Throughout the developing world, street foods represent long-established traditions that are part of complex trade networks. The ways in which street foods are culturally constructed and circulated in different societies embody both enormous variety and similarities that bear on available ingredients, technology, structures of cuisine, consumption patterns, and, of course, borrowing. In the past, more street foods were available in developing countries, including in touristic areas. Exceptions to this general pattern include such places as highly developed Hong Kong, which continues a strong tradition of outdoor foods, and other cities whose immigrant populations use these foods as a vehicle to forge identity in the diaspora. In recent decades, globalization has come to result in exchanges of ‘‘ethnic’’ foods that become readily available in Western and developing-world urban centers. Conventional wisdom argued that when societies reach a level of economic development that coheres around large-scale commercial exchange, ‘‘small-scale vending . . . decline[s]
spontaneously’’ (Matalas and Yannakoulia 2000:1). However, in the mod-ern era, worldwide, accelerated migration from rural to urban areas is accompanied by an increased trade in street foods as lifestyle adjustments embrace abbreviated meals and mobile consumption. Expendable in-comes and growing curiosity about food are contributing factors.
The Agorae of Greece
When public foods made their appearance in Greece in the sixth century BCE, the only one sold in agorae, or marketplaces, was lentil soup (Lens culinaris Medikus, Fabaceae), which was consumed on-site because
ambulant eating was not acceptable. During the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries, mobile ‘‘round about professionals’’ offered koulouri, a small ring-shaped barley bread; boyatsa, custard pie; chalvas, honey cake; baked carrots; and coffee. The diversity of street foods expanded over the next two centuries and today includes variations on koulouri;
boureki, meat pie; kefte, fried meatball; tzieri, fried liver; kebab and souv-laki, grilled skewered meat; gyros, sliced pork or beef; strayalia, chickpea;
pilav, rice; pastelli, sesame dessert; and karythato, walnut cake (Juglans regia L., Juglandaceae). Hot beverages include salepi, prepared with the boiled root of the purple orchid (Orchis mascula L., Orchidaceae). New World domesticates were not integrated into Greek street foods until the twentieth century. Sunflower seed, tomato, and groundnut (Arachis hypo-gaea L., Fabaceae) also were incorporated into domestic and restaurant cuisines, but the fire-roasted cob prepared by street vendors is the only way that maize has been used until very recently, having been cultivated primarily as animal feed (Matalas and Yannakoulia 2000).
Greek street foods are inexpensive and high in calories and are com-monly sold at sporting events, train stations, and wherever else there is substantial foot and vehicular traffic. In the past, the consumption of core street foods such as koulouri, boureki, and gyros corresponded to people’s daily activity patterns, meeting expectations for the availability of cer-tain items at particular times of day. Today, that regularity has eroded (Kochilas 2001), inviting speculation about how the meanings of food and cuisine might have shifted.
Greek street foods lack social function and prestige: people repre-senting a full spectrum of demographic and economic circumstances consume a broad spectrum of products, from the simple kollyrio, or roasted maize kernels, to elaborate pita-wrapped souvlaki. However, to-day’s health regulations have both classed and gendered the sale of street foods. The licensing of vendors privileges low-income and otherwise dis-advantaged individuals, for example, those who are physically handi-capped or support large families. In contrast with the developing world, where women play a prominent role in the preparation and vending of street foods, Greek vendors are predominantly men, an artifact of regula-tions enforced in the 1980s that prohibit selling foods prepared in the home, the realm of women (Matalas and Yannakoulia 2000).
The Sidewalks of New York
Unlike the traditional vending of Greek and many other street foods, New York City practices were historically gendered and classed, as well as nuanced by ethnicity: street trade was the domain of the lower class, primarily men, as both consumers and vendors.∞ This hierarchy reflects that many of the vendors were immigrants whose language and other skills precluded some forms of employment and whose social mobility was further restricted by the city’s dominant culture. In the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants tended to segregate themselves into neighborhoods, where pushcart-vended foods provided some economic security at the same time that they served as short-radius, but ambulant, sites for cultural identity.
