Seven Layers of Sin
Taco talk: I heard a food-related confession recently that shocked me. I was having lunch at a swank country club with a friend when I overheard two attractive, well-coiffed, and freshly manicured matrons at the next table reveal to each other their secret passion: Taco Bell.
“Sometimes,” said the blonde matron, looking past her plate of grilled sea bass and vegetables, “I sneak out at night to get a gordita.”
Her companion, barely nibbling on her plain grilled chicken breast, revealed that she knew the Taco Bell menu better than did any high school senior in America. And, she said conspiratorially, she never actually sets foot in the place. Thanks to the drive-through window and dark sunglasses, her secret lust is safe from public display.
Huh? Taco Bell? The fast-food chain that serves bland, tasteless Mexican food (“Salty, mild goop,” wrote John Mariani in his book, America Eats Out) with almost unparalled success? Who would have imagined?
As the largest fast-food Mexican chain in the world, Taco Bell, owned by TriCon Global Restaurants Inc. (a subsidiary of Pepsico that also owns Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut), serves more than 55 million people weekly. At Taco Bell, it’s possible to eat lavish amounts of that “salty, mild goop” for less than five bucks; at a sit-down Mexican restaurant, like Medina’s Mexican Restaurant, a three-taco dinner goes for $6.50. But what inflames fans of the chain to have such passion that they create — and maintain — Web sites devoted to the cult of Taco Bell? A spin through Yahoo! leads directly to the Taco Bell Love site, developed by the Milwaukee-based FreakOut. (Her home page tells us much more about herself, including her physical statistics and level of self-esteem, as revealed by the notation of “social status: loser.”)
The rambling confessional on the Taco Bell Love site includes such revelations as the fact that its writer eats at Taco Bell “10 to 15 times a week, albeit usually when I’m stoned out of my mind” and the writer’s opinion that “any city that doesn’t have a Taco Bell should be declared uninhabitable by the United States Government.”
Much less zealous is the Taco Bell Net site, created in 1994 by students at the Rochester Institute of Technology “who simply ate Taco Bell all the time.” The original purpose of the site, its creators write, “was to bring back the original 7-Layer Burrito.… After about a year of collecting responses to our plight, we submitted a petition of 1,000 e-mails to Taco Bell Corp.” A few months later, the RIT students declared victory: the 7-Layer Burrito reappeared on the Taco Bell menu.
Fans of Taco Bell’s tacos, gorditas, chalupas, and burritos can pick up interesting (and sometimes troubling) nutritional information on both Taco Bell Net and the actual Taco Bell corporate site, including the fact that a single taco contains 10 grams of fat, a Chalupa Supreme Beef contains 23 grams of fat, and a single Chalupa Baja has 27 grams of fat. No wonder the Johnson County matrons were furtively whispering about their passion for the stuff: A single meal can set a disciplined diet back by weeks.
But true devotees of Taco Bell don’t seem to care about fat grams or sodium levels. As long as the paper-wrapped delicacies remain hot, cheap, and fast, Taco Bell will continue to take over the world, one uninhabitable city after another.
