Apocalypse Chow: Street Food Vendors Are Connoisseurs, Not Criminals

I love street food. I have had superb ceviche on a Tijuana roadside, porky frijoles refritos on a handmade tortilla in the highlands of Guatemala, hot poori and chana masala on a New Delhi sidewalk, baked mussels stuffed with rice on Istanbul’s famed Istiklal Street, and grilled lamb kebab out of a shopping cart in the Paris suburbs. 

Street food goes as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. Four thousand years ago, city dwellers short on time, money, or cooking facilities patronized street food vendors offering quick, cheap, and tasty meals. 

In colonial America, the street was the supermarket. City residents shopped at outdoor markets for meat, bread, and produce, according to Cindy R. Lobel, author of Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. By the early 1800s, “hot corn girls,” mainly African American women, sold ears of corn from buckets in cities. In New York City, each wave of immigrants took their turn: Italian women peddled preserves made from scavenged fruit, German mothers hawked bread from baskets, and Jewish men dished out pickled herring and vegetables from barrels.

Street food is still a fixture of city life, providing a living to thousands of vendors and affordable food to many more customers. Given the vital role of street vendors, one would expect local governments to ease their path, but nothing could be further from reality. Many cities slap vendors with large fines, criminal penalties, and in the case of New York City, illegally seize their food carts and destroy them.

In New York City, the Street Vendor Project (SVP) is fighting back by working with more than 3,000 street vendors to publicize the essential services they provide, advocate for more official support, and end harsh penalties. Criminalization of street vendors has taken on added urgency as many are undocumented immigrants at risk from the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda. SVP is backing four bills before the New York City Council that would provide street vendors with more security, assistance, and eliminate criminal penalties.

The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) estimates 20,500 “mobile food vendors” work in New York City, 96% of whom are immigrants, and half are women. But this is likely an undercount as the survey ended in 2021, “during the height of the COVID pandemic.” Since then, more than 210,000 new immigrants have arrived in New York City, swelling the ranks of informal street vendors.

Street food vendors include Colombian women serving obleas, wafer cookies sandwiched with caramel, from laundry carts; Mexican families dishing out tamales, pozole, and aguas frescas from folding tables; Caribbean men grilling jerk chicken on a sidewalk barbecue; and the “Zongzi Lady,” a grandmother peddling savory and sweet rice dumplings out of a battered tin box on a busy Chinatown corner.

Among the newest vendors are candy sellers who navigate New York’s sprawling subway system cradling a cardboard box in one arm with colorfully arranged chewing gum, mints, and M&Ms for a couple of bucks each. Candy sellers tend to be young women, many with a child in tow or infant swaddled to their back. Most are “Kichwa-speaking Indigenous people from Ecuador’s rural central highlands,” according to New York Magazine. Nearly 20,000 Ecuadorians arrived in the city in the last few years, fleeing economic and social chaos instigated by Ecuador’s right-wing government.

Vending also includes legal food trucks packed with seven cooks cranking out thousands of tacos a day, vendors who rent permits to dispense bagels and coffee, biryani, and halal chicken out of a silvery metal cart for 12 hours a day, and unlicensed carts with dishes like fish-ball soup, beef curry waffles, and tortas. Some vendors set blankets on a sidewalk with cans and bags of food likely rescued from a dumpster. Others are newly arrived Latinas employed by underground kitchens who haul coolers filled with South American–style lunches to midtown where Latino construction workers buy a taste of home for 10 bucks. 

Mohamed Attia is intimately familiar with the life of a street vendor. That’s not just because he is managing director of the Street Vendor Project—Attia was a street vendor for nearly a decade. After emigrating from Egypt in 2008 when he was only 20, he served up java and bagels out of a metal cart to commuters, then sold hot dogs and pretzels to tourists in Times Square, eventually graduated to his own business selling smoothies and juices from a cart in Midtown, and finally ran a halal food cart before joining SVP full time.

Among the valued services street vendors provide, says Attia, is selling fresh fruits and vegetables that are affordable and just steps from people’s homes in neighborhoods that are otherwise food deserts. 

Street food vending isn’t a whim. Three-quarters of vendors have been hustling for four years or more—and nearly 40% for a decade or longer—and selling one tamale, sandwich, and smoothie at a time is the main source of income for 80% of them. According to the IRI survey of vendors, nearly 90% want to expand their business, secure legal permits, or open a storefront eatery. “When the conditions are good, street vending can be pretty profitable,” says Attia. 

But now vendors have the added burden of being criminalized by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Attia claims. “It is just mind blowing the amount of resources allocated to the NYPD, to the sanitation police … who are just raining down fines and handcuffs on the vendors day and night,” says Attia.

Under Adams, whom New York Magazine calls “flagrantly corrupt” for bribery scandals, criminal citations against street vendors skyrocketed nearly sixfold from 2019, the eve of the pandemic, to 2023. Overall, the city slapped more than 10,000 civil and criminal citations on street vendors in 2024. Immigrant advocates accuse Adams of waging “war on street vendors” by sending phalanxes of police to violently break up informal markets hosting scores of vendors in four different neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

As the NYPD dishes out tickets like Taco Bell does chalupas, the city has shut the door on new permits, despite a 2022 law authorizing 445 more street vending permits per year. The new law came after food vending permits had been capped at 5,100 for decades with “almost 12,000 other people stuck on an endless waiting list,” according to The City. 

As a solution, Attia says, “The city should reform the vending system and make it work for everyone.” To that end, SVP backs changing laws regulating vendors. Attia says four bills they have dubbed “the street vendor reform package” are currently before the New York City Council. 

He says the first bill is the “core” of the reform, as it would bring all vendors into the formal economy by creating thousands of additional licenses and permits over five years, and then lift limits on licenses and permits after that point. The second bill would reduce and “hopefully eliminate” criminal liability by not involving police enforcement anymore. The third bill would create a Division of Street Vendor Assistance within the city government to provide “support, education, outreach, and training for street vendors,” and the fourth bill would expand vending locations.

Even if the city passes all four bills, street vending is still difficult. Attia says, “It’s very hard to run business out of the street in a food cart or truck. They are vulnerable to attack or being robbed. Locations are unstable. They deal with very harsh weather. Sometimes folks can’t vend because the weather is too brutal.”

Despite the difficulties, he says street vendors enjoy their work. “Most people who start vending love being entrepreneurs, they want to have agency over their business, work schedule, hours. They don’t want to look for a traditional job where they can be exploited and sometimes underpaid or treated unfairly.” 

The benefits of street food vendors extend to the entire city. Neighborhoods throughout New York City have become renowned for vendors introducing new cuisines and foods. That is a big motivation for many vendors, says Attia. “They love the experience of bringing their culture into the communities they serve.”