Street Food Is Slow Food

What fast food is to the US, street food is to Asia. It's quick, cheap, and tasty. Take a closer look and you'll see that street food a lot more. It is freshly prepared, uses local and traditional food products, preserves its lore and preparation, and is made on a small scale. Kinda sounds like Slow Food doesn't it? 

Working on The Chai Cart is a lot of work for very little monetary reward. I have very little time to do anything else and hardly any time to be social. However, today I am more committed to it than ever. Not just to The Chai Cart but to the community of the new street vendors and the street food revolution as a whole. 

 The new Street Food "2.0" movement is more than using Twitter, or seeking the thrill of decoding locations and finding a cart, or being part of the trendy hipster crowd who are "in the know". To me, this movement represents a revolution against the fast-food culture that has haunted Americans for decades. Instead of opting for heavily processed food, wouldn't it be nice to have the choice of getting freshly prepared food at the same price? Thai Curry, Gumbo, Organic Soup, fresh Samosas, homemade Pies, Cakes, or even lavender Creme Brulee or Gobs. And of course authentic Indian Chai. Many of the new age street vendors are making and selling food they hand-make from recipes they have perfected over time or have been passed on for generations. 

These street food vendors are providing San Francisco residents a different choice, a healthier choice, in quick, fresh, and inexpensive gourmet food. This should not be viewed as a threat to restaurants; in many cities around the world, street food and sit-down restaurants have co-existed for decades. This should be seen as a support to the slow food movement. 

The city has every right to crack down on the unlicensed street food vendors. I don't disregard the value of having the right permits to sell food; it is important to be hygienic and abide by health safety codes. Getting a food safety certification is in fact easy and inexpensive, $60 for the test, $130 for the class and test. But that alone does not help in getting a food permit, which is expensive and complicated. Here is the list of various permits you need. As this trend grows and street food becomes mainstream, I hope instead of cracking it down, the city of San Francisco thinks of an alternate plan to embrace it, while regulating it. For this to happen there needs to be a mandate from the residents of San Francisco that they indeed would want such a choice.

Save Money, Save the Planet.

What's more compelling - saving money or saving the planet? Surely an entertaining topic for debate - especially between the capitalists and the tree-hugging hippies. This, however, begs the question - how about solutions that save money while saving the planet? I know what you are thinking - if it were that simple, we would be doing it already. Really? There are simple solutions out there that can accomplish both. 

Composting is one of them. It reduces your garbage collection costs while reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. All it requires is a little consciousness and a change in habit. The city of San Francisco charges garbage collection fees based on the waste they collect, that is neither recycled nor composted. It is expensive for the city to dispose of this waste and there are only so many landfills around that one can dump into. I live in a multi-unit building (150+ units), and the only reason we didn't have the green compost bins in the garbage room is b'coz no one has asked for them before. 

When I first looked into it, I was surprised at the perception people had about the composting service - it's expensive, it's smelly, it's messy, etc. A little bit of research debunked some common myths. 

1. Composting service is provided by the city - i.e. they provide green bins for the food waste and will pick it up. Residents don't have to create soil from the food waste on their premises (unless they choose to do so).

2. Adding a composting service to your garbage collection is absolutely free. Sunset Scavenger ( the garbage collection agency) will not only provide the large green cans for your garbage room, but they will also even give residents a green kitchen pail to hold the compost waste. 

3. Everything that now goes into the green composting bin would have been in the garbage bin anyway. So really, the garbage room is not going to smell any different. 

4. Just as there are plastic garbage bags, there are compostable bags to line the kitchen pail. Use these (or paper bags) to hold the food waste before disposing of it in the large green bin. No-fuss, no mess. 

5. Just as you would with your other garbage bins, periodically clean all your green bins as well. 

6. For multi-unit building or business (esp. restaurants), adopting the composting service actually results in significant savings (in thousands of dollars) in garbage collection fees every year. 

There you have it - composting is not a luxury, but a cost-cutting measure. The fact that a significant amount of the waste will end up as soil and not in a landfill or otherwise converted to toxic gas, is just an additional benefit. Think before throwing - recycle, compost or waste? That thought will save you money and the planet.