It's generally not that difficult to find seafood, vegetables, and a variety of spices at a grocery store. "Ethnic food" is, in the end, just food. With the right ingredients, a sharp knife, and a hot pan, you can make just about anything. The idea that you have to live within walking distance of $restaurant in order to not have to survive on bread and milk is fallacious.
> "With the right ingredients, a sharp knife, and a hot pan, you can make just about anything."
The first part is a problem in most places. You could, for example, make your own soy sauce. But you won't, because that's thoroughly impractical.
A lot of ingredients are surprisingly hard to come by in a lot of places. Even in places where you can find them, oftentimes they come in very poor quality (see: try to find good miso most places in the US).
I once lived in a heavily suburban town where I couldn't find a decent bottle of soy sauce to save my life. The only thing I could find was a bottle of brown-salt-liquid.
To put it in perspective, imagine moving somewhere where "bread" is just white Wonder Bread. Forget hot dog bugs, forget burger buns, forget whole wheat, forget baguettes, etc etc. Just plain white wonder bread. This is what the state of "ethnic food" looks like across a lot of the country. While you can make some of these things yourself, at some point it reminds you of the "to make an apple pie, first invent the universe" quote.
"Ethnic" ingredients in many parts of the country are either completely unavailable, or only available in a form that's palatable to people who have no substantial knowledge of the cuisine.
It takes actual population diversity to bring about the good ingredients. There are vast parts of the country where quality "ethnic" ingredients are impossible or impractical to procure.
Side note: the word "ethnic food" itself is indicative of something IMO. A system under which Indian food, Chinese food, Korean food, Afghan food, Malaysian food, and Ethiopian food are easily categorized under a single catch-all term suggests a very severe lack of diversity indeed.
That said, you just need to live in pretty much any decent-sized city to have access to good ingredients, and especially if you're comparing a major metro area with a suburb 20 years ago, it's an unfair comparison, as food has become more of an obsession across broad swaths of the culture.
I'm farther from an Indian grocery store today living in a core neighborhood of Brooklyn than when I grew up in Milwaukee or went to school in Pittsburgh. And when I went home to visit Milwaukee, the local food coop had ramps available, just like any hip store in Brooklyn.
Well... it's not all that impressive that Milwaukee has ramps available. Chicago is practically named after them. The region produces them in abundance. But go find good miso in Milwaukee.
