Agriculture and Human Values16: 327–333, 1999.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS

Street foods into the 21st century

Irene Tinker2759 NW Pettygrove Street, Portland, Oregon, USA

Accepted in revised form January 10, 1999

Irene Tinker , professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley, publishedStreet Foods: Urban Foodand Employment in Developing Countries,Oxford University Press, in 1997. Her co-edited book onWomen’sRights to House and Land: China, Laos, Vietnamwill be published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in August1999. A selection of her most influential articles on women in development, set into historical context, is nearingcompletion. Her current research focuses on the rapidly changing roles and expectations of nongovernmentalorganizations worldwide.

The critical importance of the contemporary streetfood trade has been amply documented in my bookStreet Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Devel-oping Countries. Year long studies, conducted bythe Equity Policy Center (EPOC) in cooperation withlocal research terms, in seven provincial towns in thePhilippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Egypt,Nigeria, and Senegal were supplement by additionalresearch conducted in India, Jamaica, and the UnitedStates. Findings document the high demand for thesefast foods of lower income countries: nearly half thetotal household food budget was spent on street foodsin the cities studied in Thailand and Nigeria and overa quarter in the Philippines and Indonesia. Data fromEgypt suggest that nearly a third of all inhabitants ofthe mid-sized town in Upper Egypt studied consumestreet foods during a year. While these totals do notapproach the estimated 82% of all Americans who eatat least once a year at a fast food establishment andspend 36% of the family food budget on meals andsnacks outside the house (National Restaurant Asso-ciation, 1983), consumption of street foods contributessignificantly to the diet of urban dwellers in thesecountries.

The smaller and poorer the family, the higher per-centage of their food budget was spent on street foods,a fact crucial to understanding nutritional status inthe countries. Street foods are fast, convenient, andcheap. For the often undernourished urban poor, fre-quent snacking or grazing helps them maintain theirenergy levels throughout the day. Mashed street foodsare also fed to babies. Efforts to improve the valuesof these foods through additives have been tried inboth the Philippines and Indonesia. Successful inter-ventions, such as a legume added to cassava cookiesor vitamin enhanced fish balls, result from culturally

appropriate changes that do not increase the cost of theitem. Dorothy Blair has listed several ways to increasethe value of food eaten by promoting consumption ofvitamin-rich foods such as papaya and mango.

The street food trade provides significant employ-ment, both directly and indirectly. Indeed, the sheersize of the total labor force involved in the actualfood vending is staggering. Our studies found that theaverage number of persons working in each enterprisewas 1.5 to 2 in Indonesia and Bangladesh, and 2.9in the Philippines. Given city size and potential laborforce participation, these findings indicate that 26% ofthe labor force in the Indonesian city studied workeddirectly in street food vending! In the Philippines, thefigure was 15%, and in the smaller more agriculturaltowns studied in Senegal or Bangladesh, 6% of thelabor force was so employed. Crucial is the involve-ment of women in all these countries, even where theculture inhibits women’s activities in public.

But selling to the customer is only the visiblepart of the street food trade. An intricate network oftraders, processors, and producers was evident in mostcountries. Often the vendors did all these activities inaddition to selling. Elsewhere roles were more special-ized such as the rural Indonesian women whose sweetrice delicacies, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed,are a feature throughout the country. When all thesemany suppliers of raw and processed foods plus thecarpenters who make the carts or stalls and the unpaidfamily help at home are added to the totals, the streetfood trade looms large in the local economy.

The immense variety of foods sold and of relation-ships among the vendors and their suppliers makesgeneralizations about the trade problematic except tounderscore its importance for feeding and employingurban residents today.

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Is this a transitory sector? The rapid socio-economic transformation taking place around theworld today raises issues about the future of thisactivity under the impact of globalization. Is there aniche for street foods in the emerging technologicalera? Will the nutritional values of these foods andtheir safety increase or decrease as a result of inter-national exposure? Can these microenterprises survivethe flow of manufactured prepared foods much lessprovide a pathway out of poverty for urban poor?These questions were raised in the panel discussion atthe 1998 Joint Annual Meeting of the Association forthe Study of Food and Society and The Agriculture,Food and Human Values Society in San Francisco inJune, 1998. This article presents possible future scen-arios and suggests new research needed to respond tothese issues.

