Agriculture and Human Values16: 321–323, 1999.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS

Street food vending and nutritional impact

Dorothy BlairNutrition Department, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Accepted in revised form January 10, 1999

Dorothy Blair has been a faculty member in the Pennsylvania State University Nutrition Department and theScience, Technology, and Society Program since 1980. Previous to that she received her Ph.D. from CornellUniversity and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines. She has eaten her way through the street foods ofSoutheast Asia from Bali to Korea, and also in Bahrain, Sri Lanka, and India. Her teaching and research focuson the nutritional aspects of food systems, culture, and technology. She teaches a course on international nutrition.

If you are interested in microenterprise promotion aswell as detailed examples of how urban centers inSoutheast and South Asia and Africa feed their mobileresidents, then you should not miss readingStreetFoodsby Irene Tinker. Street Foods is the descrip-tion of 15 years of collaborative research and socialaction on street food vending undertaken by Tinkerat the Equity Policy Center in Washington, DC, andcollaborators in seven different countries.

The book is arranged in two parts: seven profilesof street vending in small urban centers in Indone-sia, Thailand, the Philippines, Egypt, Bangladesh,Senegal, and Nigeria, followed by an analysis of theprojects and the development implications of the streetfood research. In each profile, Tinker examines thework and welfare of street venders, economics ofvending, gender issues, foods vended, including typ-ical recipes, customer characteristics, and nutrition andfood safety issues. She also describes intervention tostimulate recognition of the importance of street foodvenders to urban economics, food systems, and pub-lic health. This diverse set of topics is approachedholistically, with gentleness and insight.

Who vends and what foods are sold are cultur-ally determined, but I was struck by the similarityof the vender experience among such vastly diversecountries. Street food venders deal with the sameissues everywhere: sanitation problems, competitionamong pedestrians, venders and cars for road space,crowding and police harassment, difficulty, especiallyfor women, in acquiring the time, hands, and capitalneeded to vend on a remunerative scale. Particu-larly striking and true for all but the town studied inBangladesh is that street venders can make consider-ably more money than either college educated govern-ment workers or hard laborers. Venders also benefit

from the fact that family food is provided wholesale.However, the job requires long hours and the cooper-ation of many unpaid relatives. Unless women vendcooperatively with their husbands, they are at a disad-vantage: they have less access to credit, at least onefewer relative in this labor pool, and conflicting homeduties.

The economics of buying street foods

In areas where food takes up 51–74% of the averagebudget,Street Foodsilluminates the means by whichthe growing urban population affords to eat. The richare better able to afford meat items, otherwise, streetfoods are democratic. Laborers and white collar work-ers, teachers and their students, the venders and theirfamily members tend to consume the same food; evenhousewives feed their families the rich cultural arrayof foods available on the street in urban areas in Asiaand Africa.

Are street foods more economical than eating athome? Many of the studied families spend 30% of theirfood dollars on street foods, and the poorer the family,the larger the percentage of their budget spent eatingon the street. Tinker believes that the poor benefit fromstreet food because it is actually less expensive thanhome prepared.

Calculating the cost of preparing food at home iscomplex. It depends on the cost of fuel and whethersmall, retail quantities of unprepared food must be pur-chased; also the trade-off between the cooker’s timeand the possibility of remunerative work. Urbanitesmight be supplied by a distant family farm, but mostwill need to purchase all their foods in small quantitiesfrom local markets. Street food venders have the eco-

322 DOROTHY BLAIR

nomies of wholesale purchasing, access to subsidizedfoods in some cases, and purchase contracts with localurban agricultural entrepreneurs.

The type of foods purchased for home consumptionmay be a poor nutritional bargain, lacking variety andemphasizing the root or grain staple at the expense ofprotective foods. To be salable, street foods must beculturally authentic, with “sauce” or topping in correctproportion to grain or root. As food preparation timedwindles at home, street food venders help preservethe more labor intensive local food traditions.

