Re: food migration. I had a great experience when I moved to Durham, NC from NY City in 1973. I was working at the State Library in Raleigh and some of my coworkers determined we should go out for "Ethnic Food". They picked Italian, told me it was foreign cooking, and seemed to think it was quite exotic.

I grew up in SW Michigan in a small town and my German/Irish mother prepared various Italian dishes for dinner so I never quite thought of Italian as ethnic, but simply as American food.

By the time we left Durham in 1981 you could get most major cuisines in the Durham/Chapel Hill area. 

But from my experiences you are much less likely to find such variety in small towns, even today. I have to wonder what the Mexican migrants who worked in a pickle factory in my home town in the 1950s found to eat while they spent a month there working in a factory. 

Suzanne Levy