Talking Taco

Whether or not it's Tuesday, tacos pretty much always hit the spot—and not just in their homeland in Mexico. These days, the taco can be found all over the world, although it's acquired some strange new fillings along the way, from French fries to canned corn. It's hard to imagine something so universal having to be invented—but, in fact, the taco as we know it only emerged in the 1800s. In this episode, Gastropod talks taco with the experts, peering through the salsa-smudged veil of history to answer such questions as: What do Cornish miners and their lunchtime pasties have to do with the taco? Did Glen Bell, of Taco Bell fame, actually invent the hard-shell version? Is a burrito also a taco? And how can a seemingly simple snack harbor so many mysteries? Grab a napkin, because things are going to get messy—and delicious—as we dive deep into the taco-verse to find out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Cynthia Graber?

  Okay, so para ella, Big Baby is Big La Cuache. And para mí, Big La Cuache is Girondo, sin cilantro.

• 0:12Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, don't mind us. We're just hanging out in Mexico City ordering tacos from a little stand, as you do.

• 0:19Cynthia Graber?

  This is my favorite taco stand in Mexico City. It's a vegan one called Por Siempre Vegana, and it was the first place Nikki and I went out to eat after we landed in Mexico.

• 0:28Nicola Twilley?

  All right, you going first?

• 0:29Cynthia Graber?

  Get in there.

• 0:30Nicola Twilley?

  Okay.

• 0:31Cynthia Graber?

  This one has beans, this one doesn't. This one has pineapple and all sorts of fun things. Oh, spicy. Mmm, so good.

• 0:40Nicola Twilley?

  All right, I'm gonna start. You started with the pastor, so I'm gonna start with the Big Baby, which I can't even remember what it is, but it looks freaking amazing. So. Mmm. I was hitting the spot.

• 0:56Cynthia Graber?

  Tacos do frequently hit the spot these days, not just in Mexico City, but all around the world. That's the topic of this episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 1:07Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And you might be thinking, tacos? Really? What's to say about tacos? But what if I asked you if a burrito is also a taco? Or a fajita? Or what about a chimichanga?

• 1:20Cynthia Graber?

  This is a good question, and here's another one. We just did an episode all about corn and vitamin T, the omnipresent tortilla, which has certainly been around for thousands of years. So why did the taco only show up in the late 1800s?

• 1:34Nicola Twilley?

  And how did Taco Tuesday, complete with hard shell tacos, hamburger meat, and iceberg lettuce, ever become a thing?

• 1:42Cynthia Graber?

  Listen on to find out. But before we dive in, in case you missed the news in the last episode, we're going to be sending out the invite to our exclusive, once yearly fan favorite, Gastrahang, soon. That's going to be taking place on October 8, and you can get on the invite list at gastropod.com/support.

• 1:58Nicola Twilley?

  Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 2:02Cynthia Graber?

  Speaking of Eater, our friends at Eater turned 20 this year, and the brand is celebrating two decades at the center of the food world by throwing its biggest Event ever on September 20 in New York. It's called Eater Off Menu. It's presented by Capital One, and it'll be an immersive, food-focused bash, propelling guests through the last two decades of American food culture, spotlighting the restaurants, chefs, and trends that defined the era.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Culinary talent includes legends like Sean Brock, Jason Wang, and Christina Martinez, and can't-miss restaurants like Tatiana, Pizzeria Mozza, Momofuku, Carbone, Bar Contra, Honeys, Via Carota, and more. For tickets, go to eater.com/offmenu.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family, and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 4:07Nicola Twilley?

  It seems kind of ridiculous to ask, what is a taco? But we're going back to basics.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Something that is wrapped, that is a food wrapped in some other food. It's a wrap. That's it. It's a universal.

• 4:23Nicola Twilley?

  Alonso Rubalcaba is a writer in Mexico City, and he wrote a book with chef Enrique Alvera called Sunny Days Taco Nights.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  And if aliens were to come, I'd just point at it. They're folded over food, and said, that's a taco.

• 4:36Nicola Twilley?

  Uh, so wait, is a calzone also a taco? Or an empanada? Or a Cornish pasty? Or can we narrow this down a little?

• 4:45Cynthia Graber?

