A SQUAT, SQUARE brick building sits in the middle of the decidedly nonsquat, nonsquare brick architecture of the Wichita State University campus. The temperature is just pulling itself above zero, and my jacket was among many victims of an energetic, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort at backpack reduction. Yet I jump out of the car and practically prostrate myself before the black-and-white sign that hangs modestly in front of this plain building.

Only three days into an eight-month journey around the world to report on globalization, and I have stumbled upon the first, the original Pizza Hut.

Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures? One answer, a lot of people's answer, is that globalization is causing these cultures to fade. Consider Pizza Hut and what it has wrought, for an example.

An idea, a culinary idea is carried by immigrants across the ocean. It thrives in this new environment, morphs, catches on, is perfected in New Haven, perhaps, or by some mysterious cheese master in Little Italy named Ray. Then the lords of business get hold of the idea -- this messy but tasty and convenient foodstuff -- and they imperfect it. (The lords of business in this case were two students at WSU, Dan and Frank Carney, who borrowed $600 to found this first Pizza Hut in 1958 and sold the resulting corporation to Pepsico for $300 million in 1977.) Underpaid workers prepare this "pizza" using standardized and prepackaged ingredients. Underpaid workers serve it, from approximately one of out of every 1.4 strip malls in the United States. Now Pizza Huts reign over strip malls in more than 85 countries, weaning the Russians from their borscht and the French from their foie gras.

Not everyone buys this story of nefarious and inexorable cultural homogenization. "I'm skeptical; that's all," Geertz says. "To me the world looks less alike; it gets stranger." Yes, things will change; they always have. But Geertz believes our cultural idiosyncrasies are sufficiently entrenched and resilient to weather KFC, MTV, and the NBA. Others are more impressed by the power wielded by these new forces, but believe them to be forces for good -- spreading clean water, democracy, the capitalist-wealth-production machine, and Slashdot.org around the planet. A new species-wide, bit-borne intelligence -- you hear talk like that, too.

I'm traveling around the world to report on these different views of what is happening to us. I'll hang out in pueblos and Internet cafés. I'll listen to Mayan priests, sweatshop workers, and French intellectuals. I'll trust in travel's tendency to edify and surprise.

THE SURPRISES ARE already coming. Ace planner that I am, I didn't even realize Pizza Hut hailed from Wichita when I decided to make Wichita the second stop on my journey. Instead, I chose Wichita because it is more or less in the middle of the United States (and Glen Campbell never sang about Topeka) and because I had come up with an idea about globalization of my own in which it figured: I thought it might now be possible to eat some kind of exotic, foreign food here -- in the middle of Kansas. That the exotic food turns out to be Laotian, that I am sitting, for the first time in my life, in a Laotian restaurant, where there is cilantro in the chicken and beef intestine in the soup, are further edifying surprises.

This is the inverse of the Pizza Hut globalization story: Not only is America's culture, in the form of Gaps and Baywatch, spreading around the world, the world's culture is spreading through America. I suspected that Kansas, in important ways, isn't Kansas anymore. I suspected that the United States, and much of the rest of the world, is experiencing the sort of era that's rarely discussed or named until it is gone: a golden age -- a golden age, in this case, of diversity.

The sign on the front of this particular restaurant reads, "Vientianne." Half its patrons, the restaurant's owner, Chan Pheng, estimates, are non-Laotians. Wichita residents, prepared to brave the cold on this Friday night, could also eat at restaurants named: Abram Café, Azteca, Beijing, Byblos, El Salvador, Hunan Café, Kyoto Garden, LeMonde Café, Malaysia Café, Marchello's, Mediterranean Café, Ming's Cantonese, Passage to India, Saigon, Taiwan, and Thai House. In fact, there are more than ninety foreign restaurants listed in the Wichita yellow pages.

How authentic is the cuisine these ethnic restaurant's offer? Where could they possibility obtain the right ingredients? Chan Pheng says she has had difficulty locating one item: At the center of Laotian cuisine is a particular kind of rice -- sticky rice -- and she has been unable to buy here in Wichita the round, covered wicker baskets in which this rice is traditionally served. Instead, the restaurateur asks friends to bring them back for her when they visit Laos. Everything else -- all the requisite vegetables, meats, fish and spices -- she can purchase from a local wholesaler.

This becomes less surprising when you look at where Wichita residents who buy retail can now shop. Perhaps half-a-dozen Asian or Mexican markets have popped up along one downtown street, Broadway, in recent years. But most Wichita shoppers are more likely simply to stop by one of the branches of the dominant local supermarket chain, Dillion's. There, if the warehouse-sized store I wandered into is typical, they can now purchase fresh starfruit, coconuts, daikon, kale, bok choy, kumquats, quince, and persimmons, along with at least four kinds of hot peppers.

"Fifteen or twenty years ago you couldn't find any ethnic food in a grocery store here," notes Peter Salmeron, a Wichita businessman (who reports that he first arrived in the city from Peru on May 16, 1971, at two-thirty in the afternoon). "Now you can get panetone bread at Dillon's."

I know: You have a supermarket like this somewhere near your home. You have at least as many different varieties of restaurants. That's the point.

And it is not just food. Salmeron says he is now able to buy shirts made in Peru in Wichita. Kam Manyseng, another local businessman, is talking about holding a Laotian New Year's festival in Wichita. The city, I'm told, now has five Buddhist temples, a Moslem community center, plus Vietnamese, Hispanic, and Native American newspapers. (The Wichita area now features a demographic mix quite similar to that of the United States as a whole: just under seventeen percent nonwhite.) And look at all the entertainments that are currently being beamed into Wichita -- hundreds of times more entertainments then once could have been seen even with a trip to Chicago or New York. Look at all the information that a school kid with a modem can now grab hold of in Wichita.