Institutionalization of Street Food in the Modern Urban Space: Conformations, Tensions and Conflicts

Abstract

Street food constitutes itself in deep-rooted remote practices of walking vending. From the analysis undertaken from topics of the theories of Giddens, Beck and Bauman about western modernity, the present article proposes to reflect on the process of institutionalization of street from the historical nuances that marked its advent and how food starts to conform as “street” food in this modern and global context. It is evident that throughout the Modern Era, this food transposed the barrier of the trivial urban commerce, reaffirming itself as a mean of personal and collective subsistence, part of the history of various peoples, of local identity, and of structural transformations, especially in the economic and cultural sense. Qualified as a “street food, in pejorative denotation, it marks the close relationship with the changes occurring in the terrain of urban commensality, conceived with the advent of the institutionalization of eating and the emergence of the salaried class. In contemporary times this complex phenomenon, which is a producer and reproducer of modernity, adds elements of the traditional renaissance and, at the same time, forms a transcultural exponent and a path in the conflictive public space of commensality.