  Jeffrey Pilcher is a professor of food studies at the University of Toronto and author of the book Planet Taco. And he gives a slightly more constrained definition of the taco.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  A taco, to my mind, is a tortilla with something inside of it and salsa. Okay, so that would be my three qualifications. Tortilla, filling, salsa. Although that seems redundant because the salsa is kind of a filling. But I think that there has to be a salsa. And if it's not really chili in the salsa, then it's not really salsa. So here I am qualifying it.

• 5:22Nicola Twilley?

  So to have a taco, at least Jeffrey thinks you really need a tortilla. And if you need a tortilla, then that means if you wanted a taco 3,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago, you were SOL. Because the earliest archaeological evidence for a Kamal, the griddle you cook a tortilla on, that only dates back 2,000 years.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  If the tortilla then becomes kind of the baseline definition of a taco, that's something you can't have a taco without, then it has to be, it certainly is no more than about 2,000 years old.

• 5:56Cynthia Graber?

  Since the invention of the tortilla, there must have been taco-like foods where someone just wrapped the tortilla around a filling.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  The shape existed. The necessity to wrap foods in some kind of massa existed.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  They just had to find each other. And they did.

• 6:15Nicola Twilley?

  But the question is, when and how? For a long time, people have woven stories about the origin of the taco. There's one taco origin story that Jeffrey told us that's from the 1960s. It was written by a poet and playwright called Salvador Novo.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  He wrote what is sort of the first real history of food in Mexico. And he cites the origins, the first taco, as being a corn tortilla with chorizo, sausage from a pig, that was served to Cortez 500 years ago. And so it becomes a way of imagining or assigning to a food this kind of creation myth for the Mexican nation.

• 7:01Nicola Twilley?

  This myth is based on the idea that a real taco isn't just a tortilla with something random in it. It's a tortilla with meat and specifically with pork or beef. And pigs and cows only got to what's now Mexico after the Spanish arrived. So there was this myth that the taco was a combination of indigenous and Spanish foods.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  And I mean, there's no evidence for it at all. It's just that, you know, that fits conveniently with his sort of nationalist image.

• 7:25Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, although there were many street foods and snacks in Mexico in the 1600s and 1700s, and many of them involved corn dough or a tortilla wrapped around something in some way, none of them were called tacos.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  The closest thing to what we would think of as a taco now would be the envuelto, which is just Spanish for the wrap. It looks like a taco from the recipes we have for it, but something of a cross between a taco and an enchilada, so that it's a tortilla wrapped around something, but then covered in salsa.

• 7:59Nicola Twilley?

  But then by the 1890s, 1900s, there were people selling tacos all over Mexico City. So where did this food called a taco come from?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  So there are people who have tried to find indigenous language etymologies for the taco, and so tlaco is one of them, means half in Nahuatl. And so if you fold it in half. That's possibility. There's itacate, which is kind of like a takeout food and, and you know, you can take out a taco and, or so that's another possibility.

• 8:30Cynthia Graber?

  But these etymologies are all just so much baloney, according to Jeffrey, because the word taco existed long before it was the name for a food.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  The actual word taco has a very clear meaning in Spanish, and in fact, in all European languages. The original meaning is a tac in English, or a peg, or something you stick in something. And the first dictionary definition of taco is from about 1600. It's in French, and it refers to the cloth wadding, I guess you'd say, that was used to put gunpowder into an early firearm. So what you'd do is you'd, you know, kind of pour gunpowder down the barrel, and then you'd put this cloth to pack it in, to tack it in.

• 9:19Cynthia Graber?

  Taco also came to mean the cue you use to play pool. And apparently, people in Spain in the 1840s used the word taco to refer to a little snack that they'd have with a drink. It was used for things that were cylindrical or things that filled a gap.

• 9:31Nicola Twilley?

  But in Mexico, Jeffrey says that the first appearance of the word taco was in the mid 1800s in a silver mine called Real del Monte, which is about 60 miles northeast of Mexico City.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  The miners would extract the rock face to pull out the silver ore by taking a piece of paper and putting gunpowder down it, rolling it up, and then sort of pegging it into the, the rock face. They'd hollow out little holes with their picks, put it in there, light it. So it's, it's essentially a little homemade stick of dynamite. And it would blast that out.

• 10:07Cynthia Graber?

  It was a cylindrical object that was stuffed into a gap. It's a taco, and that's what it was called. But of course, the miners also needed to eat, so they wrapped their tortillas around something and would take those into the mine with them.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  So they would take a tortilla and put potatoes. And potatoes were just a convenient thing that you can grow in that mountainous area where the mines were. And then maybe some salsa, and then they would wrap it up and, and put it In a basket, and that was the lunch that they would carry with them.

