Fast Food Nation

Stephen Von Worley, burger cartographer extraordinaire, has created a map that presents fast food dominance across US territory in delectably manichean terms:



Not wrongly, Von Worley frames the Empire of the Gilded Parabola as evil and (more wrongly) the other fast food outlets as a scrappy alliance of insurgents. Says he:

In this and the following graphic, each individual restaurant location has equal power. The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe.

By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone. Sheer density is the key to victory!

The rebels already have the numbers – over 24,000 locations in total – but they’ve divided and conquered themselves by strict adherence to the peacetime principles of brand identity and corporate structure. This is war, and for the sake of self-preservation, all must be sacrificed! Kings and Queens: get used to hanging with the common folk. Tone down the sarcasm, Jack. And everyone, please, stop yanking Wendy’s pigtails! Y’all need to work in harmony to succeed with the winning strategy: an Alliance!

I.e., black space is McDonalds land. The only other contiguous territory of any real scale belongs to Sonic, across much of Texas and subsidiary areas. But Jack in the Box shows some strength in the Southwest, Burger King's got a far-flung string of outposts from the Southeast to the Northwest, and even Hardee's puts up a fight in the Carolinas. Dairy Queen, which I had always thought of as sort of the village pub of small Texas towns, actually looks to be even stronger in precisely the areas of the Upper Midwest which are most prone to actual blizzards.

Go to Von Worley's post to see another map that shows that as a combined force, the upstarts swamp the McHegemon.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Food Nations of North America

From Renewing America's Food Traditions, a coalition of organizations dedicated to promoting the diverse foods and food traditions of North America, comes this map of the "food nations" of the continent:



According to RAFT, this map identifies what it calls "totem foods" which are emblematic not only of a regional cuisine, but of an entire culture:

These totem foods are more than just important commodities--community feasts, household rituals, song, stories and the nutritional well-being of residents have revolved around these foods for centuries.

It's fair to say, in other words, that this map is not just a map of North American food commodities, but a full-blown cultural map of the continent.

It's not hard to intuit that there's something to this depiction of cultural geography. Indeed, this geographical partition is similar in many of its particulars to others made in the areas of cultural and political geography, including some I've discussed here. Chile Pepper Nation corresponds pretty closely to the areas of the US Southwest that used to be part of Mexico (and the part of northwestern Mexico that still is), and that is heavily influenced by Mexican and certain Native American cultures. Clambake Nation is the Yankee portion of the Bos-NY-Wash mega-region, plus the coastal areas of the Atlantic that correspond to the Eastern portion of Robert David's Upper Coasts region, while the western portion of Upper Coasts, the region anchored by the Cascasdia mega-region goes here by the name of Salmon Nation. Corn Bread and BBQ Nation is otherwise known as the Greater South, less Gator Nation, which is just another way of describing the Gulf Coast Mega-region. And Moose Nation - well, that's just Canada minus the parts that have people.

As the RAFT folks write in the introduction to their book on America's food traditions, more than 400 years after the first white people started mucking about on the continent:

two-thirds of the distinctive seeds and breeds which then fed America have vanished. One in fifteen wild, edible plant and animal species on this continent has diminished to the degree that it is now considered at risk. These declines in diversity bring losses in traditional ecological and culinary knowledge as well. Consequently, we have suffered declines in the food rituals which otherwise link communities to place and cultural heritage.

It's not gone unnoticed that there has been some degree of homogenization in ways we eat. One big reason for this has been industrialized agriculture and cheap transportation costs: just look at the stickers on your produce to see what kind of epic vegetable diaspora your daily diet represents. Normally I'd lament the cultural homogenization, but I've just been reading some Jim Kunstler, whose dystopian rants can't help but give one the sense that, while a return to localism in the food supply is likely just around the corner, it will only be because we are going to have far greater problems to worry about: namely, the end of cheap transportation and general economic collapse. (The pinch of salt with which one is inclined to take Kunstler would be a good bit larger if not for the fact that his predictions of doom have been spot on for the past year or so.)

But I digress. The RAFT map is interesting and their goals noble. They go into far greater detail in their book, which you can download as a pdf file free of charge at this site. In those pages they detail the ten most endangered traditional foods: Chapalote corn, Chiltepin pepper, Eulachon Smelt, Gulf Coast sheep, Java chicken (which is, yes, actually from Asia originally, but never mind), Marshall strawberry, Native American sunflowers, Pineywoods cattle, the Seminole pumpkin, and White Abalone. (They also list the top ten success stories - traditional foods that have made a comeback - including American alligator, Louisiana Creole cream cheese, and Iriquois white corn.)

The book also has a comprehensive index of endangered traditional foods; especially given the price tag, it's really an essential reference for anyone in North America who cares about food, culture, and the preservation of traditional knowledge.

Jain Geography

Here's something completely different:



It's a Jaina portrayal of the world, from an exhibit at the Library of Congress. According to the exhibit's website

Jainism has its own version of geography and cosmology. This chart from the nineteenth century shows the world of human habitation as a central continent with mountain ranges and rivers, surrounded by a series of concentric oceans (with swimmers and fish) and ring-shaped continents.

Indeed, that Jain cosmology and geography they speak of is a trip. Sez Wikipedia, the early Jains divided the universe into three parts: the heavens or realms of the gods (Urdhva Loka), the realms of the humans (Madhya Loka), and the realms of the hellish beings (Adho Loka). So the image above is a depiction of Madhya Loka, the realms of the humans.

Madhya Loka consists of at least eight continent-islands, arranged concentrically, each of which is surrounded by an ocean (typically with some sort of succulent name, like "Sugar Ocean" or "Ocean of Milk"); you can see those continent-rings clearly on this map (though why only two?). Humans live on Jambudvipa, the island at the center of the world; and at the center of Jambudvipa is Mount Meru, the highest point and center of the world. (According to trusty ol' Wikipedia, the quasi-mythical Mount Meru corresponds to the real world's Nagard Sarovar, in the middle of the Pamir Mountains.) At the summit of Mount Meru is Brahmapuri, the great city of Brahma, the god of creation.

From carbon dioxide emissions to eastern cosmology without so much as a segue. You see? You see why maps are so fun?