Political scientist Irene Tinker is known in academic circles as the doyenne of street-food studies. In 1997, she published the seminal Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press), the result of 15 years of research in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, Egypt, Senegal, and Nigeria. Professor Tinker continues to actively monitor trends in the field; for gourmet.com’s Street-Food Week she spoke with research chief Marisa Robertson-Textor about the symbiotic relationship of urbanization and street food, gender dynamics in food preparation and purchase, and some of the hazards—and joys—of the trade for vendor and consumer alike.
Marisa Robertson-Textor: How did you first become interested in street food?
Irene Tinker: In the late 1970s, I was running the Equity Policy Center (EPOC) in Washington, D.C., which focused on women’s issues in developing countries. At the time, there was a great deal of attention being paid to helping women in these countries make money by teaching them to sew and knit. That could get pretty silly when projects were set up in countries where men traditionally do all the sewing. But even when these programs were successful, like in Kenya, the women making the goods—in this case, bags—were earning about 5 cents an hour. So I decided I wanted to study an enterprise where I knew women were actually making money. I had spent three years living in Indonesia, another three in India, lots of time in Africa—and in all these places, women were selling food on the streets.
MRT: I understand you were actually responsible for coining the term street food?
IT: Yes. At the time, street food was thought of as snack food, and people were asking me why on earth I wanted to study snacks. But I had eaten food on the street, and what I’d seen, and eaten, was far more than just snacks. We’re talking about lunch, breakfast, a light dinner—food. Hence, street food. And while we were interested primarily in how women were using street food to earn a living, you don’t know what the women are doing if you don’t know what the men are doing, and there are children involved, too. So we studied everyone.
MRT: Why wasn’t street food considered a topic worth researching?
IT: Well, at that time, women- and family-run enterprises hadn’t been studied by anyone. And selling food was definitely a family strategy, meaning it was a mechanism for helping people survive and support themselves and their dependents. The thinking in the academic community back then was that small-scale efforts like these were inefficient and backward, and since, to paraphrase Marx, they were part of the informal sector, they would disappear as modernization took hold.
MRT: But the decline of street food never took place?
IT: No. In fact, street food has become increasingly important with expanding urbanization. In 1900, only one out of eight people worldwide lived in a city. By 2000, the figure was one in two. And about 20 percent of the world’s citizens currently live in megacities, which are defined as agglomerations, or metropolitan areas, of over 4 million people: places like São Paolo, Lagos, Dhaka. So the expansion of street foods is directly related to urbanization, because it’s very clear that when you begin to have more people in any place, even if they’re working just a short distance from home, they can’t go home for lunch. There’s also increasing pressure in urban areas to educate children, who also can’t go home for lunch. In fact, over a third of the customers we studied were children, who would eat on their way to school.
MRT: How else has urbanization affected street food—and vice versa?
IT: People are adjusting to a whole new food system. In Indonesia, schools have ended up vetting a few vendors and letting them into the schoolyard, so kids can eat on the premises. In the Philippines and Thailand, school cafeterias have bought food from vendors and sold it inside. In Bangkok, at least two universities have hired vendors to come in and cook for students on the premises.
Street food has also affected meals in the home. When a cuisine requires many courses, like, say, Indian or Thai cooking, you’ll find that a lot of women will buy street food, take it home, and serve it to their families, because no one who works has time to prepare that kind of complicated meal. In addition, in Thailand, where 23 percent of new apartment houses don’t have kitchens, some 18 percent of people we interviewed never cook at all. There’s an electrical outlet for a rice cooker, and you can also steam fish in the cooker, but presumably everything else is bought on the street and taken home. It’s interesting to contrast this to the whole supermarket concept, which is full of hidden costs and really very unsustainable in comparison.
MRT: So street food is providing an important service?
IT: The question is, who eats this food, and who needs it? Street food is the fast food of developing countries—it serves the same kind of need for inexpensive, available food. It also provides a service for people who can’t afford the time or money—and the hard-working poor have little of either—for a big sit-down meal. There’s a word in Tagalog, merienda—it translates as “all-day snacking”—in other words, eating a bit whenever you have time or money. And by the way, according to the medical establishment, that’s not a bad approach.
MRT: Back to women and food preparation: You’ve found that female vendors dominate the trade in Nigeria and Thailand, but in Bangladesh it’s all men. Why?
IT: It’s a question of expectations. Basically, when there’s a cultural expectation that women will contribute a lot to household income, they’re often the main breadwinners in the family. In Southeast Asia, higher status is afforded to the monarchy, the bureaucracy, and the military, and trading is low on the social scale. So women run many commercial concerns. In Nigeria, which is highly polygamous, you have the phenomenon of separate budgets. Women still do almost all of the agriculture, therefore women are valuable, and therefore they’re purchased with a bride price, which buys their labor and their fertility. You buy a wife if you have a farm, and the more women you buy, the more you can farm. And if a woman happens to be barren, then she has an excess of production because she doesn’t have to use her crops to feed her children, and she herself is in a position to buy a wife. Often, older wives are able to go out and become street vendors because they get the younger wives to stay home with all the children.
Bangladesh, unlike Nigeria, is a conservative Muslim society, which has something to do with why men are the vendors. But I should add that even though the men are selling the food, we discovered that much of this food was actually made at home by women, so unpaid female labor accounted for over a third of the average enterprise. Which raises interesting questions—is all of this still considered street food? Some of these terms are fungible: The food made to sell on the street is made at home, and sometimes people who make food at home have it packaged and served at other venues, so home-based work for women and street-food vending become almost exchangeable in a certain sense.
