Here’s a fun game that you can play right now. Go to Google Maps. Look up any Food Lion in North Carolina. Then look and see if there is a Chinese restaurant in the same shopping center. In most cases, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of how close. A lot of times, the restaurant is right next to the grocery store.

I’m not claiming to have amazing powers of perception here. The Food Lion-Chinese restaurant thing has been a meme for a long time now, so much so that people just accept it as truth:

Seriously. It’s part of the North Carolina culinary cultural canon, like gas station fried chicken and haunted fish camps in the middle of nowhere.

However! Just because something feels true doesn’t make it actually true. And, as far as I know, nobody has ever tried to see exactly how many Chinese restaurants have set up shop next to Food Lions. Until now.

This TikTok rocketed to the top of my feeds a few weeks ago. In it, a man basically compares two geographic datasets to find the places where a Chinese restaurant is within a five minute walk of a Food Lion. What he found was that 59% of all Food Lions have a Chinese restaurant nearby. In North Carolina, that number is a whopping 72%. So yes, that thing you’ve been noticing for years (or if not, will now will notice for the rest of your life)? In North Carolina, it’s overwhelmingly true.

Or, at least I hoped it was. In an age where AI is ascendant, ragebait is a business model, and misinformation is rampant, I was a little worried about this video. When I looked at the account, I found that it had barely any followers, and the Food Lion video was the only video it had ever posted. When I tried to track down the name on it, Jeffrey Jiacheng, nothing came up. So I sent a direct message and, in the meantime, studied the background for something suspicious. I also asked people who do spatial analysis to see if the post’s methodology seemed legit.

Turns out I just needed to be patient. Jeffrey Shen, the guy in the video, replied to me a few days later, and we talked by phone. He’s a software developer who makes interactive online mapping software, and he moved to Charlotte about a year ago (Jiacheng is his Chinese name). He, like you, noticed the Chinese restaurant-Food Lion thing. He’d done data visualization in the past, and after talking to some friends, thought he might be able to figure this thing out.

It took him about a week. “Honestly, the hardest part was find a list of all the Chinese restaurants,” he said. “It’s probably not complete.”

He ran the numbers and double-checked his work. Then, he was talked into making the video. “I was talking to my girl about it,” he says. “She thought a lot of people would be interested in this.”

They were. As of now, the video has 228,000 views.

(For what it’s worth, I did ask someone I’ve collaborated with before on geographic analysis to look at Shen’s work. “Deserving of applause!” analyst Blake Esselstyn told me via email. “It's not often that I see quantitative geographic research on a platform like TikTok, and this one has documentation of sources and methodology, no less. I wouldn't say it's quite ready for publication in a journal, but for this medium, it's way above average.”)

Of course, this was more than just straight data analysis. “I’ve always had a soft spot for Chinese restaurants and owners,” Shen told me. “In the South, immigrants opened shops and restaurants in places under Jim Crow. I’d been thinking about it, and then I came here and saw this phenomenon.”

So yes, it’s a real thing. But there’s a much more complex question afoot. Why?

First off, you may be surprised by just how many Chinese restaurants there actually are in North America. A frequently-cited estimate from the Chinese American Restaurant Association states there are more than 45,000 of them across the United States alone, more than all of the McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy's locations combined. That’s incredible, considering that people of Chinese descent make up only 1.6% of this country’s population. Culturally, Chinese cuisine is punching far above its weight.

The largest concentration of Chinese folks in America is in California, which isn’t surprising, given the fact that it’s geographically one of the closest states to China, and was the place where the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived during the 1849 gold rush. In the decades that followed that boom, a wave of anti-Chinese racism led to the the first law restricting immigration into America, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned the entry of Chinese laborers. That law, strangely, gave birth to the Chinese restaurant industry in the United States. While laborers were banned, there were other ways for Chinese people to get visas. “Owners of particular businesses could obtain ‘merchant status,’ which enabled them to enter the United States and sponsor relatives,” writes Heather B. Lee in a history of Chinese restaurants. “After a 1915 court case granted these special immigration privileges to Chinese restaurant owners, entrepreneurial people in the United States and China opened restaurants as a way to bypass restrictions in U.S. immigration law. Flows of newcomers from China were diverted into the restaurant industry.” It still wasn’t easy to get a visa, but new Chinese Americans were able to make connections, enlist white partners for both supplies and testimonials to immigration officials, and rely on family for demanding, low-wage work. Because of that, the number of Chinese restaurants shot up exponentially in the early 20th century.

