Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries

"Street foods," the term coined by Irene Tinker for the Equity Policy Center's action-research project, defines the study of all meals, snacks, and sweets currently sold on the streets of the world for immediate consumption.

The culmination of fifteen years of research in provincial cities in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, and Senegal, Street Foods is the first empirical study of those who make, sell, and eat these foods. The project detailed in this book was and will be a means to affect change on both micro and macro levels: the findings were utilized to improve the income of the vendors themselves and the safety of the food they sold, and to cause makers of public policy to recognize the value of this informal sector--instead of trying to restrict its trade. The accumulated power of the Street Food Project's data brings new insights to the nature of microenterprises, the interventions that truly help improve income and food safety, and the gender aspects of the street food trade. Challenging conventional wisdom about the informal sector and assumptions in development theory about women, Street Foods will reframe the major debates shaping research and aid policies for poor, small-scale entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Irene Tinker is at University of California at Berkeley.