• 10:34Cynthia Graber?

  And those lunch potato-filled tortilla wraps started to be called tacos by the miners because they looked like their gunpowder tacos. And there you have it, the very first Mexican food tacos were born.

• 10:45Nicola Twilley?

  Just to add a little wrinkle to this neat and tidy story, I should also say that at the time, many of the miners were actually Cornish. Cornwall is famous for its mines, and they'd been recruited to help improve local mining techniques. And apart from mining expertise, they brought two other things with them. Football, or as you'd call it, Cynthia, soccer. Apparently, the very first soccer game in all of Mexico was played near the mine by a Cornish team, and now look how popular the game is in Mexico.

• 11:18Cynthia Graber?

  Fascinating, but Nikki, where are you going with this story?

• 11:20Nicola Twilley?

  Bear with me here, because what's intriguing is they also brought their own folded-over mining snack, the pasty. A Cornish pasty is essentially a pastry empanada with a meat and veg filling. Now, I'm not saying that the pasty inspired the taco, but I'm not not saying it.

• 11:40Cynthia Graber?

  Sure. And also, as Alonso and Jeffrey both said, people have been wrapping tortillas around things for thousands of years, and everyone, everywhere folds something over something else. So I'm also guessing they just kind of shared their lunches.

• 11:53Nicola Twilley?

  In any case, the miners of Real del Monte are the ones who started calling tortillas folded over a filling a taco. And Alonso said it's easy to tell it's a brand-new coinage because when edible tacos started to appear outside the mine, they needed to be qualified or explained a little.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  You had tacos de tortilla, which means tortilla tacos, which by now we think are an obvious thing, but they weren't. And people said, for example, tacos de tortilla con aguacate, avocado taco on a tortilla.

• 12:29Cynthia Graber?

  At first, though, most of these tacos were just being eaten by miners.

• 12:32Nicola Twilley?

  But this was a turbulent period in Mexican history, and the mines opened and closed and opened again. And when the miners were out of work, they migrated in search of jobs.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  And of course, the nearest place that they could go was Mexico City.

• 12:45Cynthia Graber?

  They brought their tacos with them, and by the late 1800s, the miners' wives started selling those tacos on the streets.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  And those first tacos were what we call now tacos de guisado, which are leftover tacos.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Somebody makes a guisado, which is stew or something, feeds the family. And the day after, they say whatever's left. And sometimes they used to put them in a basket. So those were sweated tacos or tacos de canasta.

• 13:21Cynthia Graber?

  Canasta means basket in Spanish and the sweated thing.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Because they're kind of, you know, sitting there in their own steam. But originally, they were referred to as tacos de minero, miners tacos.

• 13:33Cynthia Graber?

  More evidence that this new food, the taco, really does have its origins down the mines.

• 13:38Nicola Twilley?

  For those of you who haven't tasted a sweated taco, the name does make it sound deeply unpleasant, but it's actually utterly delicious.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  There are beans, chicharrón, and potato. They're folded and, I don't know, the flavors just combine with one another. They are incredibly tasty. And they come with salsa verde or pickled chiles, pickled jalapenos, I think. And I do remember when I was about 15, that I got to know tacos de canasta. And I went crazy for those tacos and started eating them daily.

• 14:27Cynthia Graber?

  Around a century before Alonso's revelation, many people were having the same experience. New taco stands were opening up all the time at the turn of the century because the idea of selling tacos as a street food, that was picked up by other women, not just the ones who came to town with their miner husbands.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  What was happening in the early 20th century, late 19th century, was a big influx of people from all over our country.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Trying to live in Mexico City and trying to adapt their foods to Mexico City food. What they did was take the vessel of the tortilla and just put whatever food came with them on those tortillas and just serve it as tacos.

• 15:13Nicola Twilley?

  After all, the tortilla could hold all kinds of fillings, and tacos made the perfect street food.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Because the tortilla contains not just the food, but also the way of eating it, right? It becomes a plate and silverware. It's just, you know, you put the food in the taco, wrap it up in the tortilla, and eat it, and you can walk away. And that's terrific.

• 15:34Nicola Twilley?

  Jeffrey told us that by the early 1900s, these first taquerias were showing up in municipal records, but also in photos.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  We can look at pictures that were taken around 1900 of women on street corners, some men too, but mostly women with bowls set over little braziers. So the bowls have some kind of guisado, some stew, something that's cooking away.