MRT: It’s interesting to think about this here in New York, where the street-food scene, like the restaurant business in general, is remarkably male-dominated. Last year, our web contributor Laura Shapiro wrote a thought-provoking article comparing the culinary scene in New York to that in the Bay Area, where female chefs and street-food vendors have a much greater presence. This is also true of Portland, Oregon, where you live. What are some of the cultural factors at play here?
IT: We once considered trying to secure funding to study street food in New York, but our original thinking was, these are mean streets, there’s probably a mafia presence here, a lot of nastiness. But as for gender, perhaps women are more involved than it might seem. First of all, do street vendors tend to prepare everything right there, or is some of the food prepped and brought in? If we were conducting a study of New York City, that’s the sort of question we would start with: Where are your ingredients from? You might find that there’s a hidden component of female labor there. And also: Where do the carts go at night—are they kept in garages? In some countries and cities, you have to put your cart away at night, meaning that your spot has been vacated, and if anyone takes it, you’re in for a fight. Isn’t that how it is in New York? But in Portland, most street vendors have permanent locations—they don’t move.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember reading a study on the role of sunshine and shadow as it affects the use of plazas in the street-food trade. This was down in the Wall Street area, where you have all those tall buildings, and the researchers found that light plays a crucial role in the success of a business. They also found that when there’s a place nearby for people to sit in the sunshine, even just a low wall to perch on, it’s much more likely that a vibrant street-food community will develop.
MRT: Speaking of the vibrancy and allure of street food, let’s talk about one of the greatest dilemmas for tourists from the first world when traveling: Do you indulge in that wonderful street food and risk illness, or do you play it safe and boring by avoiding it altogether? Do you have any tips for how to negotiate this?
IT: During all our studies, our researchers, who were by and large locals, only got sick twice. One had eaten ceviche—which, as you know, is raw fish that’s only been vinegar-cooked—in the Philippines. The other had eaten oysters in Senegal, and of course oysters love to cluster beneath a sewer outtake. Either of these things could have occurred anywhere. And I should mention a study done in Pune, in the state of Maharashtra, India, where local researchers found a higher incidence of food-related illness from small restaurants than from street food, because in restaurants the bugs stay in one place, while vendors move their carts around.
That said, the single most important problem here is water, for washing pots, pans, and hands. In places like Senegal and Nigeria, locals will bring their own bowls and spoons to the vendors—they’ll never risk using the vendors’ utensils. In Bogor, Indonesia, I’ve seen vendors take a pailful of water from the canal and float a banana leaf on top to disguise how dirty it is, then rinse their plates in that water. Eating from one of those plates would not be a good idea. But if you were to eat that same food off a skewer, a banana leaf, or a napkin, it would be perfectly safe.
Another concern involves preparation method. Most vendors sell traditional food made in traditional ways, so most of the people eating the food are accustomed to it and have no trouble. But people not used to eating lower-level-safety food—tourists—will get sick. Until consumers in country begin to demand cleaner street food, that won’t change. It takes consumers’ unions and people yelling and creating a fuss to make things safer.
MRT: So much for consumer health and safety. What about the vendors themselves—what sorts of occupational hazards do they face?
IT: The biggest hazard is the government, especially in capital cities, which tend to take the view that in order to look good and modernize, you have to get rid of street-food vendors. Most vendors have to have at least two permits, one to own and use the cart and the other from the health department. And it often costs a whole day’s wages to get a health inspection, so very few people have all the right kinds of permits. And then of course in many places there’s the question of baksheesh, or palm-greasing, which some vendors told us about, although we never asked policemen directly as to whether they were on the take.
But back to these city-wide “clean-up” efforts: At first, international institutions such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization supported them—they’d go around to newly set up departments of health in, say, Cairo and tell them to get rid of street food carts because they were dirty. But after I told the FAO about our research, they did a 180-degree turnaround and started working with vendors, training them, and in many cases helping to organize them—they recognized that this was a better away to pass along ideas about health and safety.
MRT: Having spent so many years studying street food and the people who sell it around the world, what sorts of cross-cultural conclusions can you can draw?
IT: First of all, in most countries, people selling street food are doing so as just one of several family survival mechanisms. You receive unpaid labor from your family members, and you’re able to feed them on leftovers, which wouldn’t keep anyway due to lack of refrigeration.
Second, sooner or later street vendors tend to funnel their profits into something more stable. You don’t want to be consuming your assets all the time, so once you’ve accumulated a little money you buy some form of transport and, say, become a supplier to other street-food vendors, or you open a little dry-goods shop.
Third, it’s not that easy to become a vendor. The very poor don’t tend to be able to do it—they don’t have the skills—and people coming from rural areas don’t necessarily have what it takes to be entrepreneurs, any more than women automatically know how to sew. It takes a fair amount of skill to learn how to prepare food, and it takes capital to open a business. That said, most street vendors absolutely do not want to owe money. They don’t want to borrow from outsiders. The lesson there for microfinance is that the most important way to support street vendors is to ensure that poor people have access to cheap credit. If a moneylender charges you—and this is a conservative estimate—36 percent per month, but you’re able to borrow elsewhere for your household needs at 16 percent per year, well, your family income has already gone up whether the business is successful or not.
And by the way, if you want to support street vendors through lending or microfinance, put your money in the hands of women. They’ll spend it on their children, ensuring that they have good nutrition and go to school.
MRT: Any final thoughts?
IT: Just one. Any time you speak to vendors anywhere in the world, you’ll find that they’re very concerned with good health care, because if you get sick, you can’t sell every day, and boom, your enterprise is gone. So anytime street food vendors organize, you’ll find that health care is at the top of their list—and that’s very interesting in light of the current debate here in the United States.