Last year, Netflix dropped a new series from the Chef’s Table crew called Street Food: Asia. The series was a departure from the halcyon haunts of the culinary elite and, instead, focused on the food of the streets. The same arresting aesthetic was in place. But with Street Food, everything felt accessible to the common food lover (if you were willing to travel, that is). In the end, it was an easy watch that, at the time, you could actually experience yourself if you had the travel bug.
Watching the trailer for the second installment of Street Food — this time focused on Latin America — feels entirely different. With Americans pretty much banned from travel to most of the world, this truly feels like escapism most of us won’t get to experience for awhile, making this show feel like our only access point to enjoy these experiences at the moment. And wow does this trailer stoke our wanderlust for travel and our hunger for great, accessible food on the streets of North and South America.
Still, one cannot watch this outside of the context of our current situation. Will the vendors be out on the streets at all at the end of the pandemic? What will the street food experience look like? Hell, even referring to a part of the Americas as just “Latin America” now clangs more loudly of Euro-Colonial erasure of Indigenous and Afro Americans than it did a month ago.
In short, we weren’t expecting a trailer that focuses on delicious street food to bring out so many fraught emotions. But here we are.
This season of Street Food: Latin America will allot episodes to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. The episodes look like they’ll bridge European and Asian colonial cuisines, African food cultures, and the Indigenous foodways still present in some North and South American societies. It looks and sounds like a glorious mix of languages, cultures, foods, and locales — and we can’t wait to dig in.
‘Street Food: Latin America‘ premieres its full season on July 21st, 2020 on Netflix.
