Food cries, historical city sounds, and the twentieth century silencing of street vendors

Abstract

This article explores historical street cries, the sounds, calls, and music of peddlers, hawkers, and vendors who sold food, provisions and services, and their changes within global soundscapes and urban communities. It considers food cries as an acoustic, socio-economic, and cultural phenomenon associated for centuries with street selling as a key constituent of culinary provisioning and subaltern livelihoods. It examines how and why from the mid-nineteenth century, such cries were perceived negatively by many urban residents and how the sounds of selling food that were historically integral to culinary provisioning systems were portrayed as an undesirable and backward aspect of urban life and virtually relegated to the realm of nostalgia.