A few states identify with their shapes, but not many. When I lived in New York City, I never met anyone with a tattoo shaped like New York State and I never drove past a giant New York-shaped steak on the highway. Maybe Texas is so big that it needed one easy symbol, and a ‘T’ or a cowboy boot or a chicken-fried steak didn’t quite sum it up. Maybe its obsession with its shape is one of many age-old ways that Texas likes to separate itself from the rest of the states. No other state in the continental United States operates its own power grid, is creating its own state-run gold depository and no longer honors last-meal requests by condemned inmates. It’s hard to squeeze any of that onto a T-shirt or tattoo.

The business of constructing all this Texas-shaped stuff is serious business. In downtown Houston, a swarm of people have been designing, building and tinkering with the Texas-shaped lazy river at the Marriott Marquis Houston, which opens in November. The 140,000-gallon river forms the outline of a rooftop terrace shaped like Texas. The terrace and river cost roughly $10 million to build.

Waffles are far cheaper than pools — a Texas-cut waffle at the Vickery Cafe is $5.69.

I asked Curtis James, the owner of the Vickery and the co-owner of the Texan Diner, what happens if a patron orders, say, a nonstate-shaped regular old circular or square Belgian waffle. “It’s always Texas-shaped,” he replied.

Mr. James, a native Texan, said the idea to serve Texas-shaped waffles came from “my waffle guy,” his contact at a waffle mix and waffle iron distributor. “The guy offered a Texas-shaped waffle iron.”

The distributor that supplies Mr. James with his Texas-shaped irons and helps give the people of Fort Worth a Texas-shaped breakfast is Carbon’s Golden Malted. It is headquartered in Indiana.