The bar above tracks five stages of your food journey with us. It moves when you get out there and start exploring.

• Journey Start: Create an account
• Curious Cook: Play one dish scout and one quiz.
• Real-World Chef: Play all games and quizzes once.
• Designer of Your Fate: Do analog activities twce.
• Food Historian: Complete a course.

Each filled segment unlocks a little more of the archive: views, guides, and games that draw on what you've already told us.

Idiocuisine — from idiosyncratic + cuisine. It's the particular way you've learned to eat from your household, relationships, and local communities.

No two idiocuisines are identical, but they cluster. When enough people in a region describe their table, patterns surface, like food migration routes, classic suppers, popular ways to cook a dish that died with commercialization. This is the research the atlas exists to make possible.

Your idiocuisine profile is built from your own answers and stays yours. We show it back to you as a portrait, but we don't present your user profile to the public.

For more insights on your idiocuisine, share the site to people in and outside your region at interactive.southernculinaryatlas.com.

You keep the copyright to everything you write here. A license is simply your instruction to us about how others may reuse it. We recommend an open share-alike license so families, students, and researchers can build on the record. This is the same standard we hold our researchers to.

Applies to new contributions. You can change the license on anything you've already submitted from your contributions list.

We keep as little personally identifying information as the research allows, and we handle what we do keep carefully.

• Place, not address. Location is stored at region level (county, municipality, province) only.
• Separated storage. Demographic fields live apart from your stories and recipes and are joined only in aggregate for analysis.
• Encryption. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest; database backups are encrypted too.
• Least access. Only moderators on active review duty can see an unpublished submission, and access is logged.
• PII scrubbing. Before publication we flag phone numbers, street addresses, and full names of living people that appear inside submitted text and change them to aggregations. In other words, we don't need your auntie's street address, only her county.
• No third-party trackers. No ad pixels, no session recording, no analytics resale.

The next build gives you direct control over the record you've built, without writing to us:

• Adjust your rights: change the license on any past contribution or change your attribution name.
• Revoke a contribution: withdraw a story or recipe from the public archive. Your aggregated data will stay on any already-published research.
• Consent receipts: a dated log of exactly what you agreed to, each time you agreed to it.
• Household delegation: let a relative add their account of a dish under your household without sharing a login.

Targeted for early 2027, alongside the courses and guides.