• 16:01Nicola Twilley?

  So many people started making tacos that they both diversified and also people kind of specialized. First, there was a split between what you might get for breakfast, more of a stew taco, and what you might buy at night. The meat would be cooked over a grill.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Tacos sold by women stayed in the morning, and then tacos sold by men kind of drifted into the night because, well, you know, the ambience of nighttime tacos is not the same. What we call a la parrilla, when you have steak tacos or rib tacos, and al pastor, those kind of drifted into the nighttime tacos. And guisados and canasta kind of stayed in the morning for the ladies to prepare them.

• 16:53Nicola Twilley?

  But even beyond grilling versus stewing, the fillings started to really diversify in terms of ingredients and flavors.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Because these women are coming from all parts of Mexico, and they're bringing their regional foods with them. And the taco becomes that convenient way of selling it, either to people from their home state who are familiar with the food, or to strangers who are just kind of curious about, you know, what are the foods of the particular region where they come from.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  You had the carnitas tacos from Michoacan.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Which is another state in Mexico. And tacos and mariscos, which can be shrimp tacos or fish tacos from the north in Mexico, from Baja California, or tacos from the Yucatan, which, of course, there existed there. But in Mexico City, they found this taco-friendly environment.

• 17:48Cynthia Graber?

  The Yucatan tacos are called cochinita. They're pork that's been marinated in anado seeds and sour oranges. So it's both acidic and red, and it comes with pickled onions and habaneros.

• 17:58Nicola Twilley?

  Basically, a million tacos bloomed on the streets of Mexico City. Among the most famous were the al pastor tacos, one of the nighttime tacos Alonso mentioned.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  And these tacos, which, you know, they're cooked on that vertical rotisserie, just like shawarma, are in fact shawarma. That they were introduced by Lebanese migrants to Mexico in the 1920s. Originally, they were called tacos arabes, Arab tacos. They used lamb and they put them on flour tortillas.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  But it changed through time. First of all, got rid of the lamb and substituted with pork. And then the adobo kind of drifted towards something more spicy. Started using chilies, which were not in the original recipe.

• 18:50Nicola Twilley?

  The other thing that makes al pastor one of the all-time great tacos is that it has pineapple in it. No one knows how the pineapple got in there, but everyone knows pineapple and pork taste great together, which is why I will defend the supremacy of the Hawaiian pizza to my dying breath.

• 19:08Cynthia Graber?

  I take no sides in this argument. I don't think I've ever eaten Hawaiian pizza. But back to tacos. By the 1960s, the al pastor taco as we know it today had taken over Mexico City.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  And now, of course, they're on every street corner. They are the most quintessential, authentic Mexican food.

• 19:23Cynthia Graber?

  So in only a few decades, tacos went from being unknown to basically becoming totally ubiquitous in Mexico City, and from a potato-filled minor snack to the perfect vessel for almost every flavor Mexico had to offer. But not everyone was so into them. Why, some Mexicans kind of hated tacos after the break.

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• 20:19Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So, since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 21:37Nicola Twilley?

  Tacos seemed to have everything going for them. Delicious, portable, versatile, and popular. But they were definitely street food. And street wasn't always the trendy hipster thing it is today.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  When I was growing up, I was this poor kid. The only thing he eats is tacos. They were looked down upon. It was a poor person's food.

• 22:04Cynthia Graber?

  This negative view of tacos as poor people food was there right from the beginning. But there was another problem. Tacos were made with corn tortillas, and rich people did not like corn.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Oh, there was a very negative view of corn. And it was just associated with the indigenous people who were viewed in a negative, very negative fashion. And that if you were anybody in Mexico, you ate wheat bread, which was the foods of the Europeans.

• 22:27Nicola Twilley?

  Of course, tacos were still delicious, as aforementioned. So the wheat-eating elite might have some late at night, sort of slumming it, or enjoy them in a, quote, "sanitized" version they could make at home.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  You can read that in home magazines from the 1910s. You want to have some tacos, but not the tacos from the domestic workers, but you want them a little gentrified. And you read that, it's kind of uncomfortable.

• 23:04Cynthia Graber?

  Jeffrey said that if you were wealthy, you ate wheat and looked down on corn eaters. But the truth is that most of Mexico at that time was still eating corn, because, first of all, most of them were poor, but also because corn grew really well just about everywhere in Mexico, as we told you in our corn episode. And wheat really didn't do so well in most of the country.

