点击显示 收起
Department of Nutrition University of California 1 Peter J Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 E-mail: legrivetti{at}ucdavis.edu
This interesting volume edited by Artemis P Simopoulos and Ramesh V Bhat should attract scientists and scholars from different disciplines. The authors in this collection claim that street foods have been ignored in local, regional, and national nutrition surveys. That situation should change because there is much to recommend in the book. Street Foods consists of 8 chapters written by prominent scholars who considered the positive and negative roles of street foods in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas. Because of the book's global scope, the level of detail is uneven. Case studies of street foods in Greece, Israel, and Mexico are complemented by broad reviews covering the United States and Latin America and by even broader chapters on Asia and Africa. The book will tease those readers who want greater depth and detail. Nevertheless, the information presented is valuable and interesting. As such, Street Foods is an intriguing first course and presents a wealth of research questions that could engage social scientists, food technologists, and nutritionists for years.
In chapter 1, Matalas and Yannakoulia consider street foods in Greece. They discuss sales of bread, cheese pies, and soups from Greek antiquity to the 20th century. They consider the safety of street foods from the perspectives of preparation, handling, and environmental pollution and identify how dust containing heavy metals (ie, lead) enters the human food chain. They report that Greek street-food vendors have incomes well above those of persons receiving the minimum wage and that the foods are purchased for taste and convenience, not for nutrition.
In chapter 2, Taylor et al argue that street foods in the United States do not pose a greater threat to safety than do commercially available consumables, because the conventional sales of beef, pork, and chicken represent most cases of food-related intoxication. Most vendors of street foods in New York are men. Licensing is difficult to enforce and compliance is uneven. The authors suggest that street foods are purchased because of their taste, smell, and low price and because they are pleasant and convenient.
In chapter 3, Wahlqvist et al consider street foods in Australia, where the term public foods is preferred. Public foods are available through church bazaars, entertainment sites, fairs, sporting events, and public vending machines.
In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Bhat and Waghray present information on street foods sold in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The authors conclude that as incomes increase, purchases of street foods decline; that female vendors predominate in some nations, whereas males predominate in others; that vendor illiteracy cannot be assumed because vendors have a broad range of incomes; that access to, and use of, fuel to cook and warm street foods creates potential ecologic and health problems; and that the percentage of the family budget spent on street foods remains highly variable. The authors relate how Asian, African, and Latin American governments have attempted to regulate vendors to improve sanitation and reduce health problems and note that regulations have not worked in the past. They urge a 2-pronged educational effort to reduce food-borne intoxication, in which one prong is directed toward vendors and the other toward consumers.
Chapter 5 ("Street Foods of Africa") contains considerable data on Egypt, data that are more logically associated with the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean states than with Saharan or sub-Saharan nations. In general, however, the data presented focus on Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda, but regional specialists will not view this cluster of nations as especially representative of the continent. Table 3 (page 110) contains a list of typical street foods sold in different African countries, including Egypt. For one of the most commonly sold street foods in Egypt, the authors use the word foul instead of ful, for Vicia fava, or fava bean, and the correct use of ful would reduce transliteration confusion. Ful is a dish composed of stewed fava beans ladled into pocket bread (commonly aish baladi, or whole-wheat, coarse country bread) and sometimes garnished with slices of hard-boiled egg or basterma (dried, cured meat). Kushari, another Egyptian street food, is mentioned but not identified in Table 3. Kushari is a mixture of macaroni pasta and lentils, combined with hot chili peppers. The authors gloss over the important problem associated with iced beverages in Egypt. This problem arises because blocks of ice, from water of unknown origin, are sometimes dragged through the streets of Cairo atop burlap bags and slide off onto the street surfaces. Street dirt is then wiped off, and the cleaned blocks are chipped into manageable pieces and placed into beverages sold on the street in the belief that the ice is clean.
In chapter 7, Chávez et al offer the astonishing statement that in Mexico City 30 million corn tortillas are prepared and sold daily as street food. The subtitle of their chapter, "Joy or Jeopardy?" reflects the dichotomy faced by consumers: enjoyable flavor and taste versus potential health risk. The authors raise a provocative question: what if consumers must eat street foods because they have no other option? Do such consumers practice dietary roulette on a daily basis to survive? The authors suggest that the number of illnesses caused by the consumption of street foods is significantly less than would be expected and report that most food-related outbreaks in Mexico stem from non–street foods. They also suggest that poor and middle-income consumers do not become ill because they become immune to the more virulent forms of food-borne pathogens after repeated exposure to street foods. The authors argue, therefore, that the greatest risks are taken by wealthier Mexican citizens and tourists who experiment with street foods.
In chapter 8, Gvion-Rosenberg and Trostler differentiate between Israeli consumers who eat in public and those who dine in private. The authors relate that religion and private space have determined the evolution of street foods in Israel, because many Israelis consider it impolite to eat in public. The authors document that during the early years of Israel in the late 1940s, immigrants from "street-food cultures were overshadowed by a general ‘national desire’ to create a homogeneous state and culture." As a result there is a relative paucity of street foods in ethnically diverse modern Israel, where Jews of American, Ethiopian, Russian, and Yemeni origins work and dine side by side.
These 8 chapters illustrate how street foods form the livelihood of many millions of vendors on a global scale. Street foods, whether as meals or as snacks, offer significant quantities of energy and nutrients to tens of millions of consumers daily. Such items are consumed by the rich and the poor alike, and their nutrient and energy values are commonly ignored in local, regional, and national nutrition surveys. The chapters document issues of food adulteration and contamination, examine the potential for contamination with lead and other heavy metals, and relate how wind-blown street dust contaminates foods with microscopic, dry particulate matter of foul origin.
Readers will be captivated by the potential range of exciting research possibilities: how issues of age, sex, economics, religion, and geographic space dictate who uses and refuses street foods; how the ethnicity and economic characteristics of vendors collide and appear in contrast with the variable tastes and purchase patterns of consumers; how patterns of consumption change by season; how state control compared with free market enterprise affects sale patterns; and how licensing of vendors and education of both vendors and consumers could lead to improved health and sanitation. Overall, this interesting book presents a first course upon which further research agendas can be based.