Last month, we applauded the efforts of an L.A. TACO fanatic who had taken on the considerable task of mapping every place in Los Angeles that sells tacos or has tacos in its name. Now a geographer from Mexico's National Autonomous University has fulfilled our once impossible dreams and made an illuminated map featuring every place in the country of Mexico that sells tacos.
With vastly more terrain to cover, and ostensibly many, many, many more taquerías than little old L.A., the already amazingly named Baruch Sanginés employed geolocation data from INEGI, a national statistics agency to find every known entity serving tacos in the whole of Mexico for social media's cartographer-friendly #30DayMapChallenge.
The final record shows 1.6 million places where tacos are sold in the nation, surely somewhat short considering the inevitable existence of untally-able forces in the taco universe, hidden in some small street or mountain pass. Either way, this is realistically more tacos than one could ever eat in multiple lifetimes.
The scientist found the greatest abundance of tacos where population densities increase, telling Mexico News Daily, "Here in Mexico City I could almost tell you that 95% of people have a taco stand 400 meters from their home. No matter where you live, almost 400 meters away you have a stall nearby. That speaks to the popularity of the taco."
Likewise, Sanginés pinpointed Monterrey and Guadalajara to be among the country's richest taco hot spots, with a notable, unenviable lack of tacos for the residents of Mexico City's wealthy Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood.
The map, viewable in zoomed-out form here, shows a Christmas-worthy festival of lights that mirrors a plane passengers' eye view of Mexico's major urban hubs, with brightly colored lights blaring from the nation's center and cities. And seemingly few dark spots.
We can't say we're not a little jealous of such a surplus of tacos, which makes our own rich scene seem more than a bit scant by comparison. A similar all-seeing eye above the United States itself would imaginably reveal too many dark spots in the country's center, at least leaving us with the satisfaction that we live on the brightest possible coast of taco consumption in the country.
1.6 million tacos, though? We may have to consider moving south.
