Worldbuilding: Take It To The Streets

~ crossovercreativechaos

What kinds of street food does your world have?

As long as there have been cities, there have been street vendors. Likely longer. We have ancient accounts of various street stalls and foodsellers from China, the Greek city-states, the Roman Empire, the Aztecs, and probably lots of other places I don’t know about. Honestly, I’d lay odds that as soon as we hit Neolithic-size settlements and people gathering for festivals there was somebody with a fire, portable cooking utensils, and a dream.

These days we see street food as a convenience, and sometimes an annoyance. Given the cultural pervasiveness of microwaves, gas or electric stones, and even wood cookstoves, I think a lot of people underestimate how much skill goes into not just cooking, but in keeping that cooking safe for the rest of the community. It’s as simple as one, two, three.

One: The vast majority of cooking involves applying high levels of heat.

Two: Whenever you apply heat, you leave an opening for things to catch on fire.

Three: The more people you have cooking, the more chances things have to go up in smoke.

This is a matter of combinatorial probabilities. Say the chance of one person slipping and starting a fire in a year is… oh, one in ten thousand (0.0001). This is a 99.99% chance of not having a fire. Any one person could go a whole lifetime without starting a fire.

Now make it one hundred people cooking. That’s 0.9999 to the 100th power, or 0.9900. Meaning your chances of not having a fire that year are now… 99 out of 100. Still not that bad, but….

Ten thousand people cooking? The chance of not having a fire drops to 36.79%. Or almost a two-thirds chance you will have a fire that year.

Conclusion: If at all possible, you do not want everyone cooking.

(If you think this is only a past problem, look up turkey fryer explosions. Carelessness and stupidity with burning things is a human constant.)

This is also likely to be a problem in the future on shipboard or space stations. Confined spaces make all kinds of accidents more likely. It’s in everyone’s best interests to encourage klutzes out of the kitchen, and to suggest more cooking be done by those willing to master the skills to do it properly. Meaning, in any sane setting, skilled people need to be able to make a profit at it. And we’re back to street food.

Though we should also be back there for tasty reasons as well. Most people can learn to cook, but not everyone has the time or inclination to master whole cuisines and a world full of neat recipes. And some recipes, while in theory simple enough for a layman to cook, in practice take a lot of time and dishes and are so much more cost-effective if you make them in bulk instead of a meal for one, or even a few people. Ever make Philly cheesesteaks with all the classic toppings? Yeah. You can do it at home, but….

With street food you get tasty options from a bunch of different specialists, all of whom have to know what they’re doing or go out of business. You get to try different things, pick up a meal when you’re rushed, tired, or hurting, and have a friendly public spot you can arrange a meeting at with someone you don’t know well. To say nothing of the story drama possibilities for a stakeout or observation post, or a contact to pass info or gear as needed….

The streets of any story’s settlement should be interesting, because they have people. Make sure they also have snacks!

36 thoughts on “Worldbuilding: Take It To The Streets”

  1. There’s also the logistics of getting your hands on the materials, in sufficient quantities, consistently.

    They probably aren’t hunting and gardening themselves.

    One Scene from a story I’m reading:

    MC buys a meat kabob.

    Vendor asks if they like it.

    MC says it is very well seasoned, with some commentary on the curry-like seasoning.

    Vendor happily announces to passerby that his rat kabobs were the favorite of the MC!

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    1. That was actually a joke from the Stallone movie Demolition Man. The formerly cryo-frozen cop is with his partner in the future poor people underground sector when he smells meat cooking. Since food is this brave new world is mostly small vegetarian portions, he trades his partner’s watch for a meat kabob and starts chowing down. His squicked out partner tells him that there are no cows or pork raised for food, and the vendor proudly tell him it’s fresh rat. Stallone pauses for a moment before continuing to enjoy his rat kabob.

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      1. …Now I wonder, in such a context, are those rats basically in the role of domesticated pigs, except more manageable in size and faster to breed. Not hunting sewer rats, but keeping cages, doing what you can to keep them cleanish, and using them to turn scraps into meat.

