You feel it first, appropriately enough, in your stomach.

A knot clenches as you read the reports from around the country: “Portland’s bustling street-food scene may soon be rivaling the hawker centers of Singapore in terms of quality and value” (Gourmet, Sept. 22, 2009); “Taco cart wins ‘Vendy,’ NYC’s street vendor award” (MSNBC, Sept. 28, 2009). The bile rises as you wonder, “New York has a street food vendor award?” By the time it reaches your mouth, the flavor is all too familiar: The bitter taste of feeling left out.

But perhaps not for long. As early as this spring, Minneapolis may finally welcome food vendors to its streets. And it’s about time.

“There’s this idea that you can buy chestnuts and gyros on the street in any other city in America, but if you buy them here you’ll get poisoned,” says Lisa Goodman, the Ward 7 City Council member who represents downtown Minneapolis. She first noted the lack of street food last year when a group of Hennepin Avenue business owners, dubbed Hennepin 2012, launched a string of initiatives to bolster the liveliness of the street. “But there are, I’m not kidding, at least a dozen legal barriers in the way,” she says.

Goodman’s right: Street-food vending in Minneapolis is so regulated that it is essentially illegal. The municipal code reads like it was written by someone whose grandmother was run over by a sandwich cart: All food carts must be self-propelled and light enough to be moved by one person traveling on foot. They must be no larger than eight feet long and four feet wide. No “lights or noisemakers, such as bells, horns or whistles” may be used to gain customers’ attention. Carts must close by 10 p.m. They may not be parked within 50 feet of an intersection. They may not operate anywhere in the area bounded by Washington Ave., 9th St., Second Ave. N., and Chicago Ave. (in other words, downtown). And the kicker: They must sell only pre-packaged food.

“If you want to sell chips or pop, by all means, go ahead and travel around in a vehicle and do it,” says Kyle Green, co-owner of Curbside, a 1971 Airstream outfitted to sell gourmet sandwiches, soups and pasta dishes. “If you want to sell ice cream, you can go ahead and do that. But the second you make the decision to make your own food, it’s not possible.”

Nobody writes postcards about bomb pop and potato chips, but street food can be the basis of a city's cultural identity. In America’s trendiest towns, mobile kitchens are this decade’s hottest culinary movement. (The best breakfast in Portland is a waffle made in an outhouse in the middle of an empty parking lot. No joke.) And yet for all its attempts to keep up with the worldly swagger of the coastal Joneses, Minneapolis is a street-food ghost town. It can’t even keep up with St. Paul, where Curbside operates under more lenient restrictions, as do several mobile taquerias. And more are on the way: Fans of chef Tim McKee are already atwitter over his Barrio taco truck, while chickpea lovers will want to watch for Foxy Falafel. Both plan to operate primarily in St. Paul.

(The most restrictive laws banning street food in Minneapolis can be skirted by setting up shop on private land, which is how operations such as the Chef Shack—the farmers market gem known for its killer gazpacho and Indian-spiced mini donuts—remain in business.)

This wasn’t always so. Before the turn of the century, immigrant food vendors lined the streets of young Minneapolis, loudly hawking chestnuts and bratwursts, much to the chagrin, it seems, of the city’s upper crust. Local writer Andy Sturdevant recently described the timeline of the city’s escalating attacks on street food for the Web site HeavyTable.com:

“In 1895, an ordinance was passed definitively banning ‘sandwich wagons and push carts from the business center of the city’….  St. Paul passed a similar ordinance in 1902, leading Minneapolis Tribune columnist Ralph Wheelock to wryly note, ‘Just how the odor of fried ham could contaminate the highly moral atmosphere of the capital city does not appear in the ordinance.’”

So it wasn’t the skyway or the weather that killed street food, as is often assumed. It was bureaucrats, and for more than a century the food hawkers have struggled to take back their streets. They’re still trying. “When we first started, the goal was to operate in Minneapolis,” says Green. “When you look around, there are more people on the street there than anywhere else. You get the feeling that this is something downtown Minneapolis needs. So we went up as high as we could go in licensing and were told, ‘It’s going to be a long process, and you’re going to have to go to City Council about it.’ As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘You know, let’s go where they want us.’”

But more and more, Minneapolis is realizing that it does want street food. Doug Kress, senior policy aide to Goodman, has met with representatives from Community Planning and Economic Development as well as the city health and licensing departments to examine what needs to be done to make the laws more amenable to mobile vendors. He’s also looking into how other cities handle their food vendors, including St. Paul. One possible hitch: Goodman is concerned about stepping on the toes of existing businesses. “You don’t want to undercut Pizza Luce at bar time by sticking a burger cart in front of their store,” she says. “There are businesses that pay taxes to be where they are, and if the food cart is just paying the parking meter, that’s a fairness issue.” One solution she mentions: Allowing street food licenses only to businesses with a permanent location as well.

That feels like more over-regulating, but it’s a step in the right direction. Kress says he hopes to have something presented to City Council by late winter in order to have it passed by spring 2010—just in time for tamale season. “That’s what we’re trying to do, anyway,” he says. “I haven’t walked the hallways yet, but I expect there will be some agreement on this.”

Let’s hope so. There’s no better way to commune with a city than to eat food on its streets, to nourish oneself amid the whir and thrum of the cosmopolitan jungle. Until that happens, well, there’s always St. Paul.