Globalization and street foods

The term “globalization” has many definitions andnuances. Here I use it to mean the development of aglobal economy that impacts on and privileges tradeamong countries and so affects prices of energy, food,and manufactured goods everywhere. Today, the totalworld food supply can more easily affect both thetypes and costs of food available in the market thanpreviously when trade was more constricted. Ourstudies found that certain industrially produced goodshad already begun to replace home made victuals inthe 1980s. Centralized preparation was also evidentfor many foods: bakeries distributed bread throughvendors who sold goods on commission; candieswere wrapped and sold to vendors through middle-men. Pervasive television programs increasingly influ-ence dietary practices, providing a cachet to expen-sive imported foodstuffs. Delivery of these goodsthrough supermarkets undercuts the interdependentrelationships of small food producers, provisioners,and vendors. Can street food vendors survive suchonslaught?

Food surpluses in the US or Europe can translateinto subsidized food aid that alters prices in the localmarkets. The chapter on Senegal shows how importedsubsidized rice affected the way a millet-based break-fast porridge was made and priced. Cheap rice resultedin a disincentive for farmers to raise millet even thoughthat grain is much more adaptive to local climateand soils. Food vendors mixed increasing amounts ofcheap rice with the expensive millet in a reversal of realcosts on an open market. The elimination of impor-ted subsidized foods brought to end an experimentin Indonesia where local nutritionists added importedsoy flour to cassava chips to enhance their nutritional

value; costs of using local soy flour priced the chipstoo high.

Trade also affects microenterprises as modes ofwork and retailing shift. Will fast food restaurantsreplace the street vendors? Thus far the foreign fastfood establishments are patronized primarily by themiddle class in the countries studied; the disparities ofincome provide a ready market for street foods. Yet thebetter off also eat street foods for the convenience andbecause they serve more traditional fare. Indoor foodmalls that feature street-type foods in a more formalsetting are found in Singapore, Bangkok, and Manila;again food costs limit the type of customers. Even if ademand for street foods continues, what is the futureof the vendors and their families?

Current economic paradigms feature growth as anessential attribute defining entrepreneurship. In con-trast, street food vendors did not attempt to increasethe size of their street vending business; rather vendorfamilies manage the activity as they might a farm withthe many tasks providing a livelihood for extendedfamily members. Economists dismiss this approachas traditional or pre-entrepreneurial. In reality, thisworldview, held by men and well as women, is basedon fundamentally different values – family over indi-vidual, cooperation over competition, and altruismover selfishness – than those held by liberal econom-ists.

Practical reasons restrict the growth of success-ful enterprises such as the lack of refrigeration andthe perishable nature of their products, since thetropical heat and lack of refrigeration precludes stor-ing most foods for later sale. A few vendors domake more food than they can sell directly to cus-tomers and provide their distinctive foods to otherretailers or wholesalers, for cash or on consignment.If demand for a food at one enterprise is extremelybrisk, vendors may spin off identical operations ratherlike amoeba, to sell in different parts of town. Othervendors move out of direct food selling by purchas-ing a truck to fetch produce from rural areas orgradually switching into non-perishable items. Whenthey could afford it, vendors invested in alternativeincome sources such as land in their home village ora house with rooms to rent. Virtually every vendorfamily paid school fees to ensure their children’seducation.

Success of these enterprises cannot, therefore,be defined in simplistic economic growth termino-logy; rather they constitute part of the family sur-vival strategy. Everywhere, street food vending is afamily operation: couples work together in Asia andEgypt while African enterprises utilize relatives of thesame gender. Profits are used for family survival andadvancement, not for the individual person or enter-

STREET FOODS INTO THE21ST CENTURY 329

prise. Will this more humane value system survive inthe market economy?

