1. What is street food?
FAO defines the street food as food sold at various points to ease consumer access at a low cost affordable by the poor. Street foods are ready-to-eat foods and beverages prepared and/or sold by vendors or hawkers especially in the streets and other similar places. 2. Why are the people addicted in eating street foods?
Street foods may be the least expensive and most accessible means of obtaining a nutritionally balanced meal outside the home for many low income people, provided that the consumer is informed and able to choose the proper combination of foods. 3. What are the risks in eating street foods?
The risks of eating street foods remain a threat in many parts of the world due to serious food poisoning outbreaks that brings a fatal effect or even death. A lack of knowledge amongst street food vendors about the causes of food-borne disease is a major risk factor. Another riskof eating such street foods are the state of sanitation, freshness of the viands or lack thereof, the amount of sweat, hair, and saliva that goes to the exposed morsels, and the hand-washing practices. These hazards can cause diseases like typhoid fever, hepatitis, diarrhea and worst thing is liver cirrhosis. Street foods therefore can be sources of enteropathogens. The transmission of these pathogens via food to humans is due to defective personal hygiene.
Absence of proper food handling may result to contamination because of the exposure of the food to dust and flies. And also the lack of facilities for drainage and garbage disposal results in encouraging wastes to be thrown in the nearby areas. Such areas mostly act as a habitat for rodents, breeding points of flies and growth of micro-organisms. According to some researchers, grilled foods suchlike betamax, isaw, IUD, and adidas can cause trikinosis or trichiniasis trikinisis, a parasitic disease caused by the roundworm Trichinella spiralis. When the larvae are released, reach maturity, and mate in the intestines, the females are now capable to produce live larvae. The parasites are then carried from the gastrointestinal tract by the bloodstream to various muscles, where they become encysted.
This disease exhibits no symptoms and is discovered only at autopsy. On the other hand, street foods like calamares found out by BFAD (Bureau of Food and Drugs) through a series of laboratory tests that there’s a huge amount of formalin, a form of formaldehyde (a preservative) in the frozen squids being imported from nearby countries ( the recorded specimen was from China). This causes the adverse effects in the body through the blood that result to vomiting, scarred skin and muscle pains.