Taco Bell - Realm of the Stoned, Plus Me

There’s no point in decrying Taco Bell for its lack of authenticity or its lack of adherence to national food traditions. Taco Bell is a Mexican restaurant in the same vein that Wal-Mart is a place where you can buy goods that weren’t made in a sweatshop. That is to say, to make an argument that this is so is to make an argument you’re not going to win.

Taco Bell exists in somewhat of an altered state - a junction between reality and unreality. After placing my order and waiting for my food, I found my eye being drawn to the drink machine, as its ice dispenser spontaneously dumped several servings’ worth of ice into the little tray meant to catch the spillover from your cup. My eyes then scanned the drink selection. There were the usual Pepsi products (Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Foods, a wholly owned subsidiary of PepsiCo, meaning the last thing you’ll ever find at a Taco Bell is a Sprite dispenser), as well as Mountain Dew Baja Blast and Lipton Raspberry Tea, two drinks that I am yet to find in the rest of the universe.

I, your intrepid food writer, sampled them and found the Baja Blast to be aggressively sugary – more so than regular Dew – and vaguely tropical-flavored. Thumbs up. The raspberry tea was overpowered by the raspberry-ness of it all, leaving me with more of the taste of an un-carbonated red drink rather than an actual tea. Still, the thing tasted like it was comprised of only the highest of high-fructose corn syrups, so I ended up drinking an entire cup of it.

Moving on to the napkin station – which, for God-knows-what reason, is on wheels – I found packets of Taco Bell's favored “Border Sauce,” which I’m fairly certain is just the grease that gets strained out of their ground beef, with varying degrees of spiciness thrown in for fun. This totally non-unhealthy product comes in three flavors: “Mild,” “Hot,” and “Fire.” However, none of them are particularly spicy, with even the “Fire” flavor erring on the side of somewhat sweet. The most noteworthy element of these little packets have to be the messages printed on their sides. Much like Keystone Light, which has like five adages (“Unsmooth Moments,” as they call them) that they print on their cans, Taco Bell’s Border Sauce seems to have maybe six different things to say. From what I remember, these include “Marry me?” and “Help! It’s dark and I can hear laughing.” This here is Taco Bell’s Big Reveal – it caters to high people.

Make no bones about it – Taco Bell is beloved by that subculture of young people to whom I will affectionately refer as “potheads.” Indeed, when I sat down in my booth, there were two college-age males who were sitting in a booth with enough tacos, burritos and nachos piled around them to make Takeru Kobayashi give their table a second look. Neither said a word. One focused intently upon his burrito with a loving intensity usually reserved for significant others, burying his face into it in a manner more often seen in snuff films. His associate took short, staccato bites, falling into a routine that involved him nibbling a piece of taco and then scanning the dining room with a suspicious look in his eyes, making sure that he and his friend were not about to be attacked by the gigantic smiling chili pepper on the wall, and then taking another bite, carefully starting the process anew.

Why did these fellows hold this establishment in such high esteem? I have theories. For one, it is reasonably cheap, and when you’ve just blown seventy bucks on a dank zip of Bob Hope but still have to get your munch on, you’re going to be more than amenable to Taco Bell’s eighty-nine cent burritos. And there’s the whole aforementioned business of the place just being a little off, down to the crazy tables that have neon-colored triangles inlaid into their industrial plastic finishes. Finally, the presentation of the food cannot be discounted – the stuff is just waiting for you to bury your face in it and forget the rest of the world even exists. It takes a long time to eat, the employees barely care if you exist, and most of the food is covered in melted cheese. There’s nothing for high people not to like.