(Pic) Where in the USA to Escape McDonalds

Attempting to escape chain restaurants and big box stores in the US can seem like an impossible task. On a recent road trip, artist Stephen Von Worley noticed that they were popping up everywhere, even in the middle of formerly barren landscapes.

Curious to see just how rampant this problem had become, Von Worley gathered data showing the exact location of all 13,000 U.S. McDonalds. What resulted was a visualisation that draws a spot on map of the United States – and showed how pervasive the chain really is.

He explains the distribution:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid.  East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.  There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

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[via The Food Section]