Well, a burger is pretty much a burger but the TOPPINGS are regional, so you're both right.
My only problem with WJ's approach has always been that there has to be some fixed time slot where and when this regionalism occured.
This approach works in older parts of the country, but in the Sunbelt and the West, things are changing before our very eyes.
Interesting article here:
http://www.hpj.com/archives/2007/oct07/oct8/MeatpackingremakesruralUSto.cfm Meatpacking remakes rural U.S. towns in new immigration frontier
DODGE CITY, Kan. (AP)--This is the home of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, of Boot Hill and the Long Branch Saloon, of cattle drives, buffalo hunters and the romance of the American West.
But that's the Dodge City of yesteryear.
Today, downtown has Mexican restaurants and stores more reminiscent of shops south of the border than Main Street Kansas. The city of 25,176 even has a new nickname: "Little Mexico."
Signs advertising "Envios a Mexico"--retail outlets where workers send hard-earned wages back home to Mexico and other countries--hang outside many Dodge City stores. Houses occasionally fly Mexican flags, whipped hard by the prairie winds.
Dodge City ... Cactus, Texas ... Fort Morgan, Colo. ... Postville, Iowa: For more than a hundred years, this region provided a bucolic idyll and a ready example of American life and values. Today, iconic farm towns struggle with a new economic model, one that requires a workforce that is poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic.
It's not easy. The immigrants who have flooded these communities are stretching schools and law enforcement. Still, at a time when other rural towns are slowly dying, Dodge City and meatpacking towns like it boast thriving economies.
"If these people can get past the gauntlet of the border, we welcome them here with open arms," said Ford County Sheriff Dean Bush, Dodge City's modern-day counterpart to Wyatt Earp.
But many of his fellow citizens seem lost. Randy Ford and his wife, Betty, have lived in Dodge City for 35 years. They no longer attend the city's Independence Day events. They can't understand what the singers--Spanish crooners singing Latin favorites--are saying.
"We don't go anymore because we don't want to be Mexican," he said. "We want to be American."
In Washington, the debate over immigration sometimes seems to be a clash of extremes. But here, in the wide-open spaces where one-dimensional economies stoke small towns, there is plenty of room for ambivalence.
How it got this way
Just as the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad here in 1872 brought white settlers to populate the dusty towns and farms of a fledging country, the relocation and consolidation of the meatpacking industry has transformed these icons of the American West. The result: diverse, multicultural communities that challenge breadbasket notions of wheat fields, white fences and even whiter demographics.
The transformation of the nation's meatpacking industry began in 1960 when plants began moving out of cities in favor of their livestock sources in right-to-work states like Kansas. The first big slaughterhouse came to Emporia in the 1960s, followed by plants near Garden City and in Dodge City in the 1980s.
For Dodge City--famed as the "Queen of the Cowtowns" during its cowboy heyday--the advent of the slaughter plants seemed a natural fit. Locals have long recognized that the odor of manure here is the smell of money.
"They are a major hub of business and economic activity and a huge employer," said Ted Schroeder, agricultural economist at Kansas State University. "You can't go into those communities without sensing the presence and importance of those large economic facilities. Everything around there is either working with, complementing or part of that industry."
Eventually, mom-and-pop meatpackers were swallowed up by giants like Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., Swift & Co. and National Beef Packing Co.
Their massive slaughter plants today routinely sit on the outskirts of rural towns. Huge feedlots stretching at times beyond the horizon now dot the wind-swept prairie where buffalo once grazed.
When the wind blows just so, the stench can be overpowering.
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