Street Food OTOH
April 30, 2017 7:19 AM   Subscribe

Destroying a tradition of Asian street food? Maybe. In contrast to the post yesterday about the youtube channel on vibrant street food culture is this article about efforts to shoo cooking off the sidewalks.
posted by MovableBookLady (9 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
While I think there is a relevant news story in the midst of this article the sentences like "dilute the local flavor" just kind of seem like the typical Western food tourism complaints, if something is no longer "authentic" or adhering to our preconceived notions of how street food should be presented it's somehow risking abandoning the real, gritty, authenticity that seems to be a big attraction for western tourists and readers.

I'm sure that the economic damage to these street vendors is potentially significant but it seems like the author's bias is towards maintaining his preferred state rather than the sterility of Singapore for instance which is presented as the potential end state of a crackdown on street food.
posted by vuron at 7:31 AM on April 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


Previously
posted by stevil at 7:38 AM on April 30, 2017


I noticed this on our latest trip to Thailand and I think it's a shame. The street food was far superior in my mind to restaurant meals both in terms of flavour and price. I've never been sick because of street food, but I've definitely had food poisoning from restaurants. It could be down to the fact that the street vendor makes the foor in front of your eyes, whereas you mostly don't see the ingredients, where they are stored and how they are processed, in a restaurant.

The other dimension is the fact that street stalls are often old-age pensions for the ladies and gentlemen who cannot do much else. I don't know how the governments are going to address this thing.
posted by Laotic at 7:45 AM on April 30, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's a bit buried, but the author does make the point that this is harming both the earnings of street vendors and the people who depend on them for cheap meals during the day. Using imported ingredients jacks up the price considerably.

When this happens it's usually not just the consequence of good intentions to eradicate vermin or raise sanitary standards. In Taipei, at least a few neighborhood night markets have fallen victim to property developers laying claim to entire blocks to build expensive new high rises to attract wealthy international investors.
posted by tully_monster at 7:59 AM on April 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


Singapore's hawker centers are great. They also largely reside on the ground floor or "void deck" of HDB towers, so they serve an important community function.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:52 AM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


In the case of Hanoi, I think that this phenomenon is reflecting global societal changes, which in turn drive the need for rethinking urban organisation. I've been visiting the country since 2004 and I've seen the rise of a Hanoian middle-class that now lives in single-family apartment in high-rise buildings (rather than in multi-generational 3-floor tube houses where one could just hail a street vendor from a window and get food), owns and drives cars (rather than scooters), shops in malls and supermarkets, and orders food from their mobile phones. Street vendors used to be fundamental to the daily life of all Hanoians but that's no longer the case today. Important: this is from personal observations aka anecdata, not from sociological studies; for people interested in the subject, there are lots of papers about the topic, and notably about the resilience of street vendors. See Barthelemes 2016, Turner et Schoenberger 2010, Eidse et Turner 2014, Vorley 2016. But the Vietnamese society moves fast these days.
posted by elgilito at 9:51 AM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


Of course, the Eidse and Turner (2014) paper calls the qualitative method used in the other studies into question.

That a middle class has been developing in Hanoi for some time has undoubtedly had positive implications. But I still question whether Vietnamese society (or the societies of other cultures in the region) might be moving a little too fast and leaving people behind who don't show up in the social data for various reasons. One still needs to have easy, inexpensive access to a variety of quality foods on a regular basis, and centralizing street vending could have the unintended effect of creating food deserts similar, in certain ways, to those on the south side of Chicago.

And consider, too, that as standards of living rise, so do housing costs--and wages, as we well know, don't always follow suit, leaving less for food. (In Taipei it is apparently often more cost-effective to eat out than to prepare food at home--it certainly was for us, with our little poorly-equipped kitchen and with restaurants, food stalls, and pushcarts everywhere--a good, filling, relatively nutritionally balanced meal could easily be had for between USD $2 and $5--and possibly even less than $2).
posted by tully_monster at 3:24 PM on April 30, 2017


Astonished that cars receive only a passing and blameless mention in this article. Street carts are pretty easy to maneuver around. Massive luxury SUVs parked on the sidewalks (clogging up the streets, running through crosswalks...)? Not so much. There are certainly issues with pollutants from cookstoves and improper waste disposal, but these all could be addressed if the governments were actually interested.

In Cambodia, at least, large scale evictions of informal economy workers seem principally driven by dubious land sales to developers. Take Boeung Kak Lake as a poster child. Around 4,000 families evicted from around the 90 hectare lake after it the government signed a 99-year lease with a development firm cozy with a powerful senator. Development firm reneges on the "eco" master plan they presented and pumps the lake full of sand. Now the area floods with sewage on the regular.

I'm sure the Thai government would like to open up a few more Siam Paragons and CentralWorldPlazaBlablahs. Space is at a premium. Why not screw over those with the least say?
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 5:30 PM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


So, street food is cool and fun, but I don't really get the negative vibes towards Singapore's hawker centres the article is giving off. As a child of the 80s, they've always been communal places where everybody goes to and gets good food for cheap. The only thing "sanitary" about them is that they are relatively cleaner than a sidewalk; most hawker centres during busy days are a crowded cacophony of sights, sounds and smells. I don't get the feeling that the food culture here suffered much from the move to hawker centres.

I think there's nothing really wrong or bad with regulating street food vendors and centralizing them, if done properly. Singapore's hawker centres are one example, and the night markets of Taiwan probably also count. Rents can be controlled so hawkers keep their operating costs low, and thus prices as well. Cleaning and dishwashing can be consolidated, allowing for economies of scale.

A few years back there was a forum during the World Street Food Congress, and they had a discussion about the kind of issues discussed in the article. It turned out that (IIRC) while most of the Western participants preferred to keep street food on the sidewalk, a majority of the Asian participants preferred moving towards more purpose-built food areas. Part of the reason was hygiene, but part of it was also socioeconomic: as standards of living increase in the countries they were from, so do people's expectations and wants. If hawkers don't move with the times and provide better eating environments, they might end up being pushed to the wayside and ultimately disappearing.

Food courts though.... those suck.
posted by destrius at 9:48 PM on May 1, 2017


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