As a kind of informal economy, the controversy around street food never stops. Many people have a nostalgia feeling about street foods, they are supportive of “street culture” and object to the strict governmental regulation about street vendors. “Informal economy is the people’s spontaneous and creative response to the state’s incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of the impoverished masses”, and street food not only provides a survival mode for the urban poor but also expresses a city’s “liveliness” and cultural charm, why should we forbid them? Okay, then let’s have a hypothesis here: what would happen if we permit all the street foods? Would there be uncontrollable problems if street food becomes “legal”?
- The environmental problem
Many people enjoy the street food provided by the stalls, however, when the mobile vendors left the spot, there are always thick oil stains covered the ground. The stain is sticky and a lot of garbage stick to it and attracts the flies, which greatly affects the surrounding environment. If pedestrians walk on it, their shoes would be stuck to the stains, and difficult to walk through the area. So there has to be someone to clean up the mess. If it’s not the street vendors themselves, who would that be? Yes, the sanitation workers. In a news report, a sanitation worker Ms. Xu told the reporter that it was hard for her to clean up the oil stains. She had to prepare two brooms, one for the normal ground, and a special one to sweep the contaminated ground. She had to undertake the extra workload every day because she was “in charge of the area”. Consider about that: is street food legal a good idea for all the urban poor?
two sanitation workers try to clean up the oil stains
- The safety problem
If you observe the street food stalls carefully, you could find out that most of them fire up the cooking stove with gas cans. It could be very dangerous if the gas cans are not been formally used (eg. placed near the open fire), but lots of street food vendors did not care much about the safety issue even though lots of gas can explosion cases have already happened. I read about an interview on this issue. A journalist was investigating several street food stalls and found out that most of the gas cans been use were stained with oil and full of rust, and many gas cans are even directly connected to the stove. He asked a street vendor, “your gas can and gas stove looks very old, could it still be used?” The vendor hesitated and said vaguely that although it has been used for many years, it would not cause any safety problems. In fact, the journalist asked many street food vendors about the service maintenance of their gas cans, but few of them care about that. Some even said, “as long as you don’t knock it over, it should be OK.” In this situation, the safety of the street food is not guaranteed, and those food stalls with non-standard gas cans become “time bombs” lurk around us and threaten the safety of every pedestrian.
This is a Chinese report of a gas can explosion that happened in Shandong: https://www.sohu.com/a/132205699_700231. From the video, we could see that a huge flame suddenly burst out, and the fire flashed into the sky with a radiation range of four meters. Five people were severely burned in the accident, including two children…
A lot of problems also exist: the food safety problem, the traffic block problem, and the unfair competition it would bring to the substantial restaurants… It seems that we still have a long way to go to turn the street food economy into a kind of “heroic entrepreneurship”.
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