Intervention research

Not solely observers, Irene Tinker’s colleagues alsoenlist the help of government agencies, universityfaculty, and public health officials to improve the well-being of venders and the quality of their products.Informed officials have begun to appreciate the con-tribution of venders to the prosperity of the urban area,to understand vender problems, and to develop a help-ing attitude toward venders, rather than the swat teammentality prevalent in government-sponsored policestreet cleanups. The cooperation of officials in Iloilo,Philippines, Bogor, Indonesia, and Ile-Ife, Nigeriawas impressive, as were the efforts of two womenin Minia, Egypt to create an NGO, the Street FoodVenders Association, which has served as a sourceof support and innovation for the Minia venders. Inseveral study areas, University faculty were enlisted toanalyze food safety, resulting in creative approaches toreducing pathogens in street food.

Street food vending is often restricted by healthofficials who consider the vending enterprise a pub-lic health hazard. Tinker’s work demonstrates a mixedreaction to the preparation methods for street food.Standards may be low from a Western perspective, butlocals consider them typical of home preparation. Mostworrisome are industrial dyes used to “dress up” foods,and foods served at ambient temperatures after beingexposed for long periods on the streets. Foods boiledor fried just before serving are most sanitary. Whenofficials encourage rather than harass, the venders aremore likely to invest in carts that promote sanitation,attend sanitation training sessions, or health/parasitescreenings. There is a limit, however, to what thevenders can achieve on their own. The cities them-selves must provide sanitary facilities and water toinsure minimum modern sanitary standards.

Nutritional impact of street foods

The nutritional impact of street foods was a minorfocus of the studies, butStreet Foodsprovides a wealth

of detail upon which to formulate new ways of think-ing about food, nutrition, and microenterprise in urbanareas. As a nutritionist, I am particularly enthusiasticabout the rich context in which Tinker had imbeddedthe food information. This framework has broadenedmy perspective on nutrition interventions in urban sec-tions of the developing world. Because I have hadthe opportunity to dine on the streets of Indonesia, Iwill use the Bogor study as an example of how thisdelicious detail has stimulated my thinking.

The Bogor study was undertaken in the early 1980s.Bogor is a prosperous University town 50 miles fromJakarta. Street food venders were more gently handledhere than in Jakarta, where they were considered ablight to be eradicated. At that time, Bogor had onefood vender for every 14 inhabitants! Sixty percentof the total income was spent on food in Indonesia’surban areas. About 25% of the Bogor family foodbudget was spent on street foods.

Street foods in Bogor are divided into meals andsnacks. Most venders sell deep fried snack items fromfried tofu to banana or sweet potato chips. Fresh fruitsand Gado Gado, the spicy peanut sauce over blanchedvegetables, are very popular, as are boiled noodles withchicken and vegetables. Soy, peanuts and mung beansare major protein sources.

Street foods. . . reflect the dietary preference ofIndonesians for meals of steamed rice as often athree times a day. These meals are accompanied byprotein, usually cakes of fermented soybean or otherlegumes, including peanuts and curried vegetables.Meat or fish are luxuries to the majority of Indone-sians, who are poor and often malnourished. Eatingother street foods in between rice meals is a way ofkeeping up energy during the day and adding valu-able protein, minerals, and vitamins to the diet. Inmost countries such foods would be called lunch ora light meal; but to Indonesians, only rice counts asa meal: everything else is a snack. A filling chickenporridge would be the equivalent to a rice dish interms of nutrition, but to an Indonesian the porridgeis not a meal (Tinker, 1997: 28).

Whether a meal is cheap or expensive is not a goodindicator of its nutritional quality. A 300 rupiah mealsupplied near half the nutritional requirements forprotein and calories and more than half for vitaminsA and C, a better bargain than the 500 rupiah meal.

Based on their household survey data, Tinker’scollaborator in Bogor, Barbara A. Chapman (1984)determined that for an average person 20% of protein,14% of calories, and 4% of vitamin A consumed wasobtained from foods purchased on the Bogor streets.This gives us the data to evaluate street foods as goodnutritional supplements. Considering that 25% of the

STREET FOOD VENDING AND NUTRITIONAL IMPACT 323

Bogor food dollar was spent on the street, Chapman’sfigures indicate that the chosen street foods are eitherless nutrient-dense or more expensive than homemadefoods.

