Street Food - Health and Safety

Health and Safety

Despite concerns about contamination at street food vendors, the incidence of such is low with multiple studies showing rates comparable to restaurants.

As early as the 14th century, government officials oversaw street food vendor activities.

With the increasing pace of globalization and tourism, the safety of street food has become one of the major concerns of public health, and a focus for governments and scientists to raise public awarenesses. In the United Kingdom, the FSA provides comprehensive guidances of food safety for the vendors, traders and retailers of the street food sector. Other effective ways of enhancing the safety of street foods are through mystery shopping programs, through training and rewarding programs to vendors, through regulatory governing and membership management programs, or through technical testing programs. In 2002 a sampling of 511 street foods in Ghana by the World Health Organization showed that most had microbial counts within the accepted limits, and a different sampling of 15 street foods in Calcutta showed that they were "nutritionally well balanced", providing roughly 200Kcal of energy per rupee of cost.

In the late 1990s the United Nations and other organizations began to recognize that street vendors had been an underutilized method of delivering fortified foods to populations and in 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recommended considering methods of adding nutrients and supplements to street foods that are commonly consumed by the particular culture.