Buying and eating food on the street is a tradition as old as our first cities, providing customers with a (usually) inexpensive way to sate hunger and vendors with a livelihood. Depending on locale, street food can maintain diverse culinary traditions or devolve into standardized offerings. Street food vendors have long faced many challenges, both regulatory and practical, but these challenges have been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic with its upheavals of urban life and increased friction between the transitory vendor and brick-and-mortar food venues.

For this Kitchen Table Conversation, Gamze Ineceli and Scott Barton will open a conversation with Ansel Mullins and Sarah Khan. Ansel is an American ex-pat who lived for many years in Istanbul, where he co-founded Culinary Backstreets, and now resides in Lisbon. Sarah is a multi-media maker with a focus on food and migrants; both have a lot of insights and experience to share. Renni Flores of Sabor da Bahia will be joining with hands-on experience from Bahia and Los Angeles, and Jay Gyebi of Mukase Chic will report from Accra, about how she and other street food vendors uphold regional foodways. Altogether this Kitchen Table Conversation will be an inspiration and offer much insight for our 2022 Symposium topic, Portable Food.