• 23:22Nicola Twilley?

  And most of the country was eating tacos by the early 1900s. People who had migrated to Mexico City for work came home and recreated them in their own communities.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Oh, it spreads out very quickly. And we start to see regional specializations of tacos.

• 23:39Cynthia Graber?

  Like in parts of the country where goat was more common, you'd get goat tacos. Then in a part of the country where wheat grew particularly well, that became part of taco culture.

• 23:47Nicola Twilley?

  This is the northernmost part of Mexico, in Sonora, just south of Arizona, where relatively few people lived when the conquistadors first arrived.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Because it was so dry. And it just couldn't support the same populations as the more abundant agriculture of central and southern Mexico. And precisely because it was dry, it made it an ideal place for growing wheat. Because too much rain causes rust, which damages the crop. Spaniards begin to migrate north with the discovery of silver mines. And so that's kind of those boom towns then are what draw Spaniards north.

• 24:24Cynthia Graber?

  And so because the Sonora region was so Spanish and not particularly indigenous, and because wheat grew so well there, that's where the wheat tortilla was launched. They still ate tacos, they just used wheat instead of corn.

• 24:35Nicola Twilley?

  And the tacos spread even further north into the borderlands that used to be part of Mexico, California, Texas, New Mexico.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  I mean, there are tacos being served in Texas and California already by 1906.

• 24:49Cynthia Graber?

  These taco places were run by Mexicans and made for Mexicans. Mexican food wasn't popular with most non-Hispanic Americans at the time.

• 24:56Nicola Twilley?

  The perception was that it was spicy and weird and not in a good way. Plus, they had no idea how to navigate a taco, like how to actually eat it.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a sort of a challenge. And just like eating with chopsticks for the Chinese restaurant, this was something that early tourists commented on.

• 25:16Cynthia Graber?

  It took a white guy to introduce the taco to most of white America. That guy was named Glenn Bell of Taco Bell fame.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Glenn Bell grows up in Southern California in the town of San Bernardino, which is east of Los Angeles. And he joins the Marines, goes to World War II, comes back, is kicking around, looking for something to do, and opens up a hot dog stand. It was about 1947, 48.

• 25:54Nicola Twilley?

  Glenn had tried hauling bricks and running a miniature golf course, but hamburgers and hot dogs were having a bit of a moment in San Bernardino immediately post-World War II.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  At about that time, the McDonald's brothers, Maurice and Richard McDonald, are transforming their car hop restaurant into the original industrial fast food restaurant. The McDonald's system involved stripping down the menu to just a handful of products, a hamburger, fries, and a shake.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  And selling it in vast quantities at low prices.

• 26:35Cynthia Graber?

  At this time, after World War II, America was changing. The suburbs were being built. We had cars and highways and people wanted to drive those cars to restaurants. We told you about this in our episode called "The United States of McDonald's."

• 26:46Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, the American food system was being industrialized. Meat production was scaled up. Ingredients were cheap. It was just the perfect moment for American-style fast-food restaurants like McDonald's to take off.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  They're able to produce this very small menu in vast quantities and they're selling them for like 10 cents each. And the people line up around the block to get this food. And Glenn Bell, like so many other people, is just astonished at this new industrial system for feeding people.

• 27:14Cynthia Graber?

  But Glenn wasn't just checking out McDonald's. He was also eating at the local Mexican restaurants in San Bernardino, where there were plenty of Mexicans. He thought he might be able to kind of anglicize the taco and make the taqueria a place that white people would want to go to.

• 27:26Nicola Twilley?

  While also copying the McDonald's magic.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  And so he wants to find some way of taking that system and applying it to a different market niche. And it's the Mexican restaurant then that forms the model that he follows.

• 27:39Nicola Twilley?

  His wife said it wouldn't work. White people would never be able to handle the spice. And Glenn said he'd make it less spicy. And she told him then no one would want to eat it. But they divorced and he went ahead with his plan.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  What he does is to sort of industrialize the production of the taco. He pre-fries the tortillas and invents this little mold that he can then dip into the hot oil to fry it. And in his authorized biography, he claims that he invents this system and that he's this genius and that he is bringing a sort of North American, you know, can-do technology to this age-old Mexican dish.

• 28:21Cynthia Graber?