Throughout its history, the regulation of New York City street vending has been controversial; today, it embodies some of the most restrictive local laws in the United States. Seventeenth-century ordinances curtailed street vending to prevent competition with markets and restaurants and to reduce congestion. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, com-mercial trade expanded, drawing middle- and upper-class consumers into enclosed specialty shops, further sharpening class differences in street food vending and consumption. In the 1930s, in advance of the 1939 World’s Fair, the city imposed additional restrictions on street vending, which declined significantly over the next few decades.
New York’s first street foods represented the cultures of early immi-grant communities of the time, predominantly from Italy, Ireland, Ger-many, and Russia. Today, the pushcart is once again a prominent signa-ture of the city, with an estimated ten thousand vendors of food and merchandise (Baker 2005). The growing heterogeneity of the city is re-flected in today’s most popular street foods: pizza, bratwurst, egg roll, gyro, burrito, Navajo fry bread, Indian samosa, and many more. As the variety of street foods expands, their consumption is no longer demo-graphically scaffolded, although their vending still is the domain of indi-viduals with limited economic resources.
In aggregate, the diversity of public foods fuels New Yorkers’ self image as a ‘‘melting pot,’’ a term coined in the early twentieth century for the high-density, Lower East Side immigrant neighborhoods. Today, this
metaphor is invoked across the U.S. mainland as a celebration of blend-ing across ethnic heterogeneity and resonates in other, primarily coastal, metropolitan centers such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Chicago. Across the country, confluence emerges from dishes such as New England clams with Chinese sausage, Virginia wild duck with basmati rice, and Bavarian lumpia. But the melting pot metaphor more appropriately applies to fusion cuisines proper (see chapter 1, section on Slow Food movement), foodways that deliberately combine components from two or more temporally or spatially discrete cuisines into new, per-haps temporary, normative structures. Similarly, the burgeoning world-wide trend since the 1970s for innovative restaurant cuisines includes variations on Western and pan-Asian or Pacific Rim fusions that do not simply hybridize or homogenize tastes but coalesce into a unique mix not only of ingredients and seasonings but also of presentation styles and restaurant decor. One could argue that, unlike restaurant fusions, many of the street foods of New York and elsewhere still mark discrete, parallel lines of identity. Even suggested substitute terms for melting pot—quilt, mosaic, and jigsaw puzzle—do not capture the identity-forging role of culture-specific public foods.
Alimentos de la Calle
Most of Mexico’s urban street foods are based on the tortilla, a thin unleavened bread made from finely ground maize cured with lime (cal-cium hydroxide). In Mexico City alone, more than 30 million tortillas are sold each day (Muñoz de Chávez et al. 2000), their consumption bridging class, gender, and other demographics. Tortillas are folded or rolled into tacos or other forms that vary in size and presentation: tamales are cooked in maize husks or banana leaves, quesadillas are made with thicker tor-tillas, flautas are fried and rolled. Fillings include meats, vegetables, flow-ers, mushrooms, nopal cactus (Opuntia spp., Cactaceae), avocado (Per-sea americana Miller, Lauraceae), and chile pepper. Regional street foods reflect different ecologies and ethnicities: beef production in the north and the availability of seafoods along the coasts color the availability of street foods. Vendors on the streets of Mexico City sell esquites, or maize kernels cooked with epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides L., Chenopo-diaceae), chile, and lime (Citrus aurantifolia Swingle, Rutaceae). All
over Mexico, fresh fruit and fruit cocktails include mango (Mangifera indica L., Anacardiaceae), pineapple, watermelon (Citrullus lanatus Matsum. & Nakai, Cucurbitaceae), and cucumber. Crystallized fruit and aguas frescas (fruit beverages) also are popular (Muñoz de Chávez et al.
2000; Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). At least two hundred insect species are eaten in Mexico, many of them as street foods. In the diaspora—in such cities as Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles—and in the transformed landscapes of Mexican resort towns, people enjoy street foods that appeal to their ethnic identity, including insectos de la patria (DeFoliart 1997).
Interesting transpositions that grew out of colonial experiences include, in Pachuca, the sweet or savory paste named after the Cornish pasty, a baked meat- and vegetable-filled pastry introduced to Mexico by English mining engineers. Another English introduction in northern Mexico is ginyabre, or gingerbread cookie (Muñoz de Chávez et al. 2000).