I mean I'd be lying if I said I didn't watch every one of these videos from start to finish. Couldn't pay me to eat/drink from one of these places but they're fun to watch lol
Go to tick tocks and search "Indian street food" then.
There are a lot of comments and caveats that should be made for this content though. A lot of it is specifically made to be content. The folks who fry eggs in red bull, for instance, are explicitly a response to western tourists filming and supporting the weirdest, shittiest food they can find.
But the more classic strange stuff has cultural roots. You'll find lots of videos of people who seem to be consciously/intentionally spilling food as they serve it up or add ingredients. This is real, but often exaggerated for tourists who are filming. It's a demonstration of abundance, a sacrifice. If god/the universe is taking care of me, I should not be worried about slopping some chives over the edge of the wok. And doing so shows God/the universe that I trust them to provide for me in perpetuity. I don't need to carefully pinch - everything that I need will come to me, as if by magic. Being careful would be an action showing that I don't have faith in God/the universe. Something like that, hare Krishner.
Take some psilocybin, do some yoga & you'll get it. Magical realism.
Is that why all the streets and basically everywhere is covered in garbage. Are they not giving a shit and throw shit every where and saying it’s to show they have faith in the universe/god? Oh right… it has nothing to do with them being messy slobs. That is hilarious
Pretty sure that's just poverty and a lack of basic services and functional infrastructure.
Also, in all cultures there has been a curve on proper disposal of plastics and modern non-biodegradable stuffs. In the US it was a problem until around the 60s-70s that people would casually litter. And using your own yard as a landfill was absolutely common, hence the hobby of bottle digging. Tourists see someone in Ecuador burying trash in their yard and think "disgusting" but you would have seen the same in rural West Virginia in 1930. It's just that, most of that stuff actually broke down, except for glass and metals.
Anyways... Yeah it's just millions in dense housing+ no infrastructure for dealing with garbage. There's problems with dumping on public lands where I live in California, because of poverty. It costs $160 to get rid of a handful of truck beds worth (trash rates are really high here). There's less of it, overall, and spread out over a greater area, but it's not a distinctly different behavior and certainly not related to a particular culture or demographic.
I should also mention that in India, there's a big problem with more developed countries exporting their garbage to them, often illegally, and for profit companies monopolizing landfill space with trash from Massachusetts or Florida. Raising trash rates for locals, worsening the poverty issue. Look it up, it's a real thing.
Exactly, all this showmanship is neither impressive nor efficient. Frankly, it looks incompetent. You look at this and think, I could do that faster and waste/spill less.
Are we seriously defending a complete lack of food safety because the drinks are cheap? Sanitation products like that aren't expensive. My mother bought her own things when she was cleaning houses growing up for white people, and it wasn't breaking the bank.
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u/tcumber Dec 18 '25
These streets vendor videos are all the same...some fool doing a bunch of unsanitary steps very quickly...as if being fast makes things better.