The food wasn’t always authentically Chinese. Fortune cookies are actually Japanese, but became staples in Chinese restaurants amidst the Japanese internments during World War II. Broccoli wasn’t well known in China—It was an Italian staple. And early in the 20th century, chop suey was a phenomenon in cities where young people were looking for something exotic for a night out. Would people in China have recognized that dish? Nope! “I like to say chop suey is the biggest culinary joke one culture ever played on another,” the writer Jennifer 8. Lee said in a 2008 talk, noting that the words mean “odds and ends” when translated back into English. “So, these people are going around China asking for chop suey, which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying, ‘I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called ‘leftovers.’”

By the mid-1970s, the draconian laws restricting Chinese immigration had been loosened, and interest in more authentic Chinese food skyrocketed after Richard Nixon was shown eating a meal with chopsticks during his landmark visit to China in 1972. After that, a number of Chinese restaurants became high-end cuisine in big cities, and mom-and-pop Chinese food really started to take off in small towns where there was less competition and the rent tended to be lower.

This rural phenomenon caught the attention of Jocelyn Fung, a master’s student in Data Analytics and Visualization at Pratt Institute in New York City. “I wanted to validate this observation that I had, that wherever you go in Canada or the U.S., there's a Chinese restaurant in like every single small town,” she told me. First, she dove into the history, and found that a lot of studies and books about Chinese restaurants focus on big cities, not more rural areas. So, as part of a grad school project, Fung took user-generated Foursquare data, and generated a map of every known Chinese restaurant in North America, some 44,000 in all. The data, while imperfect, suggested that there seem to be more Chinese restaurants per capita in small towns than in big cities.

“The main thing that I wanted to validate is this assumption that it doesn't matter where Chinese populations are. There's going to be a Chinese restaurant no matter what. A lot of people think about Chinese food as something really foreign, but it's actually very, very American,” Fung said. “And the other thing I wanted to validate is that the people that these restaurants serve are not Chinese, right? It's white people.” Indeed, Fung said, a Chinese restaurant map is really just a map of where white people live.

But one thing that Fung’s map and data don’t explain, at least not directly, is the Food Lion-Chinese restaurant connection. “I think there are like spatial statistics that will help you assess that out, like whether or not there is like a statistically significant relationship between these,” she said. “It might just be a correlation.”

That said, there are a lot of ways in which Chinese restaurants and Food Lions are pulling from the same customer base. A 2018 study cited by Fung called “From Chinatown to Every Town” took a closer look at the phenomenon of small-town Chinese restaurants. It found that Chinese employment agencies and benevolent associations helped form a network that bussed employees into the small towns where they could find restaurant work (which, as shown in a 2014 New Yorker article, can be very stressful, exhausting, and isolating). Restaurant owners tended to look for areas with relatively low unemployment and low crime. The study also found that owners tended to focus on areas with a lot of low- or middle-income people, which seemed to be their best customer base. “Meals in Chinese restaurants are very affordable, especially at Chinese takeout places,” the study’s authors wrote. “As such, potential customers do not need to earn a high income to eat in a Chinese restaurant.”

Now consider Food Lion, which has always prioritized higher volume over higher prices. Ralph Ketner of Salisbury, the store’s founder, wrote a book called “Five Fast Pennies.” The reason for the title? “I learned from my father, ‘Never charge the customer more than necessary. Make a living—not a killing,’” he wrote. “At Food Town/Food Lion, our lower prices led to higher volume. We chose to make 1¢ profit on each of five cans of beans, instead of 5¢ on one can of beans—thus my philosophy of Five fast pennies instead of one slow nickel.”