The following sections review the salient pointsin these debates. Definitive answers are not pos-sible, not only because projections are an inexactscience, but because the necessary research uponwhich to base such projects has yet to be conceptu-alized. The first section on feeding the city amplifiesthe complexities of providing food for the burgeon-ing urbanized population by introducing energy flows,catering, and urban agriculture to the more familiarsupermarket model and the street food patterns. Thesecond section addresses the persistent debate aboutexploitation versus opportunity regarding microenter-prise, then considers issues around efficiency andservice. The current discussion about whether micro-credit assists the poor to move beyond poverty ormires them at the bottom of society offers instruc-tive insights to the street food issues. The recentfracas in New York City over street food vendorsillustrates the continued demand for this service inpost industrial countries, while the re-emergence ofstreet foods in Hanoi emphasizes the latent demandin communist countries. I conclude that street foodswill flourish in the twenty-first century, adjusting thefoods to suit new palates and higher customer stand-ards for safe handling. Vending food will continueas a major survival strategy, especially for womenwith children at home, while profits for the moreentrepreneurial will propel them into a higher incomecategory.

Feeding the cities today and tomorrow

The twenty-first century will be the first urban cen-tury in history! At the beginning of 1900 only oneperson in eight lived in cities or towns, today one oftwo is an urbanite. Of these three billion people, two-thirds live in lower income countries. Overall, 20%of the world’s population inhabit megacities contain-ing over 4 million people. Figures published by theUN Centre for Human Settlements in 1996 project thatby the year 2015, no cities in the United States orEurope will be included among the top ten in size.Tokyo will maintain its first place with 28.7 milliononly by encompassing the entire urban area includingYokahama. Mexico City, long vying for the top list-ing, will grow to 18.8 million, but drop to tenth placeas exploding population growth places the followingcities higher on the list: 2 – Bombay, 3 – Lagos; 4 –Shanghai; 5 – Jakarta; 6 – Sao Paulo; 7 – Karachi; 8 –Beijing; 9 – Dhaka.

The rapidity of growth has created chaotic condi-tions in most of these cities. Squatter houses climb

steep hills, only to wash down in mudslides causedby torrential rains as recently happened in Honduras.Other houses are jammed into swampy areas or oldgranite pits where formal housing is prohibited by zon-ing. People crowd into slum buildings, further deteri-orating the structures. Dormitories built for singleworkers in Cape Town now overflow with families. Inexploding Bangkok, 23% of the current housing stockconsists of single rooms without kitchen facilities, acircumstance that encourages street food consumption.Transportation systems struggle to keep up with cityexpansion as the newly rich clog the streets with auto-mobiles. Pollution is pervasive, from exhaust, fromtraditional methods of cooking, from industry, frominversion. Potable water is in short supply; sewagehardly exists for the majority of residents who tendto live in informal housing. According to a 1990 sur-vey of the world’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, foodcosts exceeded 50% of household incomes in 23 cities,the highest being Ho Chi Minh City (80%), Lima(70%), and Lagos (58%).1 The survey emphasized thatthe poorer the family the higher percentage of theirincome goes toward food (Population Crisis Com-mittee, 1990). The EPOC studies of food expendituresfound similar rates, with figures ranging from 51%of household income in the Philippines to 74% inSenegal. Our Thai study found that the lowest incomequartile spent 65% of income on food versus 44%among the highest; in the Philippines the contrast waseven sharper, where the poorest quartile spent 77% andwhile the wealthiest spent only 40% of their income onfood.

These figures do not tell us how people accessthe food they prepare or eat ready made. But theEPOC studies indicate that traditional central mar-kets are often being moved to the periphery as landprices soar, as in Jakarta. Elsewhere, the increasingnumber of sellers of all sorts of goods and food havespilled into aisles and nearby streets making shoppingextremely difficult, as in Lagos. Time spent by streetfood vendors to buy ingredients show why manycustomers prefer to buy their meals already prepared.Nor do the modern supermarkets in glittering newshopping malls provide food for more than the eliteand expatriate communities.

Yet, current planning for feeding the cities tendsto rely on old answers for lack of better informationabout how people are in fact feeding themselves today.Planners consider that the urban poor in Washing-ton, DC, only pay 10% of their income for food andconclude that our system is the most efficient. Sub-sidies for our transportation system and for agricultureare not factored into costs; energy consumption forprocessing, canning, freezing, packaging, and wastedisposal are not included in economic estimates. Nor

330 IRENE TINKER

is the pollution effect of energy use considered. Whenreal costs of the supermarket approach are detailed,alternative systems for supplying foods to cook or toeat become more attractive (Tinker, 1998b).

