Beasley follows four women who sell street food in Jacmel, Haiti, and asks what happens when work that is officially off the books becomes the way a family eats.

The setting is a shadow economy, not criminal enterprise but ordinary law-abiding people earning outside formal channels, in a world where people and money keep moving across borders. Food is where a great deal of women's economic activity happens, which makes it worth examining on its own terms.

One reading of such informal work is that it merely restages a familiar patriarchy. The vendors in this ethnography suggest otherwise. Their arrangements feed large numbers of people more efficiently than government programmes manage, hold a community together, and give the women themselves a sense of agency, mutual support, and a dense network of contacts.