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Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas.***When we inaugurated this newsletter, we promised it would feature “good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones.” Whether all the maps so far have been great is up for debate, but I don’t think we’ve had any truly terrible ones yet. So, with that, let me share a couple of my own.The concept of Mediterranean cuisine has always been a confusing, if compelling, one. Over the past century and a half, immigrants from around the Eastern Mediterranean have moved to America and opened restaurants serving food from their homelands. Depending on where exactly the owners came from, these restaurants have carried a variety of different names and sold a variety of different, but overlapping, dishes.Mediterranean Food Map, courtesy of me, Google Maps, and Microsoft Paint.In time, the overlap became self-fulfilling. There was enough shared cuisine between Lebanese and Greek restaurants, for example, that people who couldn’t find one went to the other and expected all the same dishes. The owners were usually happy to oblige. As a result, Greek restaurants started selling hummus and Lebanese restaurants started selling tzatziki and obviously everyone kept serving stuffed grape leaves. Then, when a new generation of immigrants arrived, whether from Turkey or Tunisia or anywhere in between, they found a ready-made culinary template waiting for them. And so, while some opened Turkish or Tunisian restaurants and some just opened Italian-themed pizza places, others launched a new wave of explicitly Mediterranean restaurants.Bringing together graphics that have been generously described as Atari-style and research methods that might be called anecdotal, today’s map tries to tease out the regional geography of this cuisine. Even before politics come into play,