  Glenn Bell's story was that in the Mexican restaurants he went to, the tortillas were soft and the cooks would stuff them and then fry them. And it took a really long time to do it that way. He says his great innovation was the invention of that pre-frying and the mold.

• 28:35Nicola Twilley?

  Maybe, but he certainly wasn't the first to come up with a fast-fried taco shell.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  The first patent for it is filed by a Mexican restaurateur, Juvencio Maldonado, in New York City, at the time when Glenn Bell is still making hot dogs. The recipe is also in various Mexican cookbooks in the Southwest. And so this idea of making a taco shell and then filling it was absolutely not invented by Glenn Bell. But he wants to kind of create this image that he is this technological innovator and that, yeah, Mexican food has its own charms, but that if you wanted it in a hurry, you had to go to Taco Bell.

• 29:17Cynthia Graber?

  It wasn't just Mexican food for people in a hurry. It was also Mexican food for people who were kind of afraid of Mexican food. As he told his ex-wife he would do, he took out the spice and any of the other flavors that would make a taco particularly Mexican tasting. Like Mexican tacos, they were filled with meat, but this wasn't roasted or stewed pork. It was hamburger.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Maybe some lettuce and tomatoes, some cheese. And these are all products of the, you know, industrial food system of California's abundant agriculture. And so you're getting very different foods, right? Ground beef instead of the assorted pork parts that you eat in Mexico City. Instead of some onion, chopped onion and cilantro, which is the typical topping for a Mexican taco, you'll get chopped lettuce, iceberg lettuce from the fields of Salinas, California, tomato, and then that kind of cheddar cheese.

• 30:05Nicola Twilley?

  It was philosophically the same in that the ingredients were cheap, but culinarily quite distinct. And the restaurants themselves were deliberately branded in a way that was more Spanish than Mexican. They were built to look like Spanish missions with stucco walls, red tile roofs and arches.

• 30:22Cynthia Graber?

  But tacos were still a little exotic. Taco Bell had to have hamburgers on the menu, too, up until the 80s. And for the first couple of decades, it was really just a regional restaurant. Glenn Bell wasn't able to realize his dream of being like McDonald's until the 70s, when the chain started to expand nationally.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  So it's not instantaneous by any means.

• 30:41Nicola Twilley?

  When Glenn Bell sold the company to Pepsi in the late 70s is when it really started to take off. And now there are Taco Bells in every state in US territory.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  I mean, I think one factor for why it's successful is it was selling it outside of the Mexican community, across the lines of segregation in Southern California. A lot of people wanted to try tacos, but they didn't necessarily want to go into Mexican neighborhoods to do it.

• 31:14Nicola Twilley?

  I'm starved.

• 31:18Nicola Twilley?

  But there was another way for people to try tacos without even leaving the house. And why not both, as they say?

• 31:27Speaker 07

  How do you decide between crunchy and soft tacos?

• 31:33Nicola Twilley?

  The story of Old El Paso, coming up after the break.

• 31:38Speaker 05

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• 32:23Speaker 02

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• 32:51Speaker 02

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• 33:03Cynthia Graber?

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• 33:18Cynthia Graber?

  Before I ever even heard of Taco Bell, there was one thing I knew. We would regularly have crunchy U-shaped corn tortillas that came in a yellow box. And my mom would put out bowls of hamburger meat flavored with their spice package, as well as lettuce, tomatoes. It was taco night. When I was little, I don't think I even realized it was Mexican, at least in origin. It was just Old El Paso.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Old El Paso starts out as a canning company. And they begin to sell things like chili and chili peppers, sort of the foods of the area around El Paso. And with the, the, the rising interest in tacos, they start to sell these tortilla shells, taco shells as well in, in these packages.

• 34:02Nicola Twilley?

  In the early 1900s, El Paso, the town, not the brand, became a bit of a hotspot for canned Mexican foods. The big company was actually called Ashley's Mexican Foods, which had won a huge contract to sell canned enchiladas to the US military. But post-war innovations in food packaging and technology had brought Americans such wonders as the TV dinner. They were over old fashioned canned Mexican meals.

• 34:29Cynthia Graber?

  The time was right for a ready to assemble, just add meat taco kit. Old El Paso was the first to launch such a thing in 1969.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  You know, housewives who are looking for something, you know, that's exotic, bring Mexican food home. Because, you know, people weren't eating out all that much. But, you know, if people wanted to mix up their meat and potatoes dinners by having tacos, that the taco shell and, and Old El Paso's version of it becomes sort of the go-to model, sort of how, how to do that.

