Chili Parlors, Community, and Geography

This weekend I made my son Cincinnati Chili for the first time.  If you've never heard of Cincy chili, wikipedia has a pretty good brief summary or if you're up for something a little more complete, here is an ethnographic - type study of chili and it's importance in Cincinnati culture: The Story of Cincinnati Chili.  From the picture above, you can see that he is perhaps a little young still but I wanted to get it into his blood as soon as possible, and it was a pretty big hit.  (FYI: the peas were a concession to healthiness because he's a baby and not a sanctioned ingredient).

Over the course of the meal, my wife and I got to talking about regional foods and their importance to the quality of life in a particular place.  We've lived in a number of places and visited lots of others and one of the things that makes us really enjoy being someplace is a sense of culinary identity.  Wisconsin has beer and cheese and brats among other things (some of you might be surprised to know that cheese curds are completely foreign food in much of the country).  Cincinnati has chili and a few other things like Goetta.   Maryland where my wife is from has blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay.  When we lived in North Carolina, we had Carolina barbeque and also some really great chicken and biscuit places tightly packed around Winston-Salem.  I've spent a lot of time in Chicago and one of my favorite things to get there is an Italian Beef sandwich.  Coastal South Carolina and Georgia have "low-country" cuisine, and don't even get me started on New Orleans and the mouthwatering bounty associated with that region.



One of the things we found frustrating about living in Bloomington, IN was that there was really no culinary specialty - sure there were popular restaurants and some really excellent food (get the muffaletta!) that I miss, but there wasn't something that people who lived there thought of as "their thing" which always left me feeling something was missing. ("Their thing" was basketball, but unfortunately that comes and goes and the teams were terrible while I was there.  A good bowl of chili doesn't depend on this year's recruiting class to be excellent).

For any students looking for a really interesting and truly interdisciplinary social science project, I think it would be fun to look at regional delicacies and specialties and explore the factors that determine their development within a community and their importance to the social fabric of a community, as well as how they spread geographically.  Cincinnati chili is very tightly located in about a 2 hour radius around Cincinnati, yet within that radius there's a chili parlor on practically every corner it seems like.  If you looked at something like the locations of Skyline chili (the most popular chain) in a GIS project and combined that with a historical study of immigration patterns, you might have a really neat project.  And if you're not into food, you could do something similar with other community activities like the popularity of the yard game Kubb highly localized in Eau Claire.

(Incidentally, on that list of Skyline locations, there are Ohio, Indiana, and Northern Kentucky locations surrounding Cincinnati and then a few random outliers in Florida.  The first person to come up with the correct hypothesis on why there are Skylines in that area of Florida and post it in the comments wins a packet of chili mix from me).
  
In the meantime, this post is making me REALLY hungry.  I think it's Skyline Time!