The end of the road for street food?

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The end of the road for street food?

"‘Is it quite common to eat out all the time in Bangkok?’

‘Yes, it is. Most people really, constantly eat out. There is a large number of apartments that actually do not have a kitchen because the assumption is that people either go out to eat or buy the food from the street and bring it home. So it's very, very common, regardless of which, you know, income level you are.’

‘But about six years ago, the local authority began to clamp down on street food vendors’...

‘In terms of the stalls, he has decreased from around 20,000 to 8,000. So that's a decrease of around 60%. Now this is the register vendors. Eh, it's very difficult to estimate the number of the informal vendors, but an organization here that works with domestic workers, informal workers, etc. Their estimation is that there were around 300,000 to 400,000 street vendors in Bangkok. And they estimate that about anything between 150 to 200,000 have lost their source of income. They've been removed, they don't do that anymore.’...

‘If street food was not available regular consumers of street food would need to spend 350 baht  more per month. At the moment 350 baht is around nine pounds.’

‘Okay, and is that like a day's wage? How much is that?’

‘Exactly. That's, that's the point. So we're talking about the equivalent of a full day of work extra just to get the same amount of food’…

‘Easy access to inexpensive food is one of the reasons that the formal employment sector can pay low wages. And so I wondered whether actually this goes way beyond the street vendors and the customers but actually has a knock on effect to the economics of a city more broadly’

‘The way that I see it is, you know, is the best kept secret of the urban economies, not only of Bangkok, but most Southeast Asian cities. An entry level salary in a formal economy. It's around 13,000 baht. Around 400, 450 US dollars. With that, unless you get, you know, things like street food from informal vendors. Informal transport, otherwise you couldn't survive on that. So you're absolutely right. Having these access to these food that is so inexpensive in a sense, subsidizes and is maintains this very low wages.’...

'The Bangkok Metropolitan administration has pledged to build Hawker centers, where vendors can set up shop with better access to amenities like running water and toilets. This transition from selling food on the streets into malls has already happened over 1000 kilometers south in Singapore'...

'[Hawkers in Singapore] used to sell what's, what they could decently or properly do on a street car devoid of all these facilities. Now that they have this mini little full fledged kitchen, they can cook anything they want. And the new generation is very, very receptive to new things that work'...

[On Penang] ‘Given what you've just said about being this big melting pot of cultures, it seems like an unusual decision to then say, actually, foreign workers who may have influenced Malaysian cooking over the years can't now make what is considered Malaysian food.’

‘Actually, I agree with you because I'm a cooking class teacher and I do not care where my students come from, as long as I can teach them a proper way of making traditional food. They can make it as good as what my grandma used to make if they follow the technique and they use the right ingredients. So I think one of the reasons why certain *people* and certain hawkers are ver-, there’s a word, proprietary, the sense of possessiveness, they don't want to share and also maybe to gain some popular votes.

But last year in 2019, the Minister of Human Resources also enforced the law all over Malaysia about food not being cooked by foreigners. And this law had a lot of opposition from the association of restaurant owners who, most of them have to hire workers from South India, for example, for Indian restaurants, because there's simply no enough local people who are willing to do the job at a certain salary that's being offered. So that's another, you know, way of looking at it… the wage for the foreign workers have a certain minimum wage, which is not what the locals are willing to take’

‘In a nutshell, what has been the fallout from this new bit of legislation?’

‘I would say some business, businesses actually have to close because they are afraid to be fined. But some still do it, you know, secretly, but if some of the clients notice and make a report, then the officials will go and investigate and they will get fine. So that's my, *laughs*’

‘But you've noticed a decline in hawker stalls. I mean, and they're citing the reason for that is that they just at one end of the spectrum, they can't employ low paid workers, they have to do the work themselves. They're struggling to make ends meet, but on the other side, they're being squeezed from customers who aren't willing to pay a higher price for the food that reflects their living standard. It sounds like a really difficult situation.’

‘Yeah, I will say within the next 20 years. I will say there'll be not much, many hawkers left who's doing all this traditional food’...

‘I also worry because the culture of street food will be lost. Then what we will have we just be like Singapore with only like spanking clean hawker centre in air conditioned. Nobody is like squatting by the roadside anymore. So you lose that, you know, the intangible heritage’"