No Centro ninguém passa fome: comida de rua em um mundo porvir

Abstract

The processes of revitalization of cities, anchored in the potentialization of flows of the world economy, transform their spaces, their social relations and their distribution of power, delegitimizing the counter-hegemonic use of public spaces. Thus, the sale of food on the street by street vendors is increasingly marginalized and criminalized in the light of the legitimized models of the city and eating that are supported by the hegemony of Food Safety. Considering this context, this research aimed to get closer to what street food can do when stripped of the labels given by scientific and state statutes that reduce it mostly to poor, antiquated, dirty, inferiorized, disorderly, illegal and of the poor for the poor. The study was supported by the methodological strategy of cartography and had as an empirical field the streets of the Centro neighborhood in the city of Fortaleza-Ceará-Brazil. Field research was carried out for eight months (April-2018 to October-2018 and June-2019 to August-2019). In it, the daily life of informal street vendors and street food eaters that are illegal in the eyes of the State. The empirical material produced derived from informal conversations, audio recordings and field diary notes, among other artifacts. The research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Bahia. While the Fortaleza2040 Project advances with the spectacularization of the city in the logic of consumption and other street food commercialization formats (street food, take away) disperse in the urban fabric, street food sold informally resists as the main manifestation in the streets of the Centre. There, mobile food vendors, eating practices and experiences manufacture political configurations that enhance food accessibility, add diversity to the contingency, populate the streets with food possibilities, trace stories and combine in the mosaic of interactions, smells, images, tastes and noise that make up the everyday alchemy of the Centre, refuge of a pedestrian Fortaleza. The street food vendors, despite their landless conditions in the face of regimes of property and urbanity, experiment and construct artfully the Centro as a world to come where “nobody goes hungry”. This Centro “where no one goes hungry” appears as a tear in the dominant modes of subjectivation, sustained by the group actors that compose it, opening cracks in the unison captures of capital in which food and the city are commodities that enhance profits. Street vendors, with their affordable prices, establish other bases for negotiation, cooperation and distribution on the streets, also provoking adaptations and transformations in the food policy of formalized trade in the Centre. Furthermore, they provide consumers with a variety of basic or less processed foods, promoting traditional and regional food practices, constituting an important popular strategy for promoting food and nutritional security, despite the hegemony of Food Safety in the state management of the phenomenon. In this scenario, hunger can be referred to as a desiring production, memory and latent need that produces realities, placing food on the streets and produces urban territories with greater food accessibility in the city. Keywords: street food, food and nutritional security, hunger, cartography.