Janeiro Street Food

Street food had been a feature of the British urban landscape since at least medieval times. At that time, lower-class households may not have had a kitchen and so buying hot foods from cook shops and street vendors was common.
In British cities, oysters were a popular and inexpensive snack, widely available from stalls on street corners or from oyster taverns. From the sixteenth century, ‘they were the food of street life and the food of intimate conversation’.In the nineteenth century, the railways provided a nation-wide distribution network and cheap oysters, known as ‘scuttlemouths’, could be bought two for a penny (about twelve pence each in today’s money). They became a subsistence food for the working classes in industrial cities across the country. ‘It is a very remarkable circumstance, sir, that poverty and oysters always seems to go together,’ says Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837). When he visited New York in 1842, Dickens had a great time ‘roistering and oystering’ in the city, eating oysters from stalls with a friend and gossiping with the vendors.
Another British visitor at this time observed that ‘there is scarcely a square without several oyster-saloons; they are aboveground and underground, in shanties and palaces. They are served in every imaginable style: escalloped, steamed, stewed, roasted, “on the half shell”, eaten raw with pepper and salt, devilled, baked in crumbs, cooked in patés, put in delicious sauces on fish and boiled mutton.’In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was estimated that nearly five hundred million oysters passed through Billingsgate fish market each year in London. The first metropolis of the industrial age had a street food culture that was unparalleled in its variety. While writing his remarkable study London Labour and the London Poor (1852), Henry Mayhew talked to the city’s street vendors and observed their business in detail: ‘Men and women, and most especially boys, purchase their meals day after day in the streets.

South Korean Street Food

The coffee-stall supplies a warm breakfast; shell-fish of many kinds tempt to a luncheon; hot-eels or pea-soup, flanked by a potato “all hot”, serve for a dinner; and cakes and tarts, or nuts and oranges, with many varieties of pastry, confectionary, and fruit, woo to indulgence in a dessert; while for supper there is a sandwich, a meat pudding, or a “trotter”.’Mayhew lists some of the food and drink that would have tempted London pedestrians in the nineteenth century: pickled whelks, oysters, sheep’s trotters, fried fish, ham sandwiches, kidney puddings and boiled meat puddings. Hot peas (known as ‘scaldings of peas’) were available in season. They were boiled in the pod and dipped in melted butter, salt and pepper, then drawn through the teeth to extract the peas, just as edamame beans are still eaten in the Far East. According to Mayhew, street pie-sellers were ‘the most ancient of the street callings of London’.
The street menu included beef, mutton, kidney and eel pies, as well as sweet ones, such as rhubarb, gooseberry, cherry, apple, damson, cranberry, or traditional English ‘mince’ pies. For those with a sweet tooth there were also cakes and biscuits: you could choose from plum cake, currant, almond and lardy cakes, as well as tarts, gingerbread, Chelsea buns, sweets and ice cream – a new delicacy in Mayhew’s day. Drinks available on the city’s streets included tea, coffee, cocoa, ginger beer, lemonade, Persian sherbet, hot elder cordial or wine, peppermint water, curds and whey, as well as rice milk. In some of London’s parks there were cows and you could buy milk fresh from the udder. There were about five hundred sellers of muffins and crumpets on London’s streets during the winter. They were sold hot, ‘swatched in flannel, to retain the heat’. One vendor, a ‘sharp lad of fourteen’, tells Mayhew: ‘My best customers is genteel houses, ’cause I sells a genteel thing.
I likes wet days best, ’cause there’s werry respectable ladies what don’t keep a servant, and they buys to save themselves going out.’ A fried-fish seller (known as ‘Fishy’) told Mayhew he could make thirty shillings a week, which was ‘a good mechanic’s earnings’. The trade in ham sandwiches on London’s streets was still relatively recent and business was brisk. Mayhew estimated they sold 436,800 sandwiches a year. But it was a hard life. A young ham sandwichman, ‘his dress old and worn’, told Mayhew: ‘I am so sick of this life, sir. I do dread the winter so. I’ve stood up to the ankles in snow till after midnight and till I’ve wished I was snow myself, and could melt like it and have an end. I’d do anything to get away from this, but I can’t.’ From fast food to fine dining, today eating out is big business in modern cities. New York has more than twenty thousand restaurants.
Businessmen think nothing of paying $400 for a restaurant meal in Manhattan, but you can still buy a Yemeni hummus sandwich on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue for about $2. A city’s true wealth is its people and the rich cultural diversity they represent. There are more than 170 immigrant groups in New York and such a multicultural city has a very diverse palate. The waves of immigrants who have swept into this city for centuries have all contributed their own specialities to the metropolitan menu. The first Dutch settlers brought delicious sweet foods, including ‘olykoeks’ (oil cakes), sweet, deep-fried dough balls – the original doughnuts. They also loved biscuits and their ‘koekjes’ (little cakes) later became better known as ‘cookies’. From the earliest days, there were street vendors in Manhattan.
By the nineteenth century, peddlers (or ‘hucksters’) were selling such items as buns, clams, fish, gingerbread, oysters, soda, milk, knishes (a Yiddish baked or fried dumpling), sausages, peanuts, popcorn, pretzels, chestnuts, halvah, and arbis (hot chickpeas). Ice cream was advertised in New York as early as 1777 and became very popular during the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, New York’s streets were full of vendors competing with each other for customers. In 1873, a German immigrant named Auguste Ermisch included a ‘Hamburger Steak’ made from minced beef on the menu of his New York restaurant at Nassau and John Streets. This is the first known reference to the dish in America. By the 1890s it was being sold in buns by street vendors in cities up and down the land. There were also other convenient American sandwiches, including the po’boy and the hot dog.
The Frankfurter was invented in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in the seventeenth century, but it was Nathan Handwerker who put them in a bun and sold them from his ‘Nathan’s Hot Dogs’ stand on Coney Island in 1916. However, no fast food is more closely associated with America than the hamburger.
It’s an urban classic – a cheap and nourishing meal you could eat easily while hurrying along the sidewalk. It has spawned a multimillion-dollar global food industry. Today’s chains of fast food restaurants date from the 1920s. McDonald’s began in the 1940s, and by 1952 they were selling one million burgers and 145 tonnes of fries a year. Even France – the home of haute cuisine – has succumbed to the fast food trend. More than a million people a day now eat at McDonald’s in France. By 2007, it had a thousand branches and had become the second most profitable market for the US company in the world. Fast food businesses are now ubiquitous on city streets throughout the developed world: takeaway burger or pizza bars, ice-cream vans, hot-dog stalls, and – in New Orleans – sno-ball stands. In 1986 there were more than 140,000 different kinds of fast food restaurant in the United States alone, with McDonald’s taking 17 per cent of the eating-out market.

Today’s fast food chains may not be dogged by the hygiene issues that plague street food vendors, particularly in the developing world, but fast food – which fits so well with our hectic urban lifestyles – is now partly blamed for twenty-first-century medical conditions such as obesity and heart disease. The result of eating so much high-fat food can be seen both in our clogged arteries and our blocked urban infrastructure. In urban areas where there are large numbers of fast food businesses and restaurants, the sewers regularly become choked with congealed fat. Underneath London’s Leicester Square, a team of ‘flushers’ kitted out with breathing apparatus recently used shovels and high-pressure water hoses to clear an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat from the nineteenth-century sewer tunnels. One flusher said: ‘We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a four-foot wall of solid fat.’

From the book "City - A Guidebook for the Urban Age" by P.D. Smith, Bloomsbury, New York, U.S.A, 2012, excerpts from p.254-260. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.