• 35:00Speaker 07

  There was trouble in Old El Paso. Texas Rose's cooking was so dull, the boys were fractious. Fortunate, Rose had heard that Old El Paso tacos was exciting. And quick, simmer beef with taco seasoning. Use Old El Paso taco shells and mild or hot taco.

• 35:19Speaker 07

  Them tacos were so good, they saved the day. Almost. Old El Paso, something exciting for a change.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  It wasn't the only one, but it was the one that's, you know, kind of most successful and really defines the market.

• 35:33Cynthia Graber?

  The kit made it really easy. And those hardcore tortillas, they're not fried in the moment. They're pre-fried, like Doritos or potato chips, and they're totally shelf-stable. They were a little hard to eat. They broke almost as soon as you bit into them, but it was fun.

• 35:46Nicola Twilley?

  More importantly, it was an easy and easily customizable dinner. So for a lot of families, it joined the rotation.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Autumn is banished with the first fight. Thanks to the bright yellow box. The box is a kit. The kit is a hit. For dinnertime fun, Old El Paso's the one. I think what's happening is that, you know, this is a time when people are looking to broaden their culinary horizons. Mexican food is becoming more interesting to people and that the taco shell, the taco meal, is a way of presenting that.

• 36:24Cynthia Graber?

  They became so popular, they even got their own night of the week. It's Tuesday, Lisa. Taco Tuesday.

• 36:35Nicola Twilley?

  So by the 1980s, tacos were a fixture on the American fast food and family dinner scene. They were not necessarily tacos that a Mexican would have recognized as part of their national cuisine, but they were very popular. Meanwhile, in England, where I was just a tiny child, there were no tacos.

• 36:54Cynthia Graber?

  It took a new generation to bring American Mexican tacos to the rest of the world. This time, it wasn't Taco Bell, it was Taco Bill.

• 37:02Nicola Twilley?

  Specifically, Bill Chilco, who was a Californian surfer.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  Surfers are people who would go down to Baja California and, you know, they didn't have a lot of money and so they'd be buying tacos. And then as they, you know, traveled the world, looking for that perfect wave, they would bring Mexican food with them.

• 37:21Cynthia Graber?

  Bill Chilco traveled from California to Queensland in Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef, to catch some waves. He brought a corn grinder and a tortilla machine along with him because he was pretty sure that he could just improvise the tacos from there.

• 37:32Nicola Twilley?

  And the result was Taco Bill.

• 37:37Speaker 07

  Award for Australia's Favorite Restaurant goes to Australia's Favorite Restaurant goes to Taco Bill.

• 37:44Nicola Twilley?

  The first Taco Bill opened its doors on Queensland's Gold Coast in 1967. And as you can hear, it's still popular today. There are a couple of dozen of them across Australia.

• 37:57Cynthia Graber?

  Taco Bill opened other branches of the restaurant in Amsterdam and London and Paris. And he wasn't the only one. Other people, some surfers, most definitely not Mexicans. They opened similar taco restaurants internationally.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  And so I see these as being some of the first wave, if you will, of Mexican restaurants around the world.

• 38:15Nicola Twilley?

  These were specifically taco places, not Mexican restaurants. They had a vibe all of their own, basically tacos, tequila, party.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  And it's really much later that Mexicans start to travel and really get annoyed to find, you know, Mexican-American food claiming to be Mexican. And then they start setting up restaurants to try to sell authentic Mexican food. And I think that's actually now spreading, although it's an uphill battle.

• 38:41Cynthia Graber?

  Because the party taco and the Old El Paso Taco Kit caught on all around the world and have really come to define the taco. The Taco Kit is so popular in Norway that it also has its own day of the week. But instead of Taco Tuesday, the Norwegians have Taco Friday.

• 38:55Nicola Twilley?

  My sister-in-law is Norwegian and her mother remembers the Old El Paso Taco Fest being the hottest trend of the late 1970s. These tacos had a distinctly Norwegian twist.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, the taco in Norway is your basic taco shell with hamburger meat. But instead of the sort of cheddar cheese that you might get in the United States, they actually have white cheese. And then they put as the piece de resistance canned corn. So you get your double corn there in the Norwegian taco.

• 39:28Cynthia Graber?

