Street Food

Street Food in a given place, is often far more interesting than restaurant food. Generally speaking, wherever it is found it will be likely to represent well-established local traditions; and in some places a tour of hawkers’ stalls may be the quickest and most agreeable method of getting the feel of local foods.

Among the factors which seem to determine how numerous and diverse street foods are in this or that country, one is clearly climate—a temperate or warm climate makes these operations much easier and also produces a larger number of passers-by who are not intent on getting to somewhere out of the cold. It might be thought that economic development would militate against street food, and certainly the rich subculture of street hawkers and vendors described by Henry Mayhew in his account of the London poor in the 1850s did not continue in the face of the growth of the retail trade and other manifestations of a modern economy. But in fact, street food did not so much disappear in these circumstances as change. The hawker took on a motorized van, the street vendor moved indoors and developed a take-away trade.