        This wouldn’t eliminate disease problems, obviously, but that’s been the case with pigs too….

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      2. I remember reading a Battlestar Galactica fic where Starbuck and Baltar go to a ship to investigate a possible murder by spacing on a ship that is pretty crapsack even by BSG Fleet standards (the crew is barely keeping the ship running and has almost no control over the refugees onboard).

        One of the witnesses they interview is a hall (street) vendor who keeps and breeds rats as a meat source to sell as food. When Starbuck and Baltar have to bail from the ship in their own shuttle, the vendor comes along lugging small crates of live rats as her future food source/merchandise.

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      3. I’ve eaten rabbit and squirrel happily, which covers the rodent angle just fine. I’ve eaten pig, which definitely covers the indiscriminate eater angle.

        Dead or sickening customers are not paying customers, past that first time. If it’s a long running stand, he probably vets his sources pretty well- or else his business shuts down.

        I’d probably finish that kabob, too.

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      4. Guinea pigs were, in fact, domesticated for eating purposes. They are still eaten in some parts of the world.

        So keeping rodents as food is not beyond us as a species.

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      6. I’ve heard Chihuahuas were originally raised to be food, too. Don’t know if it’s true, though.

        The original Hot Dogs. *grin*

        This has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve been bitten by two different Chihuahuas (not seriously) that snuck up behind me. *frown*

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      8. The museum in El Paso has one of the food-pots, shaped like a very fat little chihuahua. Like how we’d have a piggy vase. It was food.

        The sheepherders up in the high desert around Nevada, Oregon and California ate dog, too. My dad got dragged around by his grandfather on his rounds and a very hospitable shepherd told him to “dig deep, there’s puppy in the bottom” of the stew pot.

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  2. “(If you think this is only a past problem, look up turkey fryer explosions. Carelessness and stupidity with burning things is a human constant.)”

    Or look up Fail Army, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and True TV for grill accidents that could have gotten or did get out of hand real fast. It’s enough to give you a phobia, honestly. Brrr.

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  3. Food and snacks!

    I’m not a bad cook myself. I’ve made battered chicken, steaks, pasta, rice…

    I bake too, but then one of my friends told me they thought “People only bake when they are sad.”

    …What.

    I stopped baking snacks for my friends when we got together because of that.

    Not that I know where that came from. But for a while, I was doing a lot of cooking every week because I was getting to spend time with my friends.

    It’s a skill that takes time and effort to master. It can also be fun!

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    1. Is it bad that my first reaction to that is, “Man, that is such a First World Problems idea”?

      Because seriously. Baking. Anything you make at home will be tastier – and probably healthier – than anything you can get at the store. There are few things more satisfying than seeing a nice loaf of bread Rising, or that fresh baked smell. Plus you can lick the bowl and the beaters. What’s not to love?

      And I do say that being unable to eat gluten. GF stuff can still be delicious!

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      1. I know!

        As I said. I cooked because I like to, I’m proud of the skill! The kitchen smells so good!

        So, why would you do that if you were sad?

        It wasn’t just cookies I was baking either. Bread rolls. I love fresh bread, it’s the best! Especially when it’s warm.

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      2. Only problem with making it yourself- the batters don’t always manage to make it to their final, finished form.

        Made too much double chocolate chip cookie dough, decided I’d put half in the freezer to bake later. But, ah… turns out, frozen cookie dough tastes just fine on its own… it just kinda, disappeared. A spoonful at a time.

        Shame about those mice. They were determined enough to break into the freezer for a nibble or three.

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    2. I would kinda hesitate to bake if I were really sad, because you have to have your mind in the game. I guess if it were something difficult to ruin, you’d be okay.

      I mean, like if the cookie dough were premade, and all you had to do was preheat and bake, the worst that could happen would be slightly charcoaled cookies, and everybody still eats those.

      But yeah, I like to bake in the early morning, before anything’s even happened, or when everybody else in the house is already busy. I don’t do anything particularly difficult, but I’ve never really found baking tricky, per se. (Reasonably steady ovens are most of the work.)