The Street Food study clearly documents theimportance of indigenous fast foods; but because thefocus was on food sold in the street, the entire sec-tor of catered food remained invisible. We observed,but did not study, the many women preparing mealsdirectly for customers; working women in Bangkoktake home food in tiffin boxes; in Bombay textileworkers eat daily meals at the nearby modest homes;office workers in Jakarta place orders a day ahead formeals to be brought to their desks; lunch is catered oncontract in women’s homes for workers in congestedLatin American cities. Largely unnoticed and unstud-ied, these “invisible street foods” constitute anotherpart of the informal prepared food systems alreadywell established in major urban centers.

Urban areas conjure up visions of continuouslybuilt environment. In fact most cities, even in highlyindustrialized countries, have open spaces not desig-nated as parks or squares, where food can, and often is,grown. Community gardens on empty lots are a featurein urban areas in the US and Europe. The amount of,and need for, urban agriculture is growing in lowerincome countries around the world. Perceived by theelite as an unfortunate and unsightly hold-over of ruralpractices, many municipalities retain colonial laws thatprohibit the growing of crops or the raising of animals;fruit trees and fish ponds are less often regulated. Des-pite the prevailing view of many planners that greenspaces along rights of ways, in parks, or in front ofresidences should be reserved for trees and flowers,urban dwellers plant food crops and fruit trees, raisegoats, cows, poultry, fish, bees, rabbits, snakes, andguinea pigs in urban and peri-urban spaces (Drakakis-Smith, 1995; Tinker, 1992; Urban Resource Systems,1986).

Obviously, home grown and raised food reducesfood expenditures and improves nutrition (Gabany,1995). Equally important, food production can be apotent source of income. As much as seventy percentof all poultry eaten in Kampala, Uganda, is raised inthe city. Asian farmers long ago perfected ways to raisefish commercially in urban ponds. Women in urbanEgypt have for decades sold butter and cheese madefrom milk drawn from cattle stabled in their homes.River beds and vacant lots are filled with vegetablesin most cities. In Africa, observers note the greeningof cities as marketing systems falter and food pricessoar as a result of economic failure or civil unrest(Mougeot, 1994).

Recognizing the importance of urban food pro-duction to family survival, many nongovernmental

organizations have initiated such projects for the urbanpoor (Smit, 1996). Women figure significantly in theseactivities, especially in Africa where women are cul-turally responsible for feeding their children. UNICEFfound that in Kampala, urban farming was associ-ated with better long-term food security and nutritionalstatus of children, particularly in the lower incomegroups that make up some 80% of the city’s popu-lation. Further, urban farming constituted the largestsingle non-market source of food for Kampala’s urbanpopulation.

In sum, research needed to provide planners witha clearer picture of contemporary feeding patterns inthe city would detail the existing food delivery systemsand their costs in terms of energy and pollution, wouldexplore the economics and energy impact of urbanfood production, would investigate the many mechan-isms for the distribution of prepared food, and finallywould weigh the nutritional implications of the variouschoices.

Street foods, microenterprise, and a shrinkingglobe

The Street Food study clearly established that incomefrom these microenterprises provided significant fin-ancial resources to both male and female vendors thatplaces them well above the poverty line. Data frommost countries show that the more successful the enter-prise, the more the family concentrated on vending;thus the poorer families were likely to have morealternative sources of income. For example, in thesmall Bangladesh city studied, vending was the soleincome for only 47% of the families, but the primaryincome in 67%. In India, over half the vendors in thelowest income categories supplied less that 40% offamily income while the 21% of the most profitablevendors supplied 100% of family income.

In some countries, vendors combined trade withfarming. In Bangladesh 53% of the vendors derivedtheir sole income from street food; for 29% it is themain source of income but supplemented by agricul-tural produce and for 18% vending income is lessthan that from farming. In Nigeria, 7% of the vendorsalso farmed. In Senegal, the poorer women returnedseasonally to rice farming as they could not earnenough from vending to pay for their families’ totalrice requirements.

