Culinary Canopies and the Sanitized Street

Eateries that proudly claim to be serving “street food” have appeared in a surprisingly wide variety of contexts, on multiple continents, in both robust and developing economies, in both middlebrow and elite venues. This essay looks at how a once-degraded category of eating has taken on this new status. What is gained and lost, what is promoted, and what is elided in the transition? The essay’s focus is on how street food, as both a repertoire of practices and a constellation of meanings, permeates literal and symbolic geographies other than the street. For this research, the authors rely not only on their own experiences as avid consumers of street food, as well as both descriptive and analytic texts, but also on several television series that focus specifically on the street food phenomenon.