Plague of Strength

The West, and Americans in particular, are conditioned to view our culture’s greatest exports, fast food and fossil-fuel-powered machinery, as embarrassing monuments to our legendary greed. A young nation with no distinct linguistic, ethnic, racial, or territorial roots, we instead have our many inventions to speak for us. A nation of possession-and-wealth-obsessed consumers, we have truly bizarre thought patterns about consumer product goods and the purveyors of food no other nation displays, and this leads to bizarre behavior and weird nationalism arising out of simple shit like rebranding an American mainstay like Aunt Jemima or reflavoring an American classic like Coke.

More intertwined with the image of the American than apple pie, baseball, or any of the other anachronistic bullshit old people tend to associate with our nation is fatness, because Americans are so fucking corpulent that our countrymen from the 1950s would likely think we lived in some kind of horrific dystopia in which everyone is hell bent on becoming as unfuckable as possible. Rightly or wrongly, where the Albanians are associated with murder and car theft, or the Roma are associated with the theft of basically anything movable, or Haitians are generalized as being the worst neighbors any human being could have and terrifyingly witchy to boot, Americans are pegged with being fat, and our love of fast food is identified as the culprit.

Clearly, no stereotype is 100% accurate, and the vilification of fast food in America is no exception. While fast food has been linked to everything from obesity to cancer and impotence, Taco Bell is widely hailed as one of the healthiest fast food options on the planet, and has yet to resort to adding tapeworms instead of gusano rojos as an edible treat to induce fat loss in a faux skinny marg. The move appears to be the doing of Taco Bell’s chief dietitician, Missy Nelson, who expanded T-Bell’s healthier options while reducing the amount of sodium in the food, which I’m sure made made middle aged chicks (who seem to never stop discussing the state of swelling in their feet) happier than pigs in shit. Nelson’s hidden value to T-Bell actually came in her past work, however, as she seems to have a done a lot of research in the past on using very cheap ingredients to make healthy foods for people on government programs like WIC, an invaluable addition to the crew of a company based on using cheap ingredients available through the U.S. food-processing industry as a substitute for traditional ingredients that are either difficult to market (like offal, which we replaced with hamburger) or difficult to store fresh, like corn tortillas (which we’ve replaced with hard shell tacos and flour soft shell tacos (on loan from Middle Eastern food).

As I already covered the basic history of the taco in the al pastor series, I won’t rehash it too hard. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the man who is basically considered to be the world’s foremost authority on tacos, a professor at a Southern US military college primarily known for producing very few unraped graduates over the last century. Why they have the foremost taco expert on the planet on their payroll is a mystery I can only surmise arose out of an effort to change their perception from a racist white rape factory producing future coal rollers and Confederate flag lovers. In any event, here’s why Taco Bell is so awesome, in his words.

“The children of those migrants who came in 1910 or 1920 are starting to advance economically. They’re gaining civil rights; many of them fought in World War II and are claiming citizenship. Their incomes are going up and they’re eating more diverse things, but they’re still eating Mexican. A lot of Mexican American tacos are really adaptations of Mexican food to the ingredients that are available through the U.S. food-processing industry. Hamburger instead of offal meat. Cheddar cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato—these are all foods that Mexican-Americans start to incorporate into their diet.

So at the same time, what’s happening with tacos in Mexico?

You’re also starting to see new migrants coming into Mexico. For example, there are a lot of Lebanese migrants, and one of the things they bring with them is shawarma, or gyros—vertical rotisseries where they cook lamb, and they put it on little pita breads. But when they start putting [the meat] on tortillas, they’re called tacos arabes: Arab tacos. Again, it’s the second generation, the children of these Lebanese migrants, who change the recipe a little bit and start using pork instead of lamb. And they start adding a little pineapple. Tacos al pastor, which really doesn’t catch on until the 1960s, then becomes a standard Mexican dish that’s everywhere.

You talk about how the taco business in post-World War II Los Angeles illustrated increasing segregation in the city. What did the location of taco shops—including Glen Bell’s Taco Bell—say about how the taco was being “assimilated” into American culture?

Glen Bell borrowed everything about the taco from his Mexican neighbors. He did not invent the taco. What he did was bring a U.S. business model called franchising. I mapped out where these taco shops were, and I found there were no shops—or very few—in East L.A., the biggest Mexican neighborhood in all of California. I was like, “How can this possibly be?” And I realized that Mexicans, when they were selling to other Mexicans, were not calling their restaurants taco shops. The word “taco” in a restaurant name was actually a way of selling Mexican food to non-Mexicans. What Glen Bell was doing was allowing Americans of other racial and ethnic groups to sample Mexican food without actually going in to Mexican neighborhoods.

What made the fast-food taco possible?

The fast-food taco is a product of something called the “taco shell,” a tortilla that has been pre-fried into that characteristic U-shape. If you read Glen Bell’s authorized biography, he says he invented the taco shell in the 1950s, and that it was his technological breakthrough. Mexicans were cooking tacos to order—fresh—and Glen Bell, by making then ahead, was able to serve them faster. But when I went into the U.S. patent office records, I found the original patents for making taco shells were awarded in the 1940s to Mexican restaurateurs, not to Glen Bell.

So when do you see evidence of the hard-shell taco first becoming popular?

Already in the 1940s, Mexican cookbooks are describing the way to make these, by taking a tortilla, frying it, and bending it over to form that U-shape. It’s hard to say when people started doing this for the first time, but clearly its being done at least a decade before Glen Bell claims to have invented it.

Did the taco lead the way toward a broader commercialization of Mexican food in general?

The taco shell is crucial for taking Mexican food outside of Mexican communities. Corn tortillas do not keep very well. They’re sort of like doughnuts—if you get a fresh doughnut, it tastes really good. If you get one that’s been setting around for weeks, not so good. If the taco shell is fried beforehand, you can wrap it up in plastic and keep it sitting around until somebody wants to use it.

Has the American-born taco circulated back to Mexico? How has the wave of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the last 20 years changed food on both sides of the border?

Lets just say that the Mexicans have been a lot more successful at bringing their Mexican food to the United States than Americans have at bringing their Mexican food to Mexico. Taco Bell has tried on a couple occasions to establish restaurants in Mexico, and they have invariably closed down very quickly. But I think Mexican regional tacos—like tacos al pastor, tacos de barbacoa—are becoming increasingly popular in the United States. I think the reason for that is Americans want something they perceive as being a more authentic variety. They want the “real” thing.

What are some of your favorite taco joints in the U.S. today?

Tacos are street food. Where I like to go in Minneapolis is the Mercado Central, which is a little Mexican market on Lake Street. It’s got a number of vendors who are Mexican, and they make the kind of food they had back in Mexico. To me it’s like a little vacation. You can find these kinds of places all over the country now. There’s a whole world of fancy Mexican food, but every place where there are Mexican migrants you’re going to find some good tacos” (Friesen).

So, the next time you get it into your head to shit on Taco Bell, don’t. Yeah, there’s better Mexican food on the planet, but without Taco Bell’s efforts you might not have the opportunity to really enjoy tacos in any form without travelling to Texas, Mexico, or elsewhere in Mesoamerica. As I keep saying- contest is everything, even when it comes to fast food.

Sources:

Friesen, Katy June.  Where did the taco come from?  Smithsonian.  3 May 2012.  Web.  13 Apr 2019.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/where-did-the-taco-come-from-81228162/

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!