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Your culinary gain is the planet's loss. Sure, you can drive down a Virginia highway and get Philly cheese steaks, New England clam chowder, buffalo wings and St. Louis–style ribs, but it's almost impossible to find the peanut soup the Old Dominion State was famous for.

As with everything else, there are foodie progressives and foodie reactionaries, and they look at the peanut-soup problem differently. Mark Kurlansky, the best-selling author of Salt and Cod, has a new book, titled The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food — Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional — From the Lost WPA Files (yes, he's the reactionary). It's a collection of manuscripts from an unfinished Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) project to compile local food customs into a book. Kurlansky presents a startling snapshot of our nation's culinary past: a country of squirrel and opossum eaters, where few recipes didn't include cornmeal, molasses or salt pork and ash was a totally acceptable spice. "All these things like hoecakes and this Southern kind of baking — I wish there was more of that," says Kurlansky of the U.S.'s disappearing dishes. "In the West, they had sourdough pancakes. Some of the local alcohols" — he stops to ponder the various homebrews of yesteryear and concludes, "We don't make enough booze in this country." Indeed, the Arkansan art of producing cherry bounce (cherry-infused whiskey) needs to return. (See pictures of urban farming.)

The files Kurlansky unearthed — some written by Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston — reveal a weirder, more varied country. "Food is just part of the regional culture that's getting neutralized," says Kurlansky. "When I was growing up, I could tell what part of Connecticut someone was from just from his accent."

Though Kurlansky has tried some of the recipes in his book — the still regionally popular Indiana persimmon pudding is a favorite — he admits that some of these old dishes aren't great. "For my taste, there's too much ketchup and canned food in these recipes," he says. "But I would have rather eaten in 1930. I like to eat food that tells me where I am. I do book tours, and every night I'm in a different place, and I wish I were eating a different kind of food, since I'm going to all this trouble getting on and off of planes. Chicago — I don't know what to eat in Chicago nowadays. They always tell you to eat pizza, which doesn't cut it."

Fortunately for Kurlansky, there's a new guide to help people venture off the culinary highway. Written by foodie progressives who savor Chicago's pizza as well as its beef sandwiches and chicken Vesuvio and scads of old-school offerings across the country, Jane and Michael Stern's 500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late refers not to a diminishing American landscape but to the limited number of eating opportunities in our life spans. It's a bucket list of restaurants serving local, often obscure dishes, ranked cheerily from best to almost best. The Sterns' nation is one with at least a few places still serving the Kentucky burgoo (thick stew) Kurlansky dug up in those WPA files, as well as South Carolina perloo (meat-and-rice dish), Wisconsin hoppel poppel (meal in a skillet), Ohio sauerkraut balls and even the Vermont sour-milk doughnuts that Kurlansky longs for. The Sterns' America has endless varieties of hot dogs and dueling chowders. It's a land where men still gather to eat lamb fries, prairie oysters and other forms of animal testicle.

The Sterns, a married couple, have been hitting dives since the first edition of their classic, Roadfood, was published in 1977, do not agree with Kurlansky's contention that local cuisine is dying. "We're getting more homogenized. There is a lot of crap out there, but it is not that difficult to avoid the crap," Michael Stern says. "Jane and I could eat our way around this country for three more lifetimes and not eat all the regional dishes. And by then, there'd be 3,000 new regional dishes." New dishes that often are formed by the rubbing of immigration plates. Just this year, Los Angeles gave rise to the Korean taco.

To the Sterns, technology has made local food more vibrant, with people trading recipes and restaurant suggestions online. If anything, the Sterns are confused as to why many of these dishes are still regional — why, for example, the Midwest's sour-cream raisin pie hasn't joined Texas' nachos on more menus. They also think the U.S.'s local cuisine is kept fresh since it is always being tinkered with because of our lack of a food canon. While there might be only one right way to make bouillabaisse in France, there's always a new argument about how to barbecue.

But if Kurlansky's America is vanishing and the Sterns' is still emerging, both describe a culinary landscape more fascinating than the hamburgers and pizza we're known for. It's the kind of dynamic cultural mash-up that occurred in Italy before each town's dishes were calcified into classics. While every highway Olive Garden and Chili's hinders that dynamism, local cuisine is not gone yet. "There is no national hot-dog chain," says Stern. "That's because people are so loyal to the hot dog with which they grew up." So maybe we're not quite Europe. That doesn't mean we don't care about our food.

See pictures of what the world eats.

See pictures of urban farming.

• Joel Stein
• As regional fare gets harder to find, two new books celebrate America's culinary heritage. Squirrel mulligan, anyone?