This crazy food culture isn’t long for this world, though, if Bangkok’s authorities get their way. The government plans to remove all street food stalls from main drags by the end of the year. Pushcart vendors may be exempt from the ban, along with stalls that don’t obstruct the sidewalk.

The controversial ban is designed to bring back “order and hygiene,” officials say. It will also free up sidewalk space and, they say, make the city cleaner.

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It’s part of a broader push by the country’s junta to tackle all manner of vices, from corruption to prostitution. Like lots of autocratic leaders, the military leaders are planning an urban renewal program that targets disorder, or character, depending on whom you ask.

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“There will be no letup in this operation. Every street vendor will have to move out,” Wanlop Suwandee, chief adviser to Bangkok’s governor, told local news outlets.

The push has drawn criticism from eaters, chefs and the thousands of vendors who make their living selling such delicacies as spicy shrimp soup, silky noodles and papaya salad. Tourists and locals alike cram around folding tables and into plastic chairs well into the night. The stalls are one of the few places where rich and poor Thais mix.

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“If you want to clean out all the vendors it’s like you are cleaning out our culture itself,” Chiwan Suwannapak, who works for a Bangkok tour agency, told Agence France-Presse.

Some worry, too, that the change will eat into the city’s sizable tourism revenue. About 15 percent of the city’s income comes from tourists. CNN this month named Bangkok as the city with the best street food on the planet.

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The vendors also are under attack from developers, who are buying up large tracks of land to build apartment buildings and malls. Last year, the 40-year-old Soi Sukhumvit 38 food market was destroyed to make room for high-priced condominiums. Some vendors moved to the basement of a nearby building. Others squat in the area, selling egg noodles with barbecue pork illicitly.

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One vendor, a 61-year-old who sells coconut and pumpkin sweets, told the Guardian that “there is nothing I can do.”