[Curbside produce vendors often help communities that lack a
grocery store to maintain access to healthy, inexpensive food. But
long before the pandemic, many cities made it difficult for mobile
produce sellers and other street food vendors to operate]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TAKING IT TO THE STREET: FOOD VENDING DURING AND AFTER COVID-19  
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Catherine Brinkley
February 17, 2021
The Conversation
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_ Curbside produce vendors often help communities that lack a grocery
store to maintain access to healthy, inexpensive food. But long before
the pandemic, many cities made it difficult for mobile produce sellers
and other street food vendors to operate _

Yusuf Abdullah, one of the city’s horse-cart produce vendors known
as arabbers, leads Tony and his cart through the streets of Baltimore,
Maryland. , Robert MacPherson/AFP via Getty Images

 

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we eat.

Because outdoor dining poses less risk of infection, many cities have
changed their laws to accommodate public demand.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio estimates that closing 87 streets
and allowing outdoor dining saved nearly 100,000 jobs. Chicago has
offered restaurants a US$5,000 grant to weatherize outdoor dining for
the winter.

And San Mateo, California, is considering the once unthinkable:
permanently removing some parking spots to allow year-round outdoor
dining.

But what about mobile food vendors?

For the past 10 years, as a community and regional development
professor, I have studied how street vending provides an economic
lifeline for many people, particularly in low-income communities.

With increasing income inequality, growing unemployment and bans on
indoor dining because of COVID-19, more people are turning to the
street to make a living and to accommodate a rising need.

MANY FLAVORS OF STREET FOOD VENDING

When you think of street food, perhaps an image that comes to mind is
the trendy food trucks increasingly popping up on streets and in
parking lots across the United States.

But it also includes mobile vendors selling mangoes at the beach or
fruits and vegetables from stands on the sidewalk.

In San Diego, California, for example, vendors called fruteros use
paleteros, or pushcarts, to sell fruit in low-income Latino
neighborhoods.

In Baltimore, African American vendors known as arabbers sell fresh
whole fruit and vegetables from horseback.

In Troy, New York, the nonprofit Veggie Mobile sells fruits and
vegetables in low-income areas via a refrigerated box truck.

INEXPENSIVE AND HEALTHY FOOD

While some researchers were asking whether farmers markets could
provide affordable and healthy food to low-income neighborhoods, my
very first food study, in 2013, examined the affordability of produce
sold by street vendors who already operated in these neighborhoods.

With two colleagues, I compared the price and variety of produce from
street food vendors with produce sold at grocery stores in
Philadelphia.

We found that curbside vendors offered 18 to 71 different varieties of
fresh produce at lower prices, ranging from one-half to one-third less
than the price for a similar item in the nearest grocery store. The
curbside vendors all got their produce from a central produce
terminal, just as the grocery stores did, but they did not mark up
their prices as much.

We also found that many mobile vendors had operated on the same corner
for decades, outlasting grocery stores that opened and closed numerous
times in a few years.

Such closures can turn neighborhoods into so-called “food deserts”
– urban areas that lack a supermarket and the amenities that come
with it, like employment opportunities, pharmacies and ATMs.

In a 2017 nationwide study on food deserts, two colleagues and I found
that curbside produce vendors often help communities that lack a
grocery store to at least maintain access to healthy, inexpensive
food, thereby reducing the amount of diet-related health diseases,
like diabetes and obesity.

Produce vendors have a particularly positive impact on the dietary
health of low-income eaters. Customers who use SNAP benefits, for
example, are more likely to shop at street vendors than other produce
sources. Consequently, they spend an average of $3.86 more per
transaction on fruits and vegetables, according to a 2015 study
published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases.

FOOD FIGHT

A January report on New York City street vendors shows that the
pandemic has made life much harder for these workers, who are often
not eligible for federal loans and do not qualify for social services.
But long before the pandemic, many cities made it difficult for mobile
produce sellers and other street food vendors to operate.

To understand the rise of street vendor bans, researchers at the
University of Southern California conducted a study published in 2013
that tracked the rise of street food legislation across 11 cities from
2008 to 2012.

They found that restrictive regulations are often created at the
behest of brick-and-mortar restaurants. Restaurants have
well-established trade associations that lobby local and state
governments for protection against competition, affecting both food
trucks and other forms of street food vending.

To understand how pervasive these measures were, in 2020 I reviewed
street food vending regulations in a random sample of 213 of
California’s 465 cities and all 58 counties.

I found that 85% of cities and 75% of counties limited street food
vending for reasons beyond public health protocols. The restrictions
involved zoning regulations that limited where vendors could operate,
ordinances that restricted the times of operations and strict labor
laws not enforced on brick-and-mortar businesses.

Many restrictions effectively banned street food vending entirely.

The city of Davis, for example, prohibits vendors from stopping for
more than 5 minutes, effectively banning the practice entirely because
it often takes more than 5 minutes to wait on a customer. And Butte
County requires vendors to be interviewed and fingerprinted by the
sheriff – something not required of brick-and-mortar workers.

Because mobile food vendors are often immigrants and people of color,
these policies are intimidating barriers for an already marginalized
group.

FEEDING CHANGE

In response to these prohibitions, food vendors have begun to form
their own advocacy associations.

The Los Angeles Street Food Vending campaign, launched in 2008, was so
successful that in 2018 California legalized street food vending
statewide. The campaign highlighted the economic benefits to vendors
and eaters as well as the racism in the exclusionary legal codes.

In California, street food can now be regulated only for health and
safety reasons. As our study shows, many cities and counties will need
to update their policies. So far, there is no sign that cities are
starting to tackle this.

Though street food vendors are considered essential workers, Los
Angeles is fining vendors who don’t follow a newly created
permitting process, which is difficult to navigate and expensive.
Vendors pay between 10% and 20% of their annual earnings in inspection
and permitting fees.

Outdoor dining is the healthiest way to eat and keep local businesses
alive during a pandemic. Efforts to expand street food vending can
help keep the most vulnerable people out of poverty – and well fed
as well.

Every article you read here is written by university scholars and
researchers with deep expertise in their subjects, sharing their
knowledge in their own words. We don’t oversimplify complicated
issues, but we do explain and clarify. We believe bringing the voices
of experts into the public discourse is good for democracy.

Beth Daley
Editor and General Manager

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