What children, mothers, and workers eat in Indone-sia is critical, for the levels of malnutrition are some ofthe highest in the world. The prevalence of low serumretinol levels, a measure of subclinical vitamin Astatus, is 55% in Indonesia (UN, 1997). Iron deficiencyanemia is between 52 to 80% in South East Asia, withmothers having the higher percentage. The prevalenceof stunting among children is 52% in Indonesia (UN,1997).

Because schools lack school lunch programs,school children are major consumers of street foods.With the support of the Bogor city planners, attemptswere made by Chapman (1984) to improve the nutri-tional quality of children’s favorite street foods. Theyused wheat and legumes to upgrade the protein con-tent of the cassava flour products – cassava is a locallygrown root crop ground into flour and used by vendersto make inexpensive fritters and cookies preferred bychildren. Also, sanitation was improved by makingvending inside the school yard a privilege only venderswho met cleanliness standards could enjoy.

With the benefit of recent research on food andnutrition interactions and bioavailability, as well asthe rich context of Tinker and Chapman’s data, I amtempted to speculate how street foods could providea potent vehicle to improve the nutritional status ofurban Indonesians using another course of action. Thehigh dependency on milled rice, cassava flour, andphytate containing legumes is particularly problematicfor Indonesians. The absolute amount of iron in thediet as well as its bioavailablity is low. Vitamin Csupplementation could improve iron availability fromphytate containing foods (Allen and Ahluwalia, 1997).Vitamin A absorption may be improved by the deep fatfried street foods, but only if vitamin A is prevalent inthe most frequently consumed street foods. Chapman’sdata (1984) shows it is not. Promoting vitamin C andprovitamin A containing foods like ripe mango orpapaya, or leafy greens as part of the meal or alongwith a snack item would (1) improve iron absorptionfrom phytate containing foods and (2) ensure thatprovitamin A is present when high-fat snack items arebeing consumed, as fat is required for its absorption.Improving iron status would reduce anemia and

stunting; reducing vitamin A deficiency would reduceblindness and the severity of childhood infections thatincrease catabolism and reduce growth (Allen andAhluwalia, 1997; UN, 1997). Gado Gado, with its fattypeanut sauce and the lightly blanched vegetables (aslong as they are blanched as they are consumed) is mycandidate for the perfect supplementary street food, ora complementary slice of ripe papaya or mango witheach deep fried snack item.

Praise for street food

I am quite enthusiastic aboutStreet Foods. IreneTinker has done a full life’s work in the last 17 or soyears, pulling all this information together. Her workchanges forever how the dynamic of food consump-tion is understood and studied, and how interventionsare planned. It has already improved the welfare ofvenders in the study countries and elsewhere. TheFood and Agriculture Organization now promotes foodvending rather than trying to squelch it. Irene Tinker isto be praised for her noteworthy research, her effect onthe welfare of women and the poor, and for the detaileddescriptions of urban food ways. Lastly, the street foodrecipes are well worth a try.

References

Allen, L. H. and N. Ahluwalia (1997). “Improving iron statusthrough diet: The application of knowledge concerning diet-ary iron bioavailability in human populations.” Arlington,VA: John Snow, Inc./OMNI Project.

Chapman, B. A. (1984).Streetfoods in Indonesia: Vendorsin the Urban Food Supply. Washington, DC: Equity PolicyCenter.

Tinker, I. (1997).Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment inDeveloping Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.

UN (1997). Third Report of the World Nutrition Situation.New York: United Nations Administrative Committee onCoordination, Sub-committee on Nutrition.

Address for correspondence:Dorothy Blair, Nutrition Depart-ment, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA16802, USAPhone: +1-814-863-2912; Fax: +1-814-865-5870;E-mail: ey6@psu.edu