  The French version of the taco is even less taco-like.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  May we introduce the fast food pride of France, French tacos? Excuse me, that's no taco. This is a Taco. Nope, not in France. Here, a taco, or in French, a tacos, is a flour tortilla stuffed with various meats, sausages, and french fries, all put together to make a favorite fast food.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  Although it's actually not, it doesn't look a thing like a Mexican taco. And it's like a Middle Eastern. It's really kind of like shawarma, only they put the word taco on it. And again, I think that it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of Mexican or anything, it's just they like the word taco.

• 40:13Nicola Twilley?

  I think adding french fries to anything is a win. Much better than tinned sweet corn.

• 40:18Cynthia Graber?

  But I have to say, does calling it a taco make it a taco? Doesn't a taco have to be a tortilla with filling and salsa in it?

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Of course not. I've never been to Korea, but we have a Korea town here in Mexico City, and tacos there are made with lettuce. And Chinese restaurants are made with rice, paper. So, yeah, no, not at all. The thing is, the wrapping.

• 40:46Nicola Twilley?

  It's all one big, beautiful taco world, and we're just living in it.

• 40:51Cynthia Graber?

  So based on this definition, then a burrito would definitely be a version of a taco.

• 40:55Nicola Twilley?

  And Jeffrey told us it is. In the same Mexican dictionary that also included the taco for the first time, the burrito was defined as, quote, "a rolled tortilla with meat or other things inside," which in Quirinavaca in Mexico City is called a taco.

• 41:13Cynthia Graber?

  Jeffrey says the burrito became less and less popular in Mexico as the taco's popularity skyrocketed. But it survived in the American Southwest and in California, where it also became inextricably linked to the wheat tortilla.

• 41:25Nicola Twilley?

  It's like a taco in exile. And if a burrito is a taco, then a chimichanga is a taco too, because that's That's just a deep fried burrito.

• 41:34Cynthia Graber?

  Basically, it's all vitamin T, but instead of tortilla, it's all taco. The burrito, the fajita, the chimichanga, these are all tacos. And they're all popular American Mexican dishes, served in Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex style restaurants. But Mexican Mexican restaurants have also become really popular these days, and they serve tacos, too. It's not just street food anymore.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  I remember 25 years ago, I was talking to Enrique Olvera. I remember Puyol, his restaurant, was a very young restaurant. And I told him, you should serve tacos de suadero.

• 42:12Nicola Twilley?

  For context here, Enrique Olvera is one of Mexico's most celebrated chefs. And his flagship restaurant, Puyol, is one of the world's most highly regarded restaurants. It has two Michelin stars, it's fancy, it is not a taqueria.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  He said, if I sold tacos de suadero, nobody would come back to Puyol. But something happened around the turn of the century. Just people just got used to it, got used to tacos. And they just said, well, it's all right to eat tacos at the restaurant.

• 42:43Cynthia Graber?

  And now you can get a taco on the street, and you can get a taco in Puyol.

• 42:46Nicola Twilley?

  And both are delicious. The taco has risen to glory while maintaining its street cred.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  The appeal is, I think, they're very easy to eat. They're very comfortable to eat. They eat well while you're walking. They are open to all flavors. Everything that is edible, everything that is edible, can end up in a taco.

• 43:16Nicola Twilley?

  And pretty much every taco that we saw in Mexico, we ate. We had tacos filled with cactus. We had breakfast tacos with scrambled eggs and hot sauce. We had tacos with guacamole and squash blossoms. And we even had some of those high-end, sit-down restaurant tacos that Alonso was talking about.

• 43:35Cynthia Graber?

  This is a really beautiful duck taco with also a salsa borracho. They're also very nicely sized, like this is a hand-sized taco.

• 43:45Cynthia Graber?

  That's pretty great. I might marry this taco.

• 43:50Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Alanta Rubalcaba and Jeffrey Pilcher. We have links to their books on our website, gastropod.com. You can also find some photos of our taco adventures.

• 43:58Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks also to the awesome Rodrigo Perez Ortega, who is an amazing science journalist and who helped us with our reporting in Mexico. And of course, thanks to Claudia Geib, our super producer.

• 44:10Cynthia Graber?

  Don't forget that we're hosting a gastro hang on October 8th. And you know, you want to come join us. Go to gastropod.com/support or to our Patreon page to find out how to get on that list. We'll be sending out the invites later this month.

• 44:20Nicola Twilley?

  So don't miss out. And we'll be back with a new episode in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs. TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 45:13Speaker 02

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