Ketner was a hardworking math whiz who loved efficiency in his stores and in his offices, evidenced by the cheap linoleum that once lined the floors in the company’s headquarters in Salisbury. In the late 1960s, he introduced LFPINC (Lowest Food Prices in North Carolina) and, except for meat, lowered prices to numbers that were six-to-ten-percent lower than any other grocery store. That meant some items actually were sold at a loss.

The concept worked, and Food Town (which became Food Lion in 1983) grew from a small-town chain to a Southern grocery store behemoth. Lower prices catered to lower-income people, and Food Lions became the anchor tenants at brand new strip malls being built across North Carolina and other Southern states.

To be fair, Food Lion doesn’t have exclusivity here. Any major supermarket will usually make for a strong anchor store at a suburban shopping center. But Food Lions tend to show up in lower-income areas than many of its peers. “Consider the local demographics of the area when determining the value of a grocery store,” one retail analyst states. “A Food Lion in an area with a high median income will not perform as well as a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.”

The things that surround supermarkets are often small-scale stores that serve everyday needs. They’re usually privately operated, and tend to cater to the same type of customer as the one that’s coming in for groceries. And, while nobody has done a more serious study of the Food Lion-Chinese restaurant relationship, it does seem that strip mall owners have made the connection. An acquaintance of mine in commercial real estate works with landlords at four Food Lion-anchored shopping centers across North Carolina. He doesn’t know if Chinese restaurant owners are intentionally seeking out Food Lions, but he says he knows of some landlords who deliberately seek out Chinese restaurants instead of national chains. The reasons: Chinese restaurants put their heart-and-soul into their businesses, more than a franchise owner might. They pay on time. They tend to take care of small issues themselves. They’re usually very good tenants.

Of course, Chinese restaurants aren’t the only places that set up in Food Lion strip malls. There are also nail salons, tax preparers, Subways, vape stores, and Mexican restaurants. And they don’t exclusively choose Food Lions either. You might find one in the same shopping center as a Harris Teeter or Lowe’s Foods. Hence, the phenomenon might be more about the rise of strip malls than the rise of Food Lion.

I did attempt, somewhat feebly, to commission my own research into this. Last month, as I picked up an order of General Tso’s Chicken from the Asian Bistro in Winston-Salem, I asked the folks behind the counter about the Food Lion a few storefronts down. Did it factor into the decision to rent here? “I don’t think so,” the woman behind the counter told me. And last week, a manager at the China II restaurant in Denver, North Carolina told Rabbit Hole reader/deputy correspondent Austin Putnam that when they opened up 20 years ago, the Food Lion shopping center was the only strip mall in town. They’ve been there ever since.

In the end, this all may be a numbers game. Fung looked into her data for me, and found that North Carolina ranks fourth when it comes to the total number of small town Chinese restaurants with 269, behind California, Texas, and Ohio (Related: North Carolina is far more rural than you think). Overall, Fung’s data show that as of February, there were 1,462 Chinese restaurants operating in North Carolina (By comparison, data scraping sites note around 470-480 McDonald’s locations in this state). As far as grocery stores go, Food Lion is the biggest supermarket in North Carolina, with more than 500 locations across the state in both big and small towns.

So. When it comes to groceries and takeout, Food Lion and Chinese restaurants are more prolific than anyone else in their respective categories. They both prioritize low prices. They’re both catering to the same type of customers. And, they’re both staples of strip malls across the South in both big and small towns, especially in North Carolina. And yes, mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants aren’t franchises in the same way that Panda Express or P.F. Chang’s are, but they often rely on support networks for staffing, menus, naming, and more. It’s entirely possible that people in those networks are telling prospective owners to set up next to Food Lions. But it’s also possible that they’re telling them that the best places to open are in spots with criteria that would, just by happenstance, put them right next to a Food Lion. There’s definitely correlation. Causation? Who knows.

That said, Fung’s data and Shen’s analysis both show that North Carolina’s strip malls are places where culture and capitalism collide, ones that allow you to grab Chinese takeout and a gallon of milk during the same trip. “I feel like it's very much a supply and demand thing from all different angles, right?” Fung told me. “People come here looking for a better life and they need work. People here love Chinese food. So It just seems to be a thing that works. For everyone.”