Another Mystery Solved!

Apparently they don’t just use the hot dog water as someone might have told you one time or another:

Health inspectors, cracking down on unattended vendor carts across the city, revoked his permit last week when a bathroom emergency forced him to leave his stand in lower Manhattan.

“Everybody has to go sometimes,” [Nuts 4 Nuts vendor Shiraj] Islam, 42, who had been a fixture near J&R Music World, told The Post.

“Now, I am losing a lot of money. I have a wife and four children, and I have been sick.”

Leaving a food cart unattended — even for a minute — is a violation of revised city health codes that went into effect Jan. 1, sparking the crackdown.

. . .

Under the law, street-sold hot dogs, pretzels and nuts become “imminent health hazards” the moment the carts are abandoned because the food could be contaminated.

Normally, Islam would have a friend watch the cart during the one or two bathroom breaks he took each day, but since he was diagnosed with a tumor on his colon, the frequency of his trips to the toilet have increased.

Islam’s cart is dropped off each day two blocks away from the electronics and music store on Park Row, but the veteran vendor said that on that day, as he went to haul it to its usual spot in front of the shop, he knew after walking 10 feet that he wasn’t going to make it without a pit stop.

“My stomach was feeling very bad,” he said. “I went into a pizza place on Fulton Street where they know me, but there was a line.”

Islam said he waited and used the restroom, but “when I returned [to the cart] 15 minutes later, the decal [permit] was gone.”

See also: Food Carts, Nuts 4 Nuts.