Street Food in Taiwan

Street food is food obtainable from a streetside vendor, often from a makeshift or portable stall. While some street foods are regional, many are not, having spread beyond their region of origin. The food and green groceries sold in farmers' markets may also fall into this category, including the food exhibited and sold in gathering fairs, such as agricultural show and state fair. Most street food is both finger and fast food. Food and green groceries are available on the street for a fraction of the cost of a restaurant meal and a supermarket. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 2.5 billion people eat street food every day.

Concerns of cleanliness and freshness often discourage people from eating street food. Lack of refrigeration is often construed as a lack of cleanliness or hygiene; on the other hand, street food often uses particularly fresh ingredients for this very reason.

Street food is intimately connected with take-out, junk food, snacks, and fast food; it is distinguished by its local flavor and by being purchased on the sidewalk, without entering any building. Both take-out and fast food are often sold from counters inside buildings. Increasingly the line is blurred, as restaurants such as McDonald's begin to offer window counters.

With the increasing pace of globalization and tourism, the safety of street food has become one of the major concerns of public health, and a focus for governments and scientists to raise public awarenesses. FSA hence provides comprehensive guidances of food safety for the vendors, traders and retailors of the street food sector in the United Kingdom.[6] Other effective ways of curbing the safety of street foods are through mystery shopping programs, through training and rewarding programs to market stallers, through regulatory governing and membership management programs, or through technical testing programs.

Taiwan's street food is well-known in Chinese culture, especially that from the area of Tainan. Influences include the (Min Nan) flavor brought by the emigrants during the Ming loyalist rule era and Japanese tastes in the Japanese colonial period, to 1949, when the Nationalist retreated to the island with people from every other province of the mainland. Bubble/Boba Milk Tea originated on the streets of Taiwan. Taiwanese street food includes fried stinky tofu, oyster pancakes, Zongzi (especially in Tainan), fried meatball, sugarcane juice (Taiwanese sugarcane was sweet famous with Cuba), soup of boiled Trionychidae, fish ball soup, Baozi and water fried Baozi, rice cakes made with pork blood, and rice and noodle dishes.