Every Chinese Restaurant in the US
Rural distribution of Chinese Restaurants across the US
Chinese food is ubiquitous in the US. It's estimated that 90% of the American population has tried Chinese food, and more than half eat it on a regular basis. How is this possible when Chinese people are only 1.6% of the US population?
I used Python to parse through Foursquare’s open source points of interest via the Huggingface transformers library. From 11GB of data, I isolated over 50,000 Chinese restaurants across Canada and the US.
For this project, I started with an anecdotal observation that Chinese restaurants seem to be everywhere, at least one in even the smallest towns. I used ArcGIS to map populations by race and ethnicity. I then used spatial analysis methods to find the urban/rural classification for every census tract in the US, and I calculated the distance to the nearest Chinese restaurant from the centroid of each census tract.
The full data story currently lives in an ArcGIS Storymap. I’ll be porting it over soon! In the meantime, please view it here. Thanks for your patience.