My Love Affair with Street Food

      I adore Thai street food. Love it. LOVE it. Eat it every single day and, if I don’t, miss it like crazy. I never get sick of sitting down on a faded plastic stool, often with questionable carry-capacity, scooting up to a metal card table, and chowing down on freshly prepared deliciousness. It will never get old and I can guarantee that it will be something that I mourn losing before I leave. 
  For many Westerners, street food is a bit iffy. Ordering food from a cart displaying is various raw wares and eating such food whilst sitting on the sidewalk is not something that 1st world citizens do with any frequency. Questions of sanitation are probably to first to pop up. Then there is the worry about what precisely one is eating. Fair enough. I get the initial apprehension. But, if you are going to come to Thailand (or any of Southeast Asia, India, Central/South America, or China....all places where street food is king) it is a tourist crime not to indulge in street food on multiple occasions. Get over the sanitation bit. I would rather see the person (and the hand) that is cooking my dinner than have them cloaked behind a kitchen door.  No, the food cart might not make an ‘A’ on a US health department scorecard but I doubt my kitchen in the States would do much better. Furthermore, Thais eat street food everyday themselves. If there were some hidden sanitation crisis I guarantee that street carts wouldn’t be frequented by families day after day. Not every country bathes in hand sanitizer. You’ll live. Promise. 
  The really delightful thing about street food is its variance. You won’t see a measuring cup or spoon-set. Instead, you’ll watch a street-chef prepare a meal from scratch, in minutes, from memory. Amazing in and of itself. Recipes vary by vendor, by street, by province, by region. For instance, in Bangkok, the som-tom makers understand my tender (by thai-standards) palate with regard to spice quotient... They understand my ‘pheed nit noy na ka’ to mean 1-2 chiles at maximum. But outside of Bangkok? In the heart of Issaan ‘pheed nit noy na ka’ seems to translate to: ‘I’d like to feel my tongue again, if it takes a day or two thats okay, just so long as it is not permanently in fire’. Not that I am complaining... I think that eating locally, on the street, in the proverbial gastronomic trenches is that quickest and easiest way to immerse myself in the particularities of a place. Where else can I get a literal taste of local culture while people watching, finding out the local gossip, and breathing in the sights/sounds/smells of an area? All this and the knowledge that I am supporting local people and eating (mostly) local agricultural products... Never have I ever been so satisfied with a meal on so many levels.