Income derived is essential to household survival.In Senegal, 59% of the women vendors were the solesupport of their families, which had an average size of9.5 people, usually including three adults. In Egypt,55% of the women vendors provided the main sourceof income for their families; men did so 70% of the

STREET FOODS INTO THE21ST CENTURY 331

time. 20% of Thai women vendors provided primarysupport for their families while another 21% of thewomen vendors, who were unmarried, contribute totheir families’ income. The women of Nigeria saidthey never shared their incomes with husbands, a factpartially explained by that fact that over half of themarriages were polygamous. Further, most womensupported a large number of children, her own andthose of kin: the modal family size was 5–7 children.These facts are critical both to improve a woman’shousehold bargaining position within the family and toenhance the nutritional status of her children: researchhas established the fact that women’s income is morelikely than men’s to be spent on food for the family(Beneria and Roldan, 1987; Engle, 1995; Kennedyand Peters, 1992; Amartya Sen, 1990; Senauer,1990).

Women’s role in street foods and other microenter-prises emphasizes the family orientation of the entre-preneurial activity. Women with children manage thehousehold as a second job to work that earns income.To forget this fundamental truth is to denigrate muchof women’s income potential. The street food studiesshowed that women generally earned less than menper day butwomen often earned more than men perhour: with two jobs, women worked a shorter day asvendors.

Understanding the double day of women is basic toappreciating the proposed Convention on Home Workbeing circulated by the International Labour Organiza-tion. Contesting groups at the 82nd meeting of the ILOwhen the Convention was adopted reflect diametricallydifferent approaches used to reach women workingin the home. Trade unionists consider homework-ers extremely exploited and would like to organizethem as they do workers in the factories. In con-trast, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) workingin low income countries support home-based workthrough microcredit loans, considering these microen-terprises as opportunity. A leading advocate of theConvention, the Self Employed Women’s Association(SEWA) of Ahmedabad, India, itself illustrates themiddle ground. Registered as a union, SEWA operatesas an NGO in its method of organizing for multipleactivities, including running a bank for its members.They focus not only on increasing women’s incomebut also on ensuring that women maintain controlover their income by opening a bank account. SEWAfounder Ela Bhatt argues that women in the home area different type of worker who has different needs.SEWA, working with women’s groups in the Philip-pines and Europe, has established an international net-work of homeworker advocacy groups, called Home-net International; its goal is to provide benefits thatrange from childcare, to health care, to social secur-

ity for women working at home (Prugl and Tinker,1997).

TheStreet Foodstudy demonstrated the disastrousimpact that illness or accidents had on vendor enter-prises. This vulnerability of microenterprises led Shel-don Margen, during the panel discussions, to questionthe possibility that the street food trade provided a wayout of poverty. Similar critiques are frequently heardwith regard to the burgeoning field of microcredit. Tinyloans for productive activities are made to the verypoor using the group itself as collateral. This approachwas pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh,which today has over 2 million members who regularlyrepay their loans. Evaluations have corroborated theefficacy of this approach in increasing family incomeand so empowering women, an effect that also reducesdomestic violence (Hashemi et al., 1996). Critics wor-ried that women often funneled money to enterprisescontrolled by their husbands or other male relatives.Helen Todd’s village study of long-term women mem-bers of the bank documents clearly that women usetheir credit for family and personal survival. Manyinvested in land that their husband’s farmed,butregistered the land in their own names. One womaneven gave land as part of her daughter’s dowry, butagain put the land in her daughter’s name (Todd, 1996).Under Islam, women have the right to own property,unlike many other systems of inheritance and prop-erty rights. Like the street food vendors who investedoutside the enterprise, these women are securing theirfuture economic base by acquiring land to be used forfamily survival. In Bangladesh, where women’s statusis low, holding land in their own name is incrediblyempowering.2

If vendors can move up from poverty using theprofits from their microenterprises, a second ques-tion is the viability in a global world of street foodvending. Governments frequently attack street foodenterprises as unsightly, as causing congestion, andas unsafe; indeed harassment by municipal officerswas the greatest impediment to profits for vendors inthe EPOC study. What a coincidence that the monthbefore the panel, in May, 1998, Mayor of New YorkCity Rudolph W. Giuliani issued orders to close 144blocks of midtown and lower Manhattan to food vend-ing, a move that would eliminate more than 10 percentof the 3,100 year-round carts licensed by the NewYork City Health Department. Giuliani said that thenew rules were intended to improve safety, to helpclear the streets, and to keep business districts runningsmoothly (Allen, May 24, 1998). Despite the mayor’sprevious successes “in fighting what he considersquality-of-life offenders like reckless cab drivers, turn-stile jumpers, [and] ‘squeegee men’ ” (Allen, May 26,1998), the public reacted again this ban, signing peti-

332 IRENE TINKER

tions and threatening lawsuits. Citizens complainedthat the impetus for the closings came primarily fromthe Alliance for Downtown New York, which managesthe business improvement district for downtown andlower Manhattan, and saw the issue as big businessversus the common man. Nor did they take seriouslythe exposé of dangerous food handling practices byDonna St. George, whose article in theNew YorkTimeswas entitled, “In street vendor’s smorgasbord,threat of sickness lurks” (May 17). On June 25, themayor abandoned his plan and agreed to find a middleground.3

Street foods are clearly surviving in the homeof capitalism. They are emerging in many formercommunist countries where vending was in fact sup-pressed. The National Economic University in Hanoirecently conducted a study of food and market vendorsto evaluate the economic importance of this growingsector. During this period of rapid socio-economictransition, old regulations, laws, and taxes are underreview; the goal of the study was “to identify interven-tions such as credit or child care that would supportthe women vendors in their life and enhance their con-tribution to the country.” Particularly confusing is thecontinued description of the economy as a whole sothat all economic activity not controlled by the govern-ment is classified as “informal,” something previouslyconsidered illegal. Microentrepreneurs are thus a smallpart of the transition from a command to a market eco-nomy, a fact that may ease their entry into a globalworld (Tinker, 1998a).

Projecting the future of street foods

I believe that street food vending will increase through-out the world in the next century. Demand will increaseas the high costs of supermarket systems become evid-ent and as commuting workers and students requireavailable food where they work or study. Vendors willadapt the types of foods sold, and improve their foodhandling standards because customers expect it; toachieve this improvement, governments will work withvendors by offering training and secure areas wherethey can sell their foods. The importance of the streetfood trade will encourage more attention to improvingits nutritional value through additives and education.The profitability of the enterprises will increase asgovernment harassment declines but also as a resultof benefits secured by organizing. Economists willbegin to appreciate that success of an enterprise doesnot require growth but may relate to use of incomefor alternative investments including education of thechildren.

Notes

1. Percentages of household budgets spent on food relateto the amount spent on shelter. Where housing is highlysubsidized as in Vietnam, or nearly free as the result ofinvasions of land as in Peru, food costs obviously representa larger share of expenditure.

2. The Grameen Bank began making loans for building flood-resistant village houses. Loans go only to members, some97% of whom are women, and only to those womenwho have title to the land on which the house is to beconstructed. See Tinker (1995).

3. Allen wrote in his May 26, 1998 article that “sidewalkvendors have proved resilient through decades of effortsto corral them, going back to a plan by Mayor FiorelloH. La Guardia, who was Mayor from 1934 to 1945, toconfine them to indoor markets. More recently, in 1983,Mayor Edward I. Koch promised to confiscate the carts ofunlicensed vendors.”

References

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Drakakis-Smith, D. (1997). “Third world cities: Sustainableurban development III – basic needs and human rights,”Urban Studies38(5–6): 797–823.

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Senauer, B. (1990). “The impact of the value of women’s timeon food and nutrition,” in I. Tinker (ed.),Persistent Inequal-ities: Women and World Development. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

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Address for correspondence:Irene Tinker, 2759 NW Petty-grove Street, Portland, OR 97210, USAPhone: 503-228-9486; E-mail: newepoch@igc.org