There are people selling food from vehicles or similar in many European cities.

They need a licence.

I once reported the man selling ice cream from the street outside my office for leaving his engine running, the fumes were coming inside our office. The police arrested him, and siezed the vehicle, since it turned out he didn't have a license, and had previously been given a warning.

Example: http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/business/markets/street_...

You must be German. ;-)

Wait what? Maybe his engine was running to run the freezer to keep your ice cream cold?

If so, that served him right for running a 70 KW Diesel engine to operate a 0.5 KW freezer.

If he was ignoring regulations on energy efficiency, it's very possible he was also ignoring regulations on health and hygiene.

There was a locked plug socket on the base of a lamppost outside, and a very small sign saying it was for the use of the street food trader.

I asked the trader to use the socket, rather than his engine, since the diesel fumes were coming into our office, and the adjacent building was a primary school. He refused, so I reported him to the local council. They referred it to the police, since the van's number plate wasn't in their records.

Is selling food without regulation a good idea?

Yes.

Anecdotally, I get food poisoning more from eateries in the west proudly displaying their health and safety certs than I do from street stalls in east asia.

Morally, it's my own responsibility as a human being to decide whether to eat something or not.

And practically, it lowers the barrier of entry for people to actually make a living. Imagine your financial world came crashing down, you had almost no funds, couldn't get a job, and no social welfare. How long would you be able to start selling food off a cart with no license or business registration in a busy pedestrian area before the police shut you down?

Anecdotally, I have never had food poisoning in my life.

Morally, morals don't have much to do with this.

Practically, it's impossible for me to judge the sanitary conditions of a food stall. Or, if possible, it'd be wasteful for everyone to spend two hours checking everything instead of, as a society, organising a system where a trained professional does that for all of us.

Specifically, you would need to carry a thermometer to check both the refrigeration as well as hot storage. You'd want to take samples and send them to a lab for bacterial cultures. You need to check the employees' bathroom for soap and clean towels. Then, come back the next morning and check that they threw out leftovers that can't be kept overnight, and properly sealed and stored those that can. Make sure people, especially doctors, know your toll-free number to report incidents of food poisoning that may be linked to restaurants.

In Taiwan they manage to have street food and Markets, they are all at designated places though.

They also seem quite big on regulation, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are inspections.

How are you getting food poisoning often enough to draw statistical conclusions from it?

I never drew any statistical conclusions. I literally prefaced it with "anecdotally", to make it clear to everyone it was an anecdote.

Let me reword the question. Are you actually getting food poisoning enough that you can say how often it happens in each place? Even as an anecdote, you need a bunch of data points to calculate a rate of food poisoning. (And if your answer is yes, why are you getting so much more food poisoning than others?)

An anecdote like "I only got food poisoning once and it was at X" works fine with one data point. But rates need several data points.

For what it's worth, a week of eating nothing but Bangkok street food left me feeling better than a week of eating in European or American restaurants. (X = ~32)

I'm not sure if "feeling better" actually says anything about the food safety.

Don't let the good get in the way of the perfect. People griped about small sample size. I was adding mine.

In lieu of a bacteria count and kitchen audit, I feel like eating a lot of something and feeling good is a decent proxy for "Thing is safe to eat."

If you were eating the same kind of food in both places, it's a semi-decent proxy.

But most american/european restaurants are serving a completely different kind of food than bangkok street vendors. That's an enormous confounding factor, and how good you feel is quite likely from meal composition and unrelated to safety.

You need to be careful of the "holiday effect" with these kinds of comparisons. It's ruined many a biology paper...

I'm actually teaching myself statistics right now, but it's early stages yet. Does "anecdote" have some formal meaning? I meant it in the sense of "here's my personal experience, that I have not quantified at all".

That sounds fine for a definition of anecdote. But I'm making an argument about the definition of "more often". Even when talking about personal experience, without real statistics, you need a certain amount of data before you can say anything about often-ness/rate.

If you're in a class, you will soon hear the overused phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data".

You can out-smartass them by replying "Actually, it is".

An anecdote is a single data point. It's usually dismissed for all sorts of reasons, many of them valid.

BUT: contrary to popular opinion, they can be interesting, or even significant, depending on your priors, the payoffs of different outcomes etc. It's become fashionable to repeat the lazy phrase above, similar to "correlation does not prove causation", or "a survey with n=<any number> is completely worthless".

Example: "I've never seen this tree before. I wonder if those fruits are edible" / "It's just an anecdote, but my father ate one of those, started throwing up 30min later, and died the same day".

> If you're in a class, you will soon hear the overused phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data". > You can out-smartass them by replying "Actually, it is".

I don't think it is. The plural of anecdote is probably something more like "a lot of single points without any care taken to correct for variables."

To get real data there needs to be a lot than just more anecdotes. There needs to be careful measurement, followed by correction for a lot of other factors.

Here's one example: "I've never seen this tree before. I wonder if those fruits are edible"

"It's just an anecdote, but my father ate one of those, started throwing up 30min later, and died the same day."

"What did he do before that?"

"Oh, he swam the dirty river, then started playing with that striped snake over there. He was a brave man, what with his heart problems and the cancer."

The parent said "depending on your priors".

Someone drops dead right after eating a strange fruit. Maybe they had heart disease and coincidentally died right after eating said fruit, but it's far more likely that the fruit had something to do with it. This is a perfectly statistically valid assumption, given that the vast majority of plants are toxic.

Once you live in a bayesian universe, every anecdote is data. Every data point might be incorrect; that's a given. The "plural of anecdote" line is just a particularly rigid way of frequentist thinking.

I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

(Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be really careful that you've done the work and aren't just deluding yourself.

Or, to put it differently - every anecdote is really only a data point if you understand what exactly it's measuring and what has been excluded. If you haven't taken the care necessary, then it's very easy to draw false conclusions. People are really bad witnesses and really bad at seeing what is and isn't given in the information they think they have - particularly if the anecdote is time-shifted from the point it was taken.

I completely agree (and said in my post) that any single anecdote can come with all sorts of problems.

I just believe there are too many people repeating such criticism thinking it'll make them sound smart, when in reality, they wouldn't be able to function if they didn't trust single data points almost all of the time.

Most of these occasions don't appear to be "trials" to us, but they actually are. Examples:

- "I really enjoyed that restaurant and will go back there soon"

- "Don't take a taxi from the airport! The train is much cheaper and the taxi driver just ripped me off"

- "The Hitchhikers' Guide is a great book–I should read another one by Douglas Adams".

-...

All these are essentially statistical trials with n=1. What makes single experiences in these cases possibly relevant is (among other things) our believe in the low variability of what we're measuring: A restaurant's quality doesn't usually change dramatically from one day to the next etc...

Then, there are more complex examples, where learning from n=1 is slightly more dubious, but without alternatives: "Don't start a land war in Eurasia", or the other German saying: "It happened, therefore it can happen again". On a more personal level, we all have to learn an awful lot about human relationships from a very limited set of experiences.

Now imagine your financial world crashes down, so you make a loan at the bank with heavy interest and open a small noodle shop in an alley, which is the last chance to save your family from going homeless.

And then on Day 2 you find five food stalls blocking your store...

Edit: Also do you think people selling food in a busiest street are not being regulated? It's a prized spot, and these guys are professionals. Chances are that it's being regulated. Just not by the police.

And the "tax" they pay for the privilege of operating there isn't being used to, say, build a better road.

Most of them are in front of grocers and markets. They make food, sometimes pay for the access to the stream of people, and generally make it a better market - or they're friends with the owners of the market. That's my impression at least - I'll ask some local friends.

Never seen any food stalls outside a restaurant unless it's a very very busy street.

Granted I've never done a complete analysis of where all food carts are located but a few places that spring to mind.

Suk Soi 8 - In front of 7-11 but also across from a restaurant Suk Soi 5 - In front of several restaurants Suk Soi 7 - In front of several restaurants Suk Soi 11 - In front of several restaurants

I could name tons of more obscure places that I remember eating at but the above are pretty well known to most tourists and expats.

They are not friends of the local business owners. They pay the police for the space. That's why every time they have one of these street vendor crackdowns mandated by the big boys at the top of the food chain the shops usually pop back up in a week or two once the heat is off. Police can't stand not getting paid their rightful bribes.

Does anyone really think that all of those store owners right on lower Sukhumvit (between Soi 5 and Asoke) want people selling dildos in front of their shops? Viagra pills, bootleg DVDs, etc?

Literally, I have photos of cops sitting there having lunch with these street merchants (Soi 15'ish area) with dildos and fake viagra sitting on the same table they're eating off of. Guess who that street vendor is friends with? Who's the store owner going to complain to? Nobody if they value their health.

Alas those photos will never see the light of day for much the same reason.

Most of the stores you are referring in Bangkok are mainly big chains or shops run by people with lots of businesses.

The people who really struggle are the people who run the stalls :/

Most tax a government extorts from you isn't being used to build a better road either.

Anyway, I probably shouldn't generalise all asian food stall markets. Thailand is quite a poor and corrupt country AFAIK. I have no idea how someone gets a space for their cart in Bangkok. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you know more about how it works there than I do.

Full disclosure: I have no idea how it works in Bangkok. I'm extrapolating from what I learned in Seoul.

However, I'd be surprised if getting a profitable spot for one's cart doesn't involve a lot of "connections" and occasional show of force. After all, there are many more people who are willing to use these spots. If government isn't protecting the "owners" via property rights, someone else is doing the job. (It could be the merchants themselves. Whether that's desirable is left for the readers to decide.)

Fwiw, I found that Thai culture seems to have a very palpable avoidance of aggression and violence. (Buddhist thing?)

I'm not naive enough to assume this trumps economic struggle, but I will say I was surprised that a lot of things you see elsewhere in tourist areas aren't prevalent in Thailand. E.g. bag snatching, mugging, etc.

Though not as far as Japan's "Excuse me sir, you left your wallet at the restaurant 30 minutes ago. Apologies that it took me this long to catch up with you on the subway and return it."

The avoidance of aggression and violence has to do with "saving face". People who act aggresive in public "lose face" and thereby the respect of the public. The concept is more or less explained here: https://www.pattayaunlimited.com/thailand-land-of-face/

When visiting Thailand, even if some Thai person mistreats you (e.g. perhaps a tuktuk driver overcharges you), always try to act friendly (don't act angry in public). Try to resolve problems while keeping a smile. If you can't resolve problems this way, just go with the flow. This is a good way to avoid problems.

Do you have any data beyond your anecdote? Something that shows that food inspection is actually detrimental to food safety?

I don't think that anybody is saying that inspections are detrimental to food safety; I think that we're saying that a lack of regulations is not markedly detrimental to food safety.

None at all. Quite frankly, even if the data showed the opposite on that point I wouldn't change my opinion. The last two points are much more important.