delicious density

Photo by A.V. Crofts

Everyone has their obsessions. One of mine is lake swimming.

My lake obsession shares space with pie, corduroy pants (any shade of brown, if you please), and the television show Friday Night Lights, to name a few.

Much of my summer was spent thinking about swimming or actually swimming in the lake photographed above. I swapped my urban lifestyle on the West Coast for a rural existence back East. Lakes become a form of entertainment, my exercise, a part of my social life, and border on a religious experience.

Regardless of which coast I'm on, I spend a good chunk each Sunday that I can with my nose buried in the New York Times. (Yes, I still get the Sunday paper tossed to my front porch. Six days a week of virtual news is enough for me. Give me inky fingers and the satisfying thwack of cracking open a section at least once a week.)

Today, while thumbing through the Sunday Review section I stumbled on this Op-Ed article by Ryan Avent, economics correspondent for The Economist. How does this article relate to gastro-cultural?

Brilliantly, it turns out.

Avent uses the example of a thriving Vietnamese restaurant scene to illustrate how urban density provides job creation and economic growth. As Avent explains, dense urban areas have a consumer demand for not just one Vietnamese restaurant, but many. This in turn provides job opportunities for more chefs and waitstaff, not to mention a larger customer base for food suppliers who provide the bean sprouts, limes, and rice noodles that Vietnamese restaurants rely on.

Here in Seattle, I have a choice of no fewer than nine Vietnamese restaurants a ten minute walk from my office. My Maine village doesn't boast a single restaurant, just an ice cream stand that serves decent fries and shuts down after Labor Day Weekend.

Nine months of the year I find the density of Seattle delicious. But for the other three months, fewer choices feed my appetite just fine.