Dogged Determination
Why Toronto’s hot dog hegemony has it in for anything but warmed-over wieners
BY Jessica Johnston
Photography by Lisa Kannakko
After returning home from a trip around the world in 2000 and being amazed by the abundance and variety of foods for sale on the streets of South America, Europe and Asia, Katie Rabinowicz was inspired to start Fork in the Road, a pedal-powered food cart that would sell a range of world food from Laotian rice in banana leaves to Mexican masa cakes on the streets of downtown Toronto.
She knew it would be tough, but she never guessed it would be impossible. While kabobs, soups and curries may spill from the streets of many of the world’s cities, Toronto is ruled by a hot dog hegemony. And unfortunately for anyone who would be excited to buy a samosa or a salad on the street, the wieners have the law on their side.
Street food is governed by provincial health regulations that lay out the standards for handling, storing and serving food. Under these rules, all catering vehicles and “mobile preparation premises,” or food carts, must conform to restaurant standards for food-storage temperature and hygiene. That means they must have a supply of hot and cold running water under pressure, and refrigeration facilities, among other things.
Exceptions to the rules are granted to few, and those include stands that sell only cold drinks, fries, packaged ice cream, roasted nuts, popcorn or the infamous “pre-cooked meat products in the form of wieners or similar products to be served on a bun.”
“I tried to wade through all the ridiculous bylaws and I got different answers from different people in the city,” Rabinowicz says. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a coherent policy around it, except that they really don’t want people selling anything besides hot dogs.”
Unable to get a vending permit (which are no longer being issued for downtown Toronto) or permission to vend her world food from a cart, Rabinowicz looked at selling on private property, considered getting a permit to vend from a truck, and even thought about elevating her puffed rice masala to cult status to take advantage of a little-known bylaw that allows religious groups to sell more than street meat. “I was thinking of coming up with some religion,” she says half seriously. Instead, she vends her arapas and sticky rice balls solely at farmers markets and special events where health regulations are interpreted differently.
According to Susanne Burkhardt, a registered public health inspector who has prepared a report on street food for the Toronto Food Policy Council, the city’s public health department doesn’t have the resources to encourage innovation in sidewalk snacks. There are non-wiener foods that could potentially be sold within the current framework, but she admits it’s difficult for vendors to figure out what those might be.
That complicated framework needs to change, says Wayne Roberts, project coordinator for the Toronto Food Policy Council. “[It’s part of] Anglo-American heritage to make 5,000 rules about something, very specific rules, and the impact of this on food safety has often been to eliminate small producers.” Roberts hopes that Burkhardt’s report will open up a discussion of this issue and lead to some collaborative solutions.
One of the obstacles to efforts to diversify Toronto’s street food culture is that most people are not aware that there is even a problem—after all, hot dogs are cheap and portable and a defining part of North American society. But as Burkhardt points out, “street food isn’t just about food—it’s about culture, it’s about economics, it’s about urban life. It’s about lots of different things. It’s about expressing diversity, it’s about vibrant street scenes.”
