Authentic Street Food

Forget the Tesco sandwiches with their sorry slice of ham in triangular boxes - TripAdvisor named London the world’s “best food city” this year. The capital is a cosmopolitan melting pot, and the stew tastes good. Somebody at a birthday party a few years ago told me about their friend who was trying to eat from as many international restaurants in London as possible. At the time they already had a list of 60 countries they had visited via tastebud. Just last week I ate at a Somalian place in Kentish Town, a little spot with only a few tables, most occupied by uncles with the ease of regulars, and one around which I shared a big platter of busketi with two friends. Elsewhere, I can get Afghan ashak, Burmese mohinga, Sudanese mahshi, Cameroonian ndolé. 

A few months ago, the UK government abruptly stopped issuing any student visas to would-be scholars from these four countries, plus all skilled worker visas for Afghans, because the Home Office says too many of them claim asylum when they arrive, and worse, get approved. The UK has bombed some of these countries itself in recent memory but says this “abusive” route to claiming asylum (a human right) diverts resources from those who “really” need it, such as the poorer migrants the UK leaves to drown on dinghies at sea instead. 

Perhaps asylum seekers wouldn’t take up so many taxpayer resources if the UK allowed them to work- they’re not permitted to until their application has been approved, or if they’ve been waiting at least a year.  Even if those now-banned students from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan, and Cameroon were allowed to stay on their Tier IV student visa, they wouldn’t have been allowed to work more than 20 hours a week anyway, and like lots of other visa-holders (myself included) would have no recourse to public funds, despite paying taxes.

So best to get on with our own poorly-paid jobs, what with the rent and cost of livvie. If you find yourself grinding after-hours for a big deadline the boss has been breathing down your neck about, well that’s no problem, mate - all this delicious international goodness can be packaged and brought right to your door. You don’t even have to talk to anyone - no hassles of phoning up the restaurant, or dragging yourself out in the rain to pick up the takeaway. UberEats, DoorDash, JustEat bring the menus right to your fingertips, tap tap tap. After a short wait, a delivery rider follows an optimised route to directly bring you authentic street food neither made nor enjoyed there. The best of modern urban living. Five stars.

The delivery cyclist or motorcyclist, hidden in helmet and bulky waterproofs, pulls a brown paper bag out of a teal cooler mounted on the back rack. He hands it to the customer, who mumbles a 4-digit pin and maybe a thank you. They both turn away: the customer to enjoy a meal, the other in the middle of a 14-hour, 100-mile shift to bring dinner to people too busy to cook at home. Sometimes, however, your would-be seamless food delivery might hit a snag. The map tracks the delivery guy heading down Whitechapel Road with the kebabs. But he hasn’t moved in a few minutes. It’s not even raining, it’s not even late. One star. 

The 2024 film, L'Histoire de Souleymane, follows the titular character, an asylum seeker and all-around good guy from Guinea, working as a food delivery cyclist in Paris. The frantic camera tails him as he scrambles between locations, gets hit by a car, fixes his bike, sprints to catch the only bus to the homeless shelter, sleeps outside when he misses it, waits outside restaurants with other couriers as their earnings dip by the minute. They are not welcome inside to ask for an update. The driver who collides with him doesn’t even ask if he’s ok. In one scene I held my breath through, the app sends him to a remote parking lot with no obvious door to knock on. A voice calls out to him from the shadows; he is delivering to a group of cops crowded into a van. 

Souleymane is working under a different name, since asylum seekers in France are not allowed to work, either. Instead, he uses someone else’s account, a legal resident who takes half his earnings for the privilege of borrowing his identity. Occasionally, the app demands a facial recognition check, sending Souleymane in a sprint across town to the shop the actual account holder works at to get a photo. Back in the car park, the cops point out Souleymane looks different from the app’s picture and taunt him with the threat of arrest, which would mean certain deportation. After a few minutes, though, they get bored. And anyway, they’re hungry. They let him go with a chuckle and fill their bellies with the warm food he has just brought them. Souleymane wipes his tears and rushes off to pick up his next order.

I’m hungry too. Why is this guy seemingly embargoed on Whitechapel Road, just outside the station? My phone buzzes with a message from an anti-raid network. Usually I turn off notifications for group chats, but like the food delivery apps, time is of the essence when responding to cops’ raids on an estate or a workplace, or like this particular message is reporting, a police checkpoint intercepting delivery cyclists to check their immigration status. It is a warning for some to stay away and an appeal for others to witness, to document what’s happening and let the detained know their rights.

The Home Office announced in July 2025 a “national clampdown” on migrants scraping by in the gig economy, as if uncertain poverty wages - sometimes as little as £2/hour - were the fault of the the people performing this work, and not the behemoth tech companies whose algorithms decide this and divert our payments to their executives and shareholders instead. 

All the risks of enriching the company sit on the deliverers’ shoulders, as squarely as the insulated cubes some of them wear as backpacks. They’re on their own if they get hit by a car, if their bike is stolen, or if they are assaulted. The UK Supreme Court, unlike many other courts around the world, undercut delivery rider’s organising power when it ruled in 2023 that Deliveroo riders don’t technically count as “workers” because the terms and conditions include a substitution clause. Labour experts speculated Deliveroo added this clause (where the account holder can let someone else take on their deliveries) to weaken bargaining rights.

The riders race the clock. Failure to move fast enough can result in account suspension or cancellation, an abrupt shuttering with little recourse to appeal to the apps. We Are Possible published a 2024 report about food delivery riders’ safety. In one quote, an interviewee describes the convergence of apps’ high speed and low pay:

"Actually today I passed a police pickup truck that was collecting lots of illegally modded bikes that they [had] taken off delivery workers. And it just reminded me of how unfair it is because they're only doing that because it's too expensive to get a proper electric bike. Or even, you know, if you do get a proper electric bike, but maybe it's not powerful enough, but ultimately the economics of their situation means that they kind of have to get one of these illegally modded bikes. And they're the ones who get penalised for it. And the apps can’t not know that this is how they're doing it. This is how the workers have to do the job." 

Wielding the power of surveillance, these apps both exploit their sources of labour when on-duty, and criminalise them when off. The Home Office shares the location of hotels asylum seekers are lodged in with the apps - any account who spends a suspicious amount of time around one of them will get flagged and likely suspended. The private monitoring of migrant hotels is nothing new though. English white supremacists occasionally mob outside and try to burn them down.  

My dinner is on the move again. I look forward to savouring London’s multiculturalism alone in my damp overpriced flat, for double the price than if I had gone to the restaurant myself. Finally, the doorbell buzzes. The kebabs have long since cooled, and the delivery cyclist is sweating. 

TINA SNACKWELL RECOMMENDS:

How Migration Really Works: 22 things you need to know about the most divisive issue in politics, by Hein de Haas (2024)

Almost everything politicians (of any party) say about migration is probably lie; our common-sense understandings of migration are wrong and unsupported by evidence

Border Nation: A Story of Migration by Leah Cowan (2021)

Borders are a fiction; the colonial and imperial roots of corporate profiteering from migration; the discursive myths about migration hidden 

Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below Edited by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi (2022)

On-the-ground views of border crossings around the world that challenge simplistic views equating smuggling with criminality

L’Histoire de Souleymane by Boris Lojkine (2024) 

A portrait of the everyday life of an asylum seeker working as a food delivery cyclist in Paris. Fun fact: Abou Sangaré, the lead actor playing Souleymane, was also an asylum seeker who was only granted a one-year residence permit in 2025, after winning multiple awards for the film