In Saigon, you can take the grub out of the gutter, but you can't take the gutter out of the grub. No way. Here, the street is half the meal.

I dodge motorbikes, ferret my way up obscure, grubby, passages and accost the skankiest-looking street carts in an attempt to catalogue this city's sublime fare before it is snuffed off the streets. Some people collect stamps. I collect streetfood moments at www.noodlepie.com It has become quite a mission, given how rapidly Vietnam is developing. MTV and burgers are in and the gutter-grub brigade are on the way out.

Breakfast is most likely to be chao huyet long, a savoury rice porridge with offal and pig's blood, ladled from a steaming vat hidden away inside a rusting streetcart. A banh my pate, south east Asia's finest meat sarnie, is irresistible at lunchtime. I'll pick up a skillet full of grilled blood cockles on Pasteur Street for dinner and grab a freshly steamed stick of sweetcorn from a passing peddlar as an additional snack. A fine day's feed fit for a kerbside king, and all for less than a quid.

My passion isn't entirely born of economic constraints. I could spend my fee for writing this column and sit in Saigon's swankiest restaurant, filled with chamber music, nibbling at ornate, sculpted appetizers and perusing a multilingual menu du jour. I could, but I won't.

I crave the noise outside, waves of choking grill smoke, freedom from hovering waiters, the chunter of fellow chompers, the splash-back of fish sauce, vendors who bark, spit and stick their hands in the world's tastiest broths.

As I squat stall-side and devour a bowl of prawn paste-packed bun mam, I imagine my nemesis. He's sitting at a desk in a small room in an unimportant office of a forgotten ministry somewhere in Vietnam. And he's hatching a plan to sanitize the streets of Saigon. Bastard.