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    3. My guess, they knew a stress-baker. Or several. Baking can be pretty involved, and depending on what and how much you are making, doesn’t leave much time to think and sink further into despair.

      Plus, sometimes you just need to throttle something, and batters and doughs won’t usually summon the cops.

      Unless they’re brownies. Might want to be suspicious of those.

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    4. OTOH, it’s non-trivial. They used to have communal ovens, when you were lucky. Built up a big fire, racked it out, put in the stuff that needed the highest temperatures, took it out when done, put in the stuff for the next highest — you’d put in as many bunches as you could to maximize the use.

      People used to have porridge as so much easier. The root of “lady” means “loaf-kneader” or bread-maker.

      The perpetual ovens we all take for granted, where heat is applied during baking, are modern. (See Ruth Goodman Domestic Revolution. English access to them is probably why England did not develop pastry shops to match the French.)

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    5. :stares at idea, blinking:
      Oh, you know what?

      My family… kind of does that.

      When someone dies, we go make food. It’s a kind of thing you can do when you’re mentally checked out. Baked stuff is a good choice, if it’s something you can do on autopilot, but a lot of casseroles and other non-fussy just constant stuff.

      We’ve also been known to start cleaning other people’s house or similar nonsense. Because we have to do something

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  4. I had not thought of this. So I’ll need to think about this.

    And it occurs to me in any setting, it will change over time. The street food the camp followers are making is going to be different but similar to the stuff the great fusion bottle trains are bringing with them 10-20 years later after the war is over, but they will probably be related, and maybe upscaled. But they’d also have new things that having high local energy density would enable, that couldn’t have been done previously.

    I need to go get a few histories of baking, grilling and fast food… And I need to go track down a bunch of the Townsends episodes on period fast food and street food.

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  5. We have a wonderful food truck culture where I live! We even have a cooperative between at least one bar and several food trucks next to it.

    And there is/was a program on TV that was called The Great Food Truck Race. One of the competitors on it one season joined because if they won, they’d have the money to replace their former food truck that somehow went up in flames. Others on the show were hoping that the money would be enough to let them buy a store front.

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  6. There’s also another consideration that kind of goes unnoticed in our modern day, most things running off electricity, world.

    Fuel. Cost and availability.

    Mind, I get this mainly from fantasy books, mainly Mercedes Lackey, so I haven’t actually looked up statistics… but especially if you’re poor then the assumption goes you don’t have a) the time to cook all or any of your own meals because you’re working; b) the space, as especially if you’re living in a rented room you might not have a fireplace, just a room that backs onto someone else’s fireplace, or the chimney, forget a dedicated cooking oven, and c) the ability to pay for the fuel.

    I have no idea how accurate that is to the real world, but I bet probably decently accurate, especially in feudal eras and cities where space would be at a premium. I also bet that if electricity to the oven and fridge and what have you was billed separately to the rest of the house…

    It’s something I want to research, you know, somewhere on the list with everything else I want to research.

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  7. OTOH, fire was pretty much the only way to keep warm. In warmer climes, mass food production was one thing, but in colder ones, you had to have the fire anyway.

    Still, there was commercial food preparation. There was a cook shop in London during Anglo-Saxon times. A writer says so, gives its rather long menu, and says this is fitting for a large city, and modern historians Have Thoughts about the ambiguity of language — having a cook shop at all is fitting? Or is it the menu?

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  8. I’ve got a cultural melange in one of my stories. Mostly due to being set in a beach town that doubles as a shipping port(Weird Geography involved.) As an example, my main character is quite glad she didn’t get the pizza of the day(Mozzarella, Fish flakes, hot sauce, corn and octopi. Tripe extra silver!)

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  9. Apparently one of the hazards of having an apartment house/house house toilet hooked up to the ancient Roman water and sewer system, was that occasionally an octopus might make his way up the sewer and into the latrine. And frankly, I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t just come into the house at that point.

    I feel that rats in a connected ancient sewer were bad enough, thank you, so a small octopus infestation would be really annoying/creepy.

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