Doug Saunders asks why Canada can't match the excellent street food of places such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, and speculates on how the points system for immigration may have crippled the development of such cuisine here.

From the Dec. 13 Globe and Mail:

It's popular these days to pine for a return to the days of “slow” food. There are books, magazines and entire movements devoted to the worship of all things slow, authentic, non-convenient, painstaking.

This has given rise to some very refined cooking. But I do have to protest: I can name half-a-dozen places near my house that make a nice slow-roasted leg of lamb for $40 a plate. But I can't think of very many places that will give me something delicious and surprising for $2.

Fast food may well be the highest plateau of civilization – the expression, in as concise a package as possible, of all that ought to be said by food, ending with an exclamation mark.

We once had the leaders in this gastronomic haiku: the Germanophile Americans who, in the 19th century, engineered the hamburger and hot dog as penny distractions for the crowds at World's Fairs, and then perfected them into elegant glories at all-but-forgotten chains like the Apple Pan; or the Mexican immigrants who, in 1971 in San Diego, invented the burrito, and then perfected it a decade later in San Francisco's Mission District.

Alas, most of those joys are lost. We North Americans have forgotten how to make truly great fast food, surrendered those skills, like many others, to the developing world. We've lost the formula.

We haven't developed anything lately that can match the smoky, operatic beef noodles of Chongqing's back alleys, the endlessly variegated tacos of Mexico City's street kitchens or the mouth explosion that is Mumbai's beachside pani puri – which is the very best thing I've ever eaten, intestinal parasites and all.

Something has killed that sense of innovation and streetside novelty. Maybe it's excessively restrictive hygiene laws. But more likely it's equality: In the West, we think of ourselves today as consumers of fast food, not inventors of it.

Great fast food requires a class of people, usually immigrants from rural areas or foreign lands, who will concoct all night and sell all day in order to capture your eye and your tongue. When we started importing only PhDs from abroad, we lost the soul of our fast-food culture.