The following article appeared in the June 7 edition of the Guelph Mercury:
Health rules restrict sidewalk vendors to selling hotdogs and sausages on a bun, but maybe it’s time to have another look at what’s safe to eat on the street
Beat from summer job hunting downtown, Colin Winters grabs lunch at Moe Ghonhah’s hotdog cart in St. George’s Square.
As he chews through relish, ketchup, mustard and onions piled atop a grilled wiener, the 20-year-old says he likes his food on the street.
It’s fast and it’s cheap. But hotdogs get old.
What he’d really like is a gyro. He says someone should open a stand selling the sliced and spiced meat, maybe in a pita.
But it’s just not possible under provincial regulations that limit street meat to the “reheating of precooked meat products in the form of wieners or similar sausage products to be served on a bun.”
No burgers or noodles. No dumplings or kebobs.
There’s been a lot of talk recently in newspapers and among politicians about relaxing the rules in support of vendor variety.
Guelph Ward 2 councillor Ian Findlay put the issue before a city hall committee yesterday.
He proposes council figure out a way around the province’s street-meat standards.
“I think there are a lot of products that could be conveniently packaged and sold by a street vendor,” he says.
Much of the opposition lies in sanitation concerns.
“There are storage concerns with having meat juices, i.e. blood, dripping onto a ready-to-eat product like a hotdog,” says Shawn Zentner, health protection manager with Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health.
“And I can’t imagine a precooked steak, warmed up on the barbecue, tasting like something other than the bottom of a shoe.”
“French fries, maybe?” asks Courtney Houston as she hangs out by the fountain with her friend Katelyn Pellegrini and their kids.
“Oh, french fries would be good,” Pellegrini says. “Nice, greasy food.”
But fries mean litres of boiling oil on the street corner. “The fire department might not like that idea,” Zentner says.
Ewen Lewis runs Feng’s Dumplings with his wife. They sell their secret family recipe pot stickers and sauces at the farmer’s market with a choice of three fillings: chicken, shrimp, and tofu mushroom. In the winter, they sell hot soup too.
The health rules for markets differ from the rules on the street; markets favour variety. Feng’s must pre-cook the dumplings in a health-unit approved kitchen. They gently heat the dumplings at the market in electric chafing dishes.
Lewis says they would consider selling their food on the street if it is possible to do so safely and the rules allow it. “I think it would work well.”
Lewis used to live in Taiwan, where you can buy almost anything on the street. “A lot of the food is either cooked in boiling hot water or it’s deep fried,” he says.
Vendors sell rice, soup, pig’s blood and squid in Taiwan; perhaps a burger would sell better on a Guelph street.
But traditional hamburgers have to be formed and cooked and they tend to be bloody, like steak.
Raw chicken is especially dangerous; the threat of cross-contamination abounds in a preparation space as tight as a cart. “A hotdog cart isn’t like a restaurant,” Zentner says.
But a lot of protein now comes precooked and frozen — chicken, beef, and soy, for instance. The regulations, written in 1990, don’t necessarily reflect the products available in 2007. “At the time that they wrote (the law) there were only a couple things that existed in pre-wrapped and precooked form, like hot dogs and sausages,” Zentner says.