THE TACO–BURRITO LINE

ON THE MENU, EITHER SIDE OF THE LINE

METHOD

101 sample towns. The base set is the largest US cities capped at two per county, which strips out metro clustering and forces coverage into rural country; border areas were then sampled directly to test the edges. Each town scores −100 to +100 for which noun dominates its local menus, restaurant listings, tourism boards and review-site categories. The surface is inverse-distance-weighted, power 3, on an Albers equal-area conic. The frontier is the interpolated zero contour, not a drawn line.