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Street Food Home Introduction Louisville, KY Cedar Rapids Chicago Denmark Plano/Dallas/Fort Worth Richmond, VA Singapore Hawker Centres The Rules Teh Tarik / Turkish Ice Cream Chinatown Bugis Market Laksa Farewell Trenton, NJ San Antonio, TX India Introduction Bottled Water Roadside Coconut New York City Nashville, TN Olympia, WA	India Bottled Water and Sanitation I mentioned the glass of milk in the intro, and my coworkers telling me yes, I was right to leave it. They further told me that they relied on bottled water, and that I should also. When you go out, never accept water in a glass. Always ask for bottled water, and check the cap. Some places will refill the bottles with tap water and try to serve them again. My coworkers, who lived in Noida, did not drink the tap water there, and advised me to not swallow when I brushed my teeth. Coffee and tea, on the other hand, are made with boiling water, and are thus relatively safe. When we went up to Shri Cheshmundawari Temple outside of Mysore, we got a coffee from a roadside stand on the way back down. Drinking hot coffee from a paper cup requires holding it a very specific way, especially if you’re walking down the hill from a temple on a crowded road. Paper cups are preferred for sanitary reasons, but create a tremendous litter problem. There was no public service litter pickup in most of the areas I was in, no curbside trash cans. There might be an old person with a broom doing some street cleaning, but that’s only if someone in the neighborhood is paying them. The Indian public sector at the time did not spend much on municipal services. Thus, in Bengaluru, I was staying in a very nice hotel, and walking two blocks to an immaculate corporate campus down a gravel road with a ditch beside it that was nearly an open sewer. Paper cups floated in murky water, among partly-sunk bits of garbage, and the stench was appalling. This was capitalism in something of a raw form, I realized. The hotel owner and the corporation spent all their money on their own facilities, and hardly a rupee on the road that led up to them. Street food in India is thus risky because of the lack of public maintenance of the environment. Kind of like New York City, really. I have said, many times, that India prepared me for New York.

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India

Bottled Water and Sanitation

I mentioned the glass of milk in the intro, and my coworkers telling me yes, I was right to leave it. They further told me that they relied on bottled water, and that I should also.

When you go out, never accept water in a glass. Always ask for bottled water, and check the cap. Some places will refill the bottles with tap water and try to serve them again. My coworkers, who lived in Noida, did not drink the tap water there, and advised me to not swallow when I brushed my teeth.

Coffee and tea, on the other hand, are made with boiling water, and are thus relatively safe. When we went up to Shri Cheshmundawari Temple outside of Mysore, we got a coffee from a roadside stand on the way back down. Drinking hot coffee from a paper cup requires holding it a very specific way, especially if you’re walking down the hill from a temple on a crowded road.

Paper cups are preferred for sanitary reasons, but create a tremendous litter problem. There was no public service litter pickup in most of the areas I was in, no curbside trash cans. There might be an old person with a broom doing some street cleaning, but that’s only if someone in the neighborhood is paying them. The Indian public sector at the time did not spend much on municipal services.

Thus, in Bengaluru, I was staying in a very nice hotel, and walking two blocks to an immaculate corporate campus down a gravel road with a ditch beside it that was nearly an open sewer. Paper cups floated in murky water, among partly-sunk bits of garbage, and the stench was appalling. This was capitalism in something of a raw form, I realized. The hotel owner and the corporation spent all their money on their own facilities, and hardly a rupee on the road that led up to them.

Street food in India is thus risky because of the lack of public maintenance of the environment. Kind of like New York City, really. I have said, many times, that India prepared me for New York.