Let's lift street food out of the gutter

Sleep in the street and you get moved on. Sex in the street incurs a large fine, at least. Street food, however, is a tolerated nuisance. Eating is the only biological function licensed for public parade. In London we have let it become a public menace. Stomach-churning smells spread from street corners. Gutters fill with undegradable cartons. Vendors offer instant enteritis. Soiled serviettes are borne on the air, along with spores from rotting rubbish. Slicks of grease and decomposing ice cream beslime the pavements. Fries, fritters and burgers, suppurating with fat, defile lips and fingers which the eaters cannot clean: London is not a city well endowed with public fountains or lavatories. The floors of Tube trains and buses become middens for the street-eaters' discards. When you have picked your way to your seat, you share it with something smelly. Most of the food does little to nourish humans, but rats gorge on the detritus.

The pity is that we endure so much disorder and discomfort for food which is so worthless: the industrial burger, the anodyne sandwich, the glutinous noodle, the malodorous kebab. Yet street food doesn't have to be this bad. We misunderstand the problem because we think it is new. For the poverty and uniformity of our street diet, we blame the routines of the contemporary city. For the dominance of the burger and fried chicken, we blame globalisation or its evil twin, "Americanisation". But street food is one of the oldest cuisines of the world.

Hot, ready-to-eat meals from street-stands and "takeaways" have served almost every city-dwelling culture in history. Ancient Rome probably had, relative to population, more fast-food outlets than modern London: Roman flats rarely had cooking facilities and almost everyone who lived in them bought meals ready-made. The most famous Chinese painting of the Sung dynasty shows the street life of the courtly city of Kaifeng, with the snack-sellers' dump lings, oil-cakes and won tons.

In 12th century London, public kitchens were open round the clock for cooked food for all purses. In 13th century Paris you could buy boiled and roast meats and spiced pasties and tarts filled with pork, chicken, eel, soft cheese or egg. There were waffles and wafers, cakes and pancakes, hot mashed peas, garlic sauce, cheese by the slice. In the 14th century, Piers Plowman heard the vendor's cry, "Hot pies, hot! Go dine, go!" Newly popular "wraps" derive from the tamales sold on the streets of Aztec cities before the Spanish conquest. In a sense, there was street food before there were streets: the hunters and foragers of prehistory needed to take a packed meal with them into forest and field. The leaf-wrapped nasi goreng of the Malays - which you can buy on the streets today in south-east Asia - was, in origin, such a kind of dish.

In some ways, nothing seemed to have changed by 1928 when the Ladies' Home Journal boasted that "there are few things except softboiled eggs that you can't buy almost ready to eat today". Yet, whereas small, artisanal, human-scale enterprises once provided local households with the makings of a common meal, today's fast-food industry is dominated by products of industrial processing, designed to be eaten "on the fly" or at home in front of the television or computer screen. Convenience enjoys a higher priority than civilisation or pleasure or nourishment. Surveys regularly show that burgers, fries, kebabs and all the rest of the menu of the street taste of little and nourish less. Yet people buy them to assuage caprice or serve convenience.

The modern decline in street food's quality has nothing to do with growth in the volume of the trade: it is the result of the way the industry is structured, and of underlying social and economic trends. Three great revolutions of the past 300 years have combined to rob street food of flavour and appeal. In the 18th century, Enlightenment manners, which decreed streeteating to be boorish, drove street food downmarket. Only the ill-educated and undiscerning would now frequent the stalls. Then, in the 19th century, industrialisation multiplied pap. Uniform products could be centrally processed and packaged, to be finished off at the point of sale, with consequently huge economies of scale.

Finally, in the 20th century, the economics of the conveyor belt, which had already transformed food production, began to take over at the point of consumption. In 1937 Dick and Mac McDonald opened their drive-in restaurant in Pasadena: this was the nearest thing to conveyor-belt eating the industrial revolution had yet produced. From 1948 they began to eliminate plates and cutlery at mealtimes - reversing a long-sought, hard-won achievement of civilisation. Customers have accepted this innovation unprotestingly. The McDonald's 15-cent hamburger was the enfleshment of food-Fordism.

Now there is a chance of reversing the worst of these trends. Traditional street foods remain dominant in parts of the world where industrialisation never happened or began late. So in the post-industrial era we should be able to revive our own traditions. We can add those of ever more diverse cultures. Globalisation does not have to mean homogenisation: migration and cultural exchange bring new flavours and textures. The next big street-food fashion will probably be inspired by Vietnamese cuisine, which produces highly suitable finger treats: little parcels of savoury stuffings coddled in lettuce leaves and spring rolls wrapped in translucent rice noodles.

Embourgoisement, meanwhile, is easing street food back upmarket; so are rising food prices, ecological anxieties and the fad for healthconscious eating. Already the well-crafted sandwich has made a comeback. Burger chains are varying recipes to reflect regional tastes and multicultural diversity.

If the recovery continues, we could experience a new golden age of street-eating. Instead of just lingering in the gutters, trash-food could be consigned forever to the dustbin.

? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is